Government compulsion versus choice in healthcare

Alliance Defending Freedom video: Obamacare and abortion

The tragic and predictable failure of the Affordable Care Act provides Americans with a stark illustration of the consequences of government compulsion versus choice. Obamacare can only achieve its stated purpose--affordable care and increased access--by forcibly redistributing wealth and limiting consumer choice. The law forces the young and the healthy to buy unneeded and unwanted government-dictated insurance plans to subsidize healthcare for the old and the sick. 

Obamacare's pricey premiums force many consumers to decline insurance and pay comparatively lesser fines, thereby collapsing the law's premise of a larger pool of insured payers. Others lose their coverage as struggling employers to trim hours and personnel to adjust to the law's mandates. Employers who conscientiously object to Obamacare's abortion pill mandate are forced to drop health coverage. 

Insurance companies cannot afford to ignore actuarial realities that account for relative risk. Burgeoning regulation and government control, coupled with Obamacare's failure to curb malpractice lawsuit abuses or provide adequate Medicare reimbursements, push physicians out of medicine, fueling shortages. 

Government compulsion undermines both healthcare affordability and access. We need instead bipartisan, measured reforms that rely on the proven benefits of competition and consumer choice.

USA Today, GOP, slavery and abortion

I'm thankful that USA Today published my commentary below today. The point is not partisan but principled:

If only the GOP would throw up the white flag and surrender "hard-line positions on abortion" and other social issues, they might win like Democrats, suggests a USA editorial ("How GOP candidates can win: Our view," Nov. 6).

If Republicans had followed such advice in the nineteenth century, we would still be trading in slaves.

A 2013 Gallup poll revealed that by at least a 17-point margin, women, independents and young voters all favored the GOP position of making abortion illegal in most cases.The movement against abortion on demand garners even more support when the specific abortion issue is parental consent, partial-birth abortion, second and third trimesterabortions and informed consent.

Meanwhile, a Brookings Institution poll found that "Republicans have a better opportunity to attract Democratic defectors with … a socially conservative message than an economically conservative message."

Republicans' socially conservative position on abortionclearly syncs with American voters' values. Yet even ifpolling on abortion ran counter to the GOP platform, who could ever trust a political party that sacrificed on the altar of political expediency its commitment to the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?"