Ira Brodsky.com

Obamacare is an imminent threat to people with life-threatening medical conditions.

People with serious medical conditions often achieve miraculous results in the U.S. thanks to a private health care system that gives them the freedom to track down and go to doctors with the right knowledge and experience. These people, who have the greatest and most urgent health care needs, will be stymied by Obamacare’s new layers of bureaucracy. Instead of swiftly obtaining the right diagnosis and treatment, they will lose precious time submitting forms and filing appeals.

As every physician knows, it’s important to arrive at a correct diagnosis as soon as possible because medical conditions are most treatable in their early stages.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal illustrates the point. “Facing Lifesaving Heart Surgery, Twice” bemoans the plight of people who had heart surgery as children only to experience further heart problems as adults. Doctors were often baffled because their hearts had been reconfigured during childhood. In some cases, the best course of action proved to be going back to the pediatric hospitals and surgeons who performed the original operations. This is possible in a private health care system because patients are correctly viewed as customers. Under Obamacare — a system that perceives people with serious medical conditions as financial burdens to a government already deeply in hock — these patients are more likely to find themselves boxed in by rules designed to contain costs.

It didn’t take long for libertarians to condemn Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. Ryan may have required his staffers to read Ayn Rand’s novels, but he’s no John Galt. Over his nearly 14 years in Congress, Ryan has cast several votes unfit for an advocate of limited government. He voted for TARP, auto bailouts, and Medicare expansion. He also voted for No Child Left Behind, and twice voted for stimulus spending.

The criticism of Ryan is a classic example of the saying, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” And it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how our system of government operates.

The Founders’ great achievement — an achievement that today is often ignored and even dismissed by the cynics in our education and media establishments — was to protect the people from tyrannical government. States’ rights, the separation of power between the legislative, judiciary, and executive branches, and a system of checks and balances were carefully designed to prevent any one person or party from acquiring a monopoly of power.