The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

Four major U.S. employers (AT&T, Verizon, Deere and Caterpillar) are considering dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.  These companies currently offer health benefits to over 2.3 million employees. That is like cutting off health care for the entire city of Houston.

The reality of budgets, economics, sociology, incentive, and plain common sense about what would have worked were thrown to the wind in favor of futuristic visions of everyone getting the best health care available for free. It sounds good on paper and many of the people were well-meaning (though grossly misinformed).

But as with other optimistic visions of the future where all injustice is eradicated and there is no one with an advantage over another, ideas inherent within the construct of socialism (soft European-style or hard Soviet-style), this simply cannot stand up to real life where there are legitimate constraints that make the system work as it does now.

It is unfortunate this won’t work too, because now many more will be hurt as a result. That and the fact that the country is bankrupt and we just can’t afford it. But that’s another discussion for another day. Sure would be nice to just get things for free! But we live in a fallen world. That presupposition seems to be lost in these discussions though, or ignored, or disbelieved in favor of an optimistic assumption about humanity that simply doesn’t stack up against what Scripture says about our condition apart from Christ.