What Is ObamaCare?Paul Craig Roberts, Contributor It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the worlds largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel. Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches. I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by security forces that they finance as if they were terrorists or domestic extremists, another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections. Yet, ObamaCare is before the US Supreme Court. The conservative majority might now utilize the judicial activism for which conservatives have criticized liberals. Hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. However, the fight over ObamaCare is not worth five cents. It is extraordinary that liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever they are, are defending a health program that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care. Americans have been brainwashed that a single-payer system is unaffordable because it is socialized medicine. Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care. The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care. On top of these profits come the costs of preventing and combatting fraud. Because private insurance companies resist paying and Medicare pays a small fraction of the medical charges, private health care providers charge as much as they possibly can, knowing that the payments will be cut to the bone. But a billing mistake of even $300 can bankrupt a health care provider from legal expenses defending him/her self from fraud accusations. The beauty of a single-payer system is that it takes the profits out of the system. No one has to make profits. Wall Street cannot threaten insurance companies and private health care companies with being taken over because their profits are too low. No health-provider in a single-payer system has to worry about being displaced in a takeover organized by Wall Street because the profits are too low. Because a single-payer system eliminates the profits that drive up the costs, Wall Street, Insurance companies, and free market economists hate a socialized medical care system. They prefer a socialized private health care system in which public monies flow into private insurance companies. To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the socialistic ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide private health care to US citizens who cannot afford it. The extremely high costs of ObamaCare is not socialistic medicine. ObamaCare is high-cost privatized medicine that guarantees billions of dollars in profits to private insurance companies. It remains to be seen whether such a ridiculous health care scheme, nowhere extant on earth except in Romneys Massachusetts, will provide health care or just private profits. This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. 