"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act".  Wow, what a great name.  In case you hadn't
heard the news, that is the name officially given by Congress to the monstrosity that was
passed in the Senate.  The government has long had a talent for naming stuff in ways so
grandiose that no future Congress would repeal them as they sounded too good to the voter to
consider repeal.  It is no accident.  Never mind that the new law does nothing to protect patients
or make care more affordable.  Basically it turns insurance companies into public utilities which means higher costs and increased regulation.  There has never been a regulated industry that has delivered lower costs.  Don't believe me?  Think telephones.  AT&T used to be a public utility and regulated monopoly.  Remember when long distance phone calls were a big deal?  Not to give away my age but I can clearly remember making one sentence calls collect to my parents from summer camp.  "Hi, I'm here and fine.  Love you.  Bye."  I saved any longer discussions for letters (I know, no one does that anymore) as they were cheaper by a longshot.

Today tons of companies compete for your phone service.  Most of us will sooner or later turn off our old fashioned land lines for the unlimited long distance and internet provided by our increasingly sophisticated cell phones.  And if you keep your land line, check out the internet
phone services offering unlimited service for under $20 per year.  That's what a free market
does folks.  It improves service and lowers costs.  Always.

Remember airlines before deregulation?  There weren't too many of them, the routes were protected supposedly for our protection by the government, and tickets were really expensive.  Today I can book a ticket on Southwest or JetBlue, one of the many new carriers that sprang up since deregulation in the late 1970s, and fly round trip to lots of cities for, well, peanuts!  And the surviving big carriers of the past have had to compete on cost and service as well.  Lots of airlines have failed which is a good thing in the creative destruction of capitalism.

Franklin Roosevelt named Old Age Welfare "Social Security" and created the fiction of there
being a trust fund so that future Congresses wouldn't dare repeal what people have come to
believe is a national pension system that they pay into.  It isn't, never was, and the whole
thing was a cynical sham from the start.  FDR did it on purpose like Harry Reid is trying to
do it with healthcare today.  Let's hope it isn't the straw that finally breaks the camel's back
and bankrupts us officially as in effect we already are. 

Oh, and as for my suggestion for the new name for the healthcare act?  "The Increased Cost
Act to Ruin What's Left of Decent Medicine, " how about that?