The answer to life’s problems seems to all hinge upon just giving up a teeny bit of freedom here and a bit there. Leftist authoritarians promise they can save the world from (insert environmental disaster), but only if you don’t drive cars or eat hamburgers. They can save the world from crime, but you need to sacrifice your right to defend yourself. They can make a world of perfect equality, but you need to give up your money, your clean streets, your functional schools, etc., etc.

Indeed, the deep swing toward authoritarianism from the post-Obama left reminds one of the quote from journalist HL Mencken, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

The issue Democrats have selected to wedge their way into more and more government power is health care. Health is something that affects everyone, and an issue where it’s easy to promise the world while decrying anyone who questions the infeasibility of, say, promising full medical benefits to all of Latin America.

If Democrats can subvert the health care industry – which is 18% of the US economy – into a top-down, government-controlled single-payer system, they can use that leverage toward controlling ever more of the private industry and people’s lives.

One of the people driving for this is billionaire John Arnold, George Soros’s Mini-Me. The John and Laura Arnold Foundation (now called Arnold Ventures) funds the Center for Media and Democracy, a far-left group working to defund the free market. Why someone who has benefitted so much from capitalism wants to undermine capitalism is somewhat baffling, but that’s the world we live in nowadays.

Exploiting health care as a wedge issue, the so-called “progressive” billionaire has pushed for drug price controls, funding anti-Second Amendment causes since gun freedom is “a public health crisis,” and promoting as much abortion as possible – though it usually gets called something innocuous like “women’s health.”

The Arnolds have been great at funding fake research to advance their agendas, and all told they have disbursed more than $1 billion of their personal fortune to subvert traditional American values – so maybe we need to rename it the John and Laura and Benedict Arnold Foundation.

Of particular note where the Arnolds’ effort on health care is concerned is the issue of Surprise Medical Billing (SMB), the situation where insured patients get slammed with unexpected, out-of-network charges – such as when the surgeon was in-network but the anesthesiologist wasn’t.  

Insurers want to design narrow coverage with a very small number of providers they have to pay, leading to the conclusion that the health insurers are to blame for SMBs as the inevitable bad actors in the space.  SMBs are great for insurance companies, since they don’t have to pay out-of-network benefits, but they’re awful for everyone else. The Arnolds and their ilk are depicting the SMB issue as a sign that the system is inherently broken and must be replaced with an inevitably dysfunctional socialist one.

For some reason, this aspect of the insurance industry has been singled out by leftist activists while insurance companies’ record-breaking Obamacare profits haven’t.

The goal of non-profit advocacy groups spawned by the Arnolds, George Soros, or whoever is to disrupt as much of the system as possible to replace it with a new one, one that promises the world but, again, can’t keep waste off the streets or discipline school kids who get out of line. People like this need to be defeated utterly. The system needs to be tweaked to be even better, not just thrown in the trash.  

Jared Whitley is a long-time DC politico who writes about the impact of government regulation on business. He worked in the US Senate, the White House, and the defense industry. He is a graduate of Hult International Business School in Dubai and an associate of the Global Justice Foundation.

Note to Readers: Issues & Insights is a new site launched by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to use our decades of experience to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day.

We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we think our approach to commentary is sorely lacking both in today’s mainstream media and on the internet. If you like what you see, feel free to click the Tip Jar over on the right sidebar. And be sure to tell your friends!