New York Congressman Anthony Weiner unveiled the purpose behind Obamacare: the destruction of the role of private insurance in the medical marketplace.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did similarly when she labeled insurers as “villains.”

Congressman Weiner derided profits for insurance companies and argued that insurers take money out of the medical care system, thereby causing everyone to pay higher prices for care.  Speaker Pelosi’s “villainous” comment claimed that insurance companies’ profits are theft.  What both of these positions reveal is a lack of an understanding of insurance – and therefore a lack of understanding of how a free society operates – for insurance is freedom.

Concerning the needs of human beings, all require medical care, from the moment of birth until death.  Either someone takes the responsibility for providing it for us or we take on that responsibility ourselves.

In a command and control economy care is provided to us by others who are told to provide it - and how to do so.  The analogy to the former Soviet Union is apt, but it is also applicable to the socialized methods adopted by Europe and Canada.  This is the proscribed method of Obamacare: freedom of choice and personal responsibility are eliminated: we should take what we can get. This is the view supported by Weiner, Pelosi and a good many Democrats.

But in free societies we, the citizenry, take on responsibility for ourselves.  In a highly advanced capitalist economy we still place that responsibility on ourselves, but then shift the financial risk for doing so onto a financial institution whose business it is to accept and manage the risk.  The financial institution, a business enterprise, accepts and manages that risk in exchange for the non-guaranteed opportunity to make a profit.  That financial institution is an insurance company.

Far from being villainous, insurers, enabled by their profits, permit us to maintain individual responsibility for our actions.  The premiums paid allow us to pay small amounts for our medical care in relation to the significant capital that we would have to tie up were we to be required to maintain our own capital to fund possible, unknown contingencies that could stem from accident or illness.  Because we do not have to retain our own large amounts of capital for such contingencies we can invest it elsewhere, to the positive benefit of ourselves and our society.  We can have a more affluent lifestyle than we would otherwise have – while remaining free.  All of this is made possible by insurance which, being an industry like all other industries requires profits to survive.

Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi and her leadership were voted into power by her members, the Democrats in Congress, who can vote to remove her and her leadership any time they like.  By not doing so, or by not even speaking out against her and Congressman Weiner’s views, the congressional members of today’s Democratic Party demonstrate that they identify with those views.  Maybe they do not realize that insurance is freedom and thus do not equate the two, but neither ignorance of law or history is a defense, especially for lawmakers. 

When insurance companies, the purveyors of a system that ensures freedom, are attacked for engaging in their business, freedom – in the land of the free - is at stake.