On June 22, The Heartland Institute started an online and print marketing campaign featuring full-page ads opposing nationalized health care. You can click on the image below to see the ad. Please forward links to this page to friends and colleagues, and/or post the ad on your blog or Web site.

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This ad, titled “Meet your new doctor” and featuring a picture of a clown, contains the following warning:

President Obama and Democrats in Congress want to replace your doctor with a government employee. Not all at once, though. Right now they want to pass an “individual mandate” and a “public plan.” Once these policies have destroyed private insurance markets, they will take over hospitals and private medical practices. And then the joke will be on us. There is a better way.

We designed and are placing the ads to alert the public to the very real threat to their health and personal liberty posed by legislation being considered by Congress and endorsed by President Obama. The American people are being misled by promises of “free” and “universal” health care when in reality, the proposed legislation would cost trillions of dollars, fail to extend health insurance to millions of people, and lead to rationing by government bureaucrats.

More About the Threat to Private Health Care

A national debate is taking place over who should be in charge of your health care. Should it be you (the consumer), or should it be government agencies, insurance companies, and employers? Advocates of consumer-driven health care think individual consumers should in the driver’s seat. They ought to be able to choose their doctors, make informed choices, and be rewarded when they take action to stay healthy and avoid unnecessary utilization of health care services.

For the past several decades--since around the time of World War II--health care consumers have been losing their power over the health care they receive. Tax policies adopted during WWII created strong financial incentives for employers to choose what insurance their employees would get, and to insulate employees from the costs of their decisions. When prices started to rise, employers sought relief by giving insurers more power to limit access to care by enrolling employees in managed care and HMOs.

Governments also stepped in, taking away power from consumers. Medicaid, Medicare, and more recently the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) provide subsidized health insurance to millions of Americans, but at a steep cost: They bring with them a heavy load of regulations on providers, shift costs onto people with private insurance, and are crippled by fraud and excessive spending.

But in recent years, health care consumers have starting taking back power. A key policy that is making this possible is a federal law that allows people to pay for medical expenses from tax-sheltered Health Savings Accounts. These accounts “level the playing field” between employer-provided low-deductible insurance and individually owned high-deductible insurance. This enables more people to be able to afford to buy insurance, choose the type of insurance that best suits their situations, and choose doctors and other care providers.

As consumers being spending more of their own money and making their own decisions, the market is responding with better services and more choices. Some recent innovations include free-standing health clinics, specialty hospitals, and medical tourism. New technologies that promise to make health care more effective and affordable are reaching the market. Politicians get a lot of mileage out of promising “universal health insurance,” which usually is just another step toward a single-payer health system, similar to those in Canada and Britain and other countries.

Single-Payer Plans

The opposite of consumer empowerment in health care is increased government control over health care decisions.

The problems with single-payer health systems are many. They violate the freedom of consumers to choose doctors and treatments. They fuel unnecessary health care spending and price inflation, which can be stopped only with rationing by waiting. They create massive new government bureaucracies and increase administrative costs, waste, and fraud. And their costs destroy millions of jobs.

Insurance Reform

A major part of the debate over health care is how insurance companies are regulated. Health insurance is mostly regulated by state governments, and there has been a lot of variation in regulatory policies among the states, allowing us to discover what policies work and which do not. Legislation pending in Congress would nationalize much of this regulatory policy, imposing a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime on health care nationwide.

Community rating--laws requiring that everyone pay the same amount for health insurance--and guaranteed issue--laws requiring that anyone who applies must be sold an insurance policy--are two types of regulation that have been tried repeatedly and found to cause more problems than they solve. Both policies increase the price of insurance and discourage young and healthier people from buying insurance. Benefit mandates--laws that require insurers to cover certain conditions--are another kind of counterproductive regulation.

Regulations that unnecessarily increase the cost of insurance are largely responsible for the high number of uninsured people today. The best way to solve the uninsured problem is to repeal unnecessary regulations, and then to fund high-risk pools that can provide subsidized insurance only to those who need it.

More Resources for Activists

The Heartland Institute’s Web site contains a wealth of information on health care reform and contact information for many organizations that are fighting for consumer-driven health care and against nationalization. Go to the Health Care Issue Suite for an overview of the issue (some of which appears above) and links to other resources, or go directly to the following resources:

• Consumers for Health Care Choices Web site

• Consumer Power Report

• Health Care News

• Heartland Policy Studies on Health Care

• Research & Commentary on Health Care

• Books and Booklets on Health Care

• Heartland Senior Fellows and Policy Advisors

• Links to Allies

More About The Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute is a 25-year-old national independent nonprofit organization. For more information about us, please visit About The Heartland Institute. For answers to baseless criticisms of us that appear on some Web sites, go to Reply to Our Critics. To become a member or to make a contribution to enable us to place these ads in more publications, click here.