Full post here.

Insurers pool risk.  There were rapidly rising costs due to many factors and the health-care delivery system we have had serious inefficiencies.   32 million more people unable to pay to join will now be subsidized by your tax dollars to join those pools, whether you could spend the money more efficiently or not on your own.

Our government has jumped in that market and is now imposing mandates upon those insurers by enacting this bill, which are designed over time to serve in the nation’s best long term interests by trying to provide for the health of all:

“By forcing the exit of Principal Financial Group — which ran a profitable, $1.6 billion health insurance business — ObamaCare has now left 840,000 Americans to find another source of coverage.”

The libertarian argument is fairly clear, as I understand it:  the moral responsibility and burden of treating those without any money has now been transferred from individuals and  the market (who were picking up many of these costs elsewhere) to government oversight.   A vast amount of economic liberty (which is is responsible for so much of our dynamism, social mobility and capacity to successfully absorb immigrants) has now been sacrificed to the State.  At a time when we need to stay as dynamic as possible in competition with emerging and developing markets, we have chosen a more European-style approach thanks to the current administration and the slimmest of margins of popular support.

Don’t worry, this will control costs in the long run.

Full Congressional bill here.

Also On This Site:  Of course, this is politics, and there’s a lot of pork in there, too:  From Real Clear Markets: ‘Racial, Gender Quotas In The Financial Bill?’…I’ve never been sufficiently convinced of the moral argument: From If-Then Knots: Health Care Is Not A Right…But Then Neither Is Property?

The most knowledgable articles I’ve read that make the case for some government involvement are here, but using farm subsidies (a lesson in corruption, skewed markets and unnecessary source of protectionism) as a useful model?: Atul Gawande At The New Yorker: ‘The Cost Conundrum Persists’…

Remember, democrats have been working on this for many years now, and Krugman argued that only government could contain all the factors leading to rising costs: A Few Health Care Links-03/18/2010