Mandate Mania: Does Adam Searing Hate People?

No matter what one thinks about Bob Orr’s health plan – and there is much that is wanting – his call to eliminate some of the more costly and unnecessary mandates is not a bad one as nanny statist Adam Searing would have you believe here. He uses one of the oldest tricks in the book to argue in favor of government mandates — take the seemingly unobjectionable ones and frontload them. For example (get out out your hankerchief):

Perhaps the one requiring insurance companies to allow a woman at least two days in the hospital after the birth of a child – the eliminate drive-through delivery mandate.  Or maybe he’d like to get rid of the mandate requiring it to be left up to a woman and her doctor as to how much hospital care she needs after a mastectomy.  Maybe he’d like to eliminate the newborn hearing screening mandate – now there’s one we sure don’t need.  He probably isn’t worried about getting tested for prostate cancer because he’s got great health coverage himself – so he’d be OK with deleting the colorectal cancer screening mandate.  Or how about eliminating coverage for detection of ovarian cancer?

Searing may have found some heartstrings to tug about these few out of the 47 odd mandates, but he omits some absolute doozies — hiding behind the same moral highground the government does in the name of regulating your life and healthcare choices:

-pastoral counselors,
-marriage therapists,
-drug abuse treatment,
-alcohol abuse treatment,
-contraceptives,
-chiropractors, and
-clinical trials.   

Yes, that’s chiropractic, which I would never purchase willingly and consider it snakeoil medicine. So when Adam says: "Orr ought to be asked exactly which mandates he would choose to eliminate." We’ve certainly given him some items that should at least be considered subject to review. After all, why should single folks pay for marriage therapy? (Why is this lifestyle choice being considered medical at all?) Why should atheists pay for religious counseling? Why can’t people who want such counseling – yes, even if it’s for hospice care – find such counseling at their own church, synagogue or mosque? Why should any North Carolinian be forced to pay for people who repeatedly make bad choices like taking drugs? We can go on and on (without crocodile tears). Adam Searing doesn’t care that you have to pay for these — even if you’re struggling to make ends meet. But it gets worse.

Adam Searing wants you to think he and his kind care about people, and that’s why he supports such costly and draconian mandates. For Adam and his friends, caring always means coerced compassion and or regulation.

What he doesn’t want you to know is that many people elect to go uninsured because they believe health insurance premiums are too expensive–and they’re too expensive – in great part – because of these mandates. Indeed, N.C.’s mandates account for 45-50% of premium costs in North Carolina. Looks like Searing is either lying to himself, wants people to pay for things they don’t want or need, or wants poor and middle class people to go uninsured. Does Searing hate people?

If we could take out some mandates, or at least introduce "Mandate Lite" legislation found in many other states, we would make insurance affordable for a lot more people — reducing the number of uninsured in our state. Or, we could simply give people the freedom to buy out of state. Doesn’t Adam Searing want people to be free? Doesn’t look that way.

He’s also overlooking the fact that a majority of people with insurance in North Carolina get it through employers that are exempted by ERISA (often big, multi-state companies), which means only the individual market has to comply with the expensive N.C. regulations. (Oh, and ERISA exempt folks aren’t dropping like flies. Why so?  People can make informed healthcare choices about themselves and their families.) But the individual and small group markets (to which the N.C. mandates apply) is often made up of people who are unemployed, marginally employed, or self-employed–people who would like to have more healthcare options and less expensive coverage–not Cadillac plans. Searing doesn’t care, he’d rather it be the case that the few people who can afford coverage be forced to pay extra for the N.C. Cadillac plan, than have more people have tailored coverage that may or may not include chiropractors, pastors, and drug-abuse treatment – or even two days hospitalization post-partum – as options.

Oh, does Adam Searing like that so many of these mandates were put in to benefit special interests? Sure seems that way. Dirty politicians and shady back-crackers have Adam to thank.

My guess is, just as with SCHIP, Adam Searing wants insurance premiums to be expensive. (Here’s why.) He wants people who don’t understand the costly regulatory scheme he advocates to cry uncle and ask the government for "free" healthcare like they have in Canada, which keeps people waiting for months and months to mend broken legs. Does Adam Searing Hate people? No, he hates freedom. He hates choice. He thinks he is smarter than you and can make better choices for your family than you. But we know better, don’t we?
-Max Borders