A Simple American Solution for Today’s Government-Caused Health Care Crisis

Where words are many, sin is not wanting.” Proverbs 19:10

By: Dr. W. Scott Magill, Executive Director, ViDoL, USMC/USArmy-Med.Corps

The 2016 platform to repeal the worst healthcare law in American history resulted in one-party control of executive and legislative branches of the federal government in 2017. But voters soon re-learned that campaign promises are simple to make, yet hard to keep. It’s all so much more complicated and difficult, we are told, than repealers would have us believe.

Really? Perhaps rather than asking how government can repeal the monstrous law it created, we should first look back in time, a time most of us still remember well, and ask a simpler question:

QUESTION: How did America create the greatest healthcare system in the world?

ANSWER: The Free Market. The free market is simply people doing what they feel is in their best interest, without having to consider what the government wants. In healthcare, that means a person who wants to be healthy seeks the services of specialists who want to be paid to keep them that way. Insurance companies added another benefit people wanted—preventing financial ruin in the event of serious illness or disability—and competed for Americans’ dollars in the Free Market. This created the worst healthcare system in the world, except for all the others.

In the last century the federal government complicated and ruined everything by forcing its own “experts” into that beautifully simple, mutually beneficial private relationship. Politicians and bureaucrats looked at Americans not as people or patients, but as “their citizens.” They saw healthcare not as a personal service, but as a limited commodity to be distributed according to the wisdom of government planners in collusion with insurance corporations and hospital chains.

This repugnant, anti-liberty government-insurance-hospital collusion culminated in ObamaCare, resulting in the guaranteed outcome of all corruption-driven rationing—higher costs, lower supply, falling quality. Will government bureaucrats ever learn? No. Which is why voters revolted at the polls, and must do so again now, by forcing government back into its constitutionally defined limits.

Not surprisingly, the simple answer to restoring a fair and beneficial healthcare system in our country is right there in our Constitution and in our history.

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution (enumerated powers) gives Congress no authority to interfere in our healthcare. So the first action Congress must take is to repeal ObamaCare, thereby honoring the rule of law, their oath of office and the campaign promises of many.

And lest there be any confusion, the definition of repeal is: to revoke, rescind, cancel, reverse, annul, nullify, declare null and void, quash, abolish, vacate, abrogate and recall. Note the absence of the word “modify.”

Once repealed, the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce clause does give Congress authority to unleash the Free Market in support of consumers by allowing insurance sales across state lines. Long-overdue legislation could finally clear the way for the states’ insurance commissions to adjust their rules and regulations, increasing competition for better coverage at lower rates. Americans regain their ability to choose their doctors and buy insurance which best suits their needs, unencumbered by arbitrary government-mandated restrictions or requirements to purchase unwanted coverage.

Additionally, national legislation should allow patient co-ops, to which Americans have easy access to join. Through these large co-ops, Americans will be able to reap the benefits of the economies of scale provided by that Free Market solution.

So while the Constitution prohibits the government from intruding into our private personal healthcare, it does empower the Congress to unleash the power of the Free Market through the Interstate Commerce clause, all happily addressed in the Necessary and Proper Clause. As Chief Justice Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland: “…Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.”

Decades of increasingly complex government controls have made the health care system more expensive, less responsive, and set it on a path to failure. By applying the American values of free choice and free markets, Congress has an opportunity to return control of the health care system to the consumer—the patient—and governance of health care decisions will be returned to its proper position, the relationship between patients and their physicians.

How simple, how right, how American.

So let’s just do it. Let’s repeal ObamaCare, boot the federal government out of illegally meddling in our private bodily business, and open up the Constitutionally-sanctioned power of our marvelous Free Market to increase the quality and lower the cost of healthcare for all Americans.

It’s a solution so simple, even a Congressman can understand it!

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Dr. William Scott Magill served with the United States Marine Corps (1965-1971), the United States Army Medical Corps (1981-1988), and the Denver Police Dept. (1970-1976). He obtained his bachelors of Business Administration from the University of Denver, Masters of Health Care Administration Trinity University in San Antonio, and medical degree from the University of Health Sciences in Kansas City. Dr. Magill matriculated his residency in Ob/Gyn at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, and served as the Chief of Ob/Gyn at Irwin Army Hospital, Ft. Riley, Kansas. He was until recently a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in Springfield, Missouri for 21 years.” As an author and lyricist, Dr. Magill has authored such pieces as “Here we go again,” “The Greatest Generation,” “The Requiem of the Brave,” “The Battle Hymn of the Americans,” “Seek ye the Bridge in the Forest,” “The Pledge of Allegiance, say it with pride, say it with understanding,” and “The Birth of A Great Nation.” His writings and/or interviews have appeared in the Journal of Military Medicine, the Anglican Digest, the Chronicle Republican, Springfield News Leader, the Washington Times and the New York Times, among others.

As a gallant warrior in the cause of liberty, Dr. Magill served as President and Executive Director of an organization, intent on returning the American culture to the beliefs and principles of those 56 men, our Founding Fathers, who pledged their “Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” that liberty and justice might prevail throughout the ages.

Dr. Magill is the founder and executive Director of Veterans in Defense of Liberty (ViDoL). After 30 years of practice, including some 9000 deliveries, Dr. Magill closed his doors in order to devote all of his efforts to the survival of the U.S. Constitution. Dr. Magill stated at that time, “If we can establish, for the first time in American history, that vehicle for American veterans to fulfill their oath, which did not vanish when we took off our uniforms for the last time, this will be a full time effort.”