When in doubt, turn to freedom. There you will find your answer.

Health care reform: Many of us have been paying great attention to the outcome of this massive federal legislation. With the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, it now appears the health care bill may have some trouble. But if this bill should die in the halls of Congress — as I hope it will — we must not forget that, yes, a real and dire crisis prevails within our health care system.

The outrageous price of insurance and the inflated cost of health care service have left many Americans and West Virginians unable to make ends meet. But before we can properly reform anything, we must determine cause and effect. I submit that government is the cause and not the answer.

First, to realize freedom, we must accept that no one in life “owes us.” Save liberty, “entitlements” are earned, not awarded. This truth is sometimes hard to accept for some, and history has proven that a culture that deviates from this philosophy cannot long sustain a free society.

Our free society, which now exists in name only, is infected with government privilege. These privileges fly in the face of liberty and have created a society of corporatism, a looming threat to our free way of life.

Corporatism is the rise of the unholy public-private alliance — “politically connected” businesses teamed with government regulators. And this theme underscores the latest health care reform bill.

Our public has been led to believe that the health care insurance industry has lined up in opposition to this legislation, when in reality these few industry giants helped to craft it. And why not? The entire bill would force every American to become a customer of a very select group of private firms. Special privileges, or government force bestowing certain benefits to one group over another, often are disguised through government regulation. It is not that the major insurance companies want less regulation. They want more.

This may seem odd at first, that private businesses often want more government intervention. So let me illustrate the point, and while doing so reveal how government regulatory force is used to massively distort the typical consumer-producer price relationship.

Within the first couple of weeks of the regular session in Charleston, several bills regarding health care bureaucracy immediately took shape. One bill pitted chiropractors against physical therapists and included wide-ranging arbitrary language that could give very broad powers to the therapy bureaucrats (things like who can do what and who determines this or that, although I’m sure the chiropractors wouldn’t mind if this situation was reversed).

Another issue matched the interests of optometrists and ophthalmologists. Ophthalmologists claim the “public needs to be protected” from the reckless practices of the optometrists. But we see this all the time — counselors, psychologists, nursing aides, occupational therapists, administrative assistants — private firms and interests forcing these questions: Who should be allowed to do what? Who should we let practice and in what areas? How should government “protect the public”?

The reality is that these private businesses and interest groups are all aimed at the same goal, and it is not the noble venture of “protecting the public.”

Their objective? State-issued writ of monopoly to remove competition.

The truth is that government bureaucracy cannot effectively protect you; you have to protect yourself. All government has done has been to drive up the cost of health care through these insane “divide-the-work” schemes aimed not at the righteous endeavor of “protecting the public” but at protecting the interest groups by regulating away competition.

Through bureaucratic boards and licensing tricks, not only do we in government inflate the costs of health care services, we produce many other undesirable but unintended consequences. We in government say “How can the patient know? How can the consumer know who is ‘good’ and who isn’t?”

With this banner of protecting the public, we legislators try to make ourselves seem more important than what we really are, and we cause detrimental effects that far exceed the protection these regulations aim to offer. Government licenses often have this effect because consumers and patients believe a bureaucratic board’s license means license holders must be “safe” and “good” at their jobs. Moral hazard? Government licenses often cause people to act with less caution than they otherwise would.

And what about the basic logic of these regulations? The patient cannot be trusted to know who is a good doctor? How then can the voter know which candidate is “good” and which is not? Our very democratic system, along with free markets, is based on individual choice and preference. Only voters and consumers can possibly know whether a person is “good” at his or her job, and they must find that out themselves.

This is not to say that licensing has no value. But because they are forced by government, it is impossible to determine whether they do have value. But there is an effective market solution to this problem, one that has been around for a very long time: voluntary license programs.

Voluntary licensure programs always have been provided in the market — normally in the form of a trademark or other seal. And since they come with a premium, their services can be measured and their value can be assessed. For instance, if I buy a new toothbrush, I know to look for the seal that says “Approved by the American Dental Association.”

This private entity only awards its seal to those companies that “earn” it by demonstrating their toothbrush is safe and of good quality. If the American Dental Association begins awarding seals to anyone and anything, their seal will lose value, and toothbrush companies will cease paying for their trademark. The same concept can apply across the spectrum of health care services, where such demand exists of course.

Sadly, we are moving the other way with health care. If we take these compounding regulations on who can do what, when and where, multiply them by a factor of 100 and apply them exponentially over 40 years, it should come as no surprise that health care has ballooned. Reversing this trend is the only real method of providing quality care at a true market price. The only solid way to reduce cost is not through force — but through freedom. Failure to realize this on all levels will result in the eventual failure of a free nation.

Pat McGeehan is a Hancock County Republican serving in the West Virginia House of Delegates.