Prairie State Wire

I have always admired Nobel Prize Laureate Milton Friedman’s calm and surgically precise dismemberment of brainwashed liberals’ who argued with the great man with memorized self-righteous chants of nonsense.

Is it possible for me to take a similar intelligent, factual and sophisticated approach to responding to the 21 issues of which J.B. Pritzker claims he will address as Governor of Illinois?

Probably not.

But I’m willing to try.

So for now, let’s forget Pritzker’s offshore tax-shelters, his FBI-recorded conversation with Blago, his disparaging comments about African-Americans prompting his apology tour, and of course the Great Toilet Caper (you remember…. He removed the toilets in one of his mansions in order to get a property assessment reduction).

Before Governor-Elect Pritzker follows the path of prior Illinois Governors and is either consigned to a minimum security prison facility or complete obscurity, I will focus on the first of his 21 Issues, Healthcare for Illinoisans.

IllinoisCares (less)

“I propose a public health insurance option that would allow every Illinois resident the chance to buy low-cost health insurance. I will work with legislators and the health care community to design this public option to provide another choice in the health insurance marketplace, to lower the cost of premiums and mitigate market uncertainty – at no cost to taxpayers.”  

Soon this statement will live alongside these other famous Democratic prevarications:

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

And

“Really, Mary Jo. I’m ok to drive.”

(I really do hate to have to explain my every subtlety but we do have millennial readers. Mary Jo Kophne was the young woman who Senator Ted “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy left gasping for her last breath after, in his drunken panic, abandoned her in his car which he parked at the bottom of Poucha Pond in Chappaquiddick).

First, we must separate two massive categories – health care and health insurance.

The topic of health care will be saved for a future discussion; one which will start with the fact (and for the rare liberal who might read my editorials, the Merriam-Webster definition of fact is “a piece of information presented as having objective reality.”) that pre-ACA healthcare and access to it far surpassed that of any country whose plan the American left purports to be superior.

On May 29, 2007, the New York Times published a speech that then Senator Obama gave on health care at the University of Iowa. The fantasies spun in this speech, since proven to be as ludicrous as suspected, are the same as those currently regurgitated by J.B. and his Democratic colleagues.

These fallacies include but are not limited to:

    •    It is possible to provide a public option which is financially sound and sustainable in the manner in which Democrats suggest.

    •    A public option can exist while current health insurance plans are maintained.

    •    The public option plan will lower the cost of premiums on insurance, and the most fantastic claim of all,

    •    The public option health insurance plan will not cost taxpayers anything.

President Obama infamously promised us that the Affordable Care Act would give working American families an additional  $2,500 in their pockets from decreased health insurance premiums; that the same government which has so incompetently run the Veterans Administration Hospitals would more efficiently and for less money administrate health insurance than private companies, and that each American would have equal care and access.

Even if J.B. Pritzker were to personally contribute an amount at least equal to the $146,500,034.95 he generously donated to his own campaign, as we have already seen, none of these promises are remotely possible.

Can Illinois, the state in which Moody’s Investor Service has documented $250 billion in unfunded pension debt ; the state whose unprecedented emigration of its citizens reflects its hostility towards its taxpayers and businesses; the state which boasts a 10-year discrepancy in life expectancy between  Chicago’s white Gold Coast elite and its impoverished West and South side residents living only miles away, both create and administrate health insurance that better serves its residents?

For millennials, these are what we call rhetorical questions.

For you liberals who pretend to want what is truly best for mankind, perhaps you might consider a plan which does not include expanding upon those (Medicaid and Medicare) whose course is set for bankruptcy?

For this, I refer the reader to “Restoring Quality Health Care” by Scott W. Atlas, MD., Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute and member of the Institute’s Working Group on Health Care Policy.

I include the titles of Dr. Atlas’ chapters as an outline of the approach that I both strongly feel we should pursue and demonstrate the course which both Republican and Democratic legislators and administrations alike are shamelessly guilty of  knowingly ignoring for decades.

They are:

    •    Expand Affordable Private Insurance

    •    Establish and Liberalize Universal Health Savings Accounts

    •    Install Appropriate Incentives with Rational Tax Treatment of Health Spending

    •    Modernize Medicare for the Twenty-First Century

    •    Overhaul Medicaid and Eliminate the Two-Tiered System for Poor Americans

    •    Strategically Enhance the Supply of Medical Care While Ensuring Innovation

For my fellow Republican voters don’t hold your collective breaths. It is a fool’s errand to wait for establishment U.S. Republican legislators let alone their craven, unprincipled Illinois counterparts to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, from their guarded mansions, “I want details!” bray the liberals and their brainwashed offspring.

I suggest trying something new.

Open a book which is not authored by Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky or the litany of leftists embraced by your college professors and learn something.

Happy New Year!

– Jeffrey Leef, M.D. is a two-time candidate for US Congress and concerned citizen.