Anything that the government has power to provide you, it also has the power to take away. Only 18 percent of Americans trust the government, according to a Pew Research Center study. Do we really want to put our health in the hands of a government that has proven to be incapable of providing quality and affordable healthcare to its citizens?

Under the Affordable Care Act, patients were falsely promised they would be able to keep their healthcare plans and their doctors. They were also promised plans would remain affordable. But the monopoly that the federal government has created when it comes to healthcare has created a situation in which premiums have doubled and tripled in the state of Wisconsin for some demographics.

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Obamacare has stripped the industry of the mediocre competition it already had and begun to replace it with a government monopoly. From 2015 to 2018, the Heritage Foundation reported that significantly more health insurers are going out of business than entering the market.

Free market ideals are an integral part of the fabric of America, where competition has always been encouraged and monopolies broken up so consumers could have access to more options. By taking away choices from the consumer, prices in the healthcare market will continue to rise because there is no incentive to keep costs low. With a government that will always meet the price of a service no matter how high it goes and no competition between different providers, we will never see a reduction of costs in the healthcare market.

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Victims of state-run healthcare systems all over the world are at the mercy of the state. They are a burden to the system, siphoning up the finite resources that were allocated. Instead, patients in a market-based healthcare system are customers and are therefore an asset to the healthcare provider. The resources, being primarily provided by the recipient of the care, are less finite, and the healthcare providers rely on the patients as much as the patients rely on the providers. Conversely, the state-run system has turned its back on its own patients — some of whom have fled to America to seek better care. Healthcare is a time sensitive service — wait lists and rationing aren’t acceptable practices when someone’s life is hanging in the balance.

It can be tempting to relinquish power to politicians who claim to have all the answers to the imperfections of the healthcare system. It’s easy to give the government more power, but it’s much more difficult to take that power back once it has been sacrificed. That said, once the state snatches control of the nation’s healthcare system, they will not let go, even when it inevitably ends in catastrophic failure.

A one-size-fits-all system will not solve our national healthcare problems. We can provide quality healthcare to our nation’s citizens while taking power out of the hands of the government and put it back in the hands of the patients. We will still be able to protect patients with pre-existing conditions without protecting the failures of Obamacare and other government-mandated health care policies.

Gov. Scott Walker’s healthcare plan meant to benefit his reelection rather than Wisconsinites

We simply cannot afford to move toward more government control when it comes to our healthcare choices. A plan for socialized medicine backed by politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin would cost taxpayers $32.6 trillion in the first ten years alone. A study found that funding the plan could not be covered even if federal income taxes doubled.

President Donald Trump’s administration has already improved our healthcare system by reforming the Veterans Health Administration. Republicans repealed the Obamacare mandate that forced consumers to purchase healthcare plans that they didn’t necessarily need and couldn’t afford. We should support Trump and Republicans across our nation in creating a sustainable, new system which puts the patient first, not the government.

Charlie Mueth ([email protected]) is a junior studying finance. Evan Karabas ([email protected]) is a sophomore studying information systems and operations & technology management. They are the Chairman and Digital Director for College Republicans respectively.