My Personal Bane As A Blogger

The blogger’s bane is being ignored. Although fellow bloggers have been kind in frequently linking to me, on a subject of particular expertise* I’m usually ignored: health care, pensions and insurance. Here’s the topic #1 or #2 on Americans minds, according to polls, which consumes nearing 20% of our GNP for health care and which has multi-trillion dollar unfunded liabilities for pensions (squeezing out essential government services to taxpayers and citizens), and almost all conservative bloggers have nothing to say about it.

Sure, a few may occasionally gripe about a particular health care or insurance experience, but otherwise avoid the subject as they concentrate on the latest front page blood pressure raiser. Conservative bloggers should start paying more attention, before they find themselves lined up for a public proctologist in lines of rationed medical backwardness administered by one-size-fits-all bureaucrats, and busting their axles in rutted roads on the way to dilapidated parks in order to finance lush public pensions.

Chris Reed, an editorialist of the San Diego Union-Tribune, (here’s his bio) has been doing a fantastic and knowledgeable job of exposing the new clothes of the grandiose health care proposal by California Gubernator Schwarzenegger as lacking fiber.

In his online blog at the newspaper, today, Reed cites the court decision striking down the Maryland so-called “Wal-Mart tax” requiring a certain level of health benefits by employers or else pay a tax to a state fund for the benefit of the uninsured:

Because the Fair Share Act effectively mandates that employers structure their employee healthcare plans to provide a certain level of benefits, the Act has an obvious "connection with" employee benefit plans and so is preempted by ERISA.

Reed then phones one of the nations leading ERISA experts, who was general counsel for Wal-Mart, to check up on California governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed health care plan that also imposes a “play-or-pay” on employers :

"Frankly, I'm not impressed here. ... They are trying to skirt around these prickly issues and sell the overall idea (of extending health insurance coverage)," he said. "Respectfully speaking, I don't know where they're getting all this."

As Reed sums up:

[T]he governor's staff:
Declines to name a single lawyer not in the administration's pay who thinks its health insurance plan is legal….
This would be comic if the stakes weren't so high. We're about to have a bitter fight for months over something that's plainly illegal, a fact that's obvious to every ERISA expert out there, but not to our governor or his high-paid staff. Just great.

Maybe the Gubernator is hoping on a special dispensation from Congress, or in-law Teddy to drive to the rescue (without himself going off a bridge but sending the rest of us there).

Read Reed’s comprehensive editorial, “Governor's plan falls apart under scrutiny,” from yesterday’s San Diego Union-Tribune to get the whole sorry picture of the naked foolishness by Schwarzenegger.

Reed is dogged in revealing the empty rhetoric driving most other newspapers, as they lament the “uninsured.” The poor already receive health care, through Medicaid and similar programs for working poor, and even illegals are guaranteed emergency care. Most of the uninsured are, actually, the young and foolish, and most others can afford at least catastrophic insurance if they didn’t prioritize lattes and other luxuries over self-responsibility. Here and here, Reed names the newspapers glibly citing that there are 47-million uninsured, when up to 12-million are actually illegal aliens.

The mantra that we must upend the health care arrangements and economics of the 85% of us with insurance, polls usually showing 80% satisfaction, in order to subsidize the inflated, undeserving and irresponsible bulk of the uninsured 15% is public policy insanity, driven by the Left’s obsession with enlarging government and bureaucrats’ power over us via a government-run, nationalized health care system.

* In my real life, I’m an employee benefits consultant with earned credentials as a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), Registered Employee Benefits Consultant (REBC), Registered Health Underwriter (RHU), and Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU).