Donald Trump Donald John TrumpBiden on Trump's refusal to commit to peaceful transfer of power: 'What country are we in?' Romney: 'Unthinkable and unacceptable' to not commit to peaceful transition of power Two Louisville police officers shot amid Breonna Taylor grand jury protests MORE is president-elect because he didn’t amen the Holy Catechism of the political left - including most notably his “heretical” promise to dismantle the left’s most cherished legislation of the past eight years, the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare.

In particular, he promised to toss the individual mandate, which has managed to drive up the cost of health insurance and reduce the actual care millions of people receive.

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Which tells us the president-elect understands economics.

When you force people to buy something, the cost of that thing always goes up - while the quality of the product or service always goes down. The DMV is an obvious example.

Anything the government does is an obvious example.

But Obamacare was never really about lowering health care costs. It was always about increasing the power of the government over the people, by making them dependent on the government for their health care.

By depriving them of their money - and their right to say, “no thanks.”

President-elect Trump understands this. The danger of this. His pick for secretary of Health and Human Services - Georgia Rep. (and orthopedic surgeon) Tom Price - indicates his campaign promises were more than just words.

Dr. Price was among the few Republicans in the House who actively opposed the core of Obamacare - the individual mandate - and succeeded in putting an actual bill that would have done exactly that directly under soon-to-be-former-President Obama’s nose.

It was of course vetoed, but like the Doolittle Raid in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dr. Price’s stab at the ACA was hugely symbolic.

As is the president-elect’s nomination of Dr. Price.

Like Trump, he is serious about changing things up. And not just Obamacare. HHS itself is in urgent need of oversight - and accounting.

This Carter-era bureaucracy has an annual budget of more than $1 trillion dollars - the lion’s share of that spent on who-knows-what. Price is hopefully going to find out exactly what - and rein in extravagant, wasteful or simply inappropriate use of taxpayers’ dollars.

For example, some of the questionable activities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which is one of several federal sub-bureaucracies under the HHS umbrella. Among the Questionables - the diversion of taxpayer dollars to a bureaucratic appendage of the World Health Organization called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which has been accused of using political science to classify things like bacon and coffee as “carcinogens” that ought to be regulated - much as the Obama Administration’s EPA recently issued a regulatory fatwa characterizing carbon dioxide (an inert gas that plays no role whatsoever in air quality) as a “pollutant” subject to regulation.

The IARC also asserts that the commonly used weed killer glyphosate - known commercially by the brand name, Round Up - is “probably carcinogenic.”

And there “may be” such a thing as the Easter Bunny.

Point being, regulatory fatwas based on politics rather than science actually are harmful to human health - unlike the bogeys ginned up to scare people and thereby increase the regulatory power of the government.

Political science is also a danger to people’s jobs. How many have been lost - or never created - due to overzealous regulations?

Before the government mucks around with either people's’ lives or their jobs, there had better be good reason - established fact - not asserted claim.

But unlike the EPA, the WHO and its appendages aren't even accountable to American taxpayers. They get our money and do as they like with it.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz Jason ChaffetzThe myth of the conservative bestseller Elijah Cummings, Democratic chairman and powerful Trump critic, dies at 68 House Oversight panel demands DeVos turn over personal email records MORE (R-Utah) has been questioning this business since before the election. With Dr. Price heading HHS, something might actually be done about it, too.

It’s also time to question - and do something about - other agencies that are accountable to taxpayers. Like the Food and Drug Administration - another HHS sub-bureaucracy. One with an annual budget of almost $3 billion.

President-elect Trump’s nominee to head the FDA is reportedly Jim O’Neill, who (like Price) understands economics - including the cost of regulatory burdens that have made prescription drugs catastrophically expensive. “Big Pharma” - the demagogic term used by the left to characterize the pharmaceutical industry and to stifle honest discussion by ridiculing its opponents - has had to absorb these costs, which manifest in the form of higher prices.

The daunting (and expensive) regulatory burden also serves to inhibit research into new drugs, which may never get to market and earn back their R&D costs.

This, too, is harmful to human health.

O’Neill - like Dr. Price - seems to get the problem. He stated back in 2014 that he supports reforming the FDA’s currently Byzantine approval rules, in order to get new drugs to market sooner - and cheaper.

Dr. Price has other worthy reforms in mind - such as devolving Medicaid to local (state) control, where it would be more accountable to the people who fund it, as opposed to the federal government that seeks to control it (and them).

Dr. Price - along with Seema Verma, President-elect Trump's choice to be administrator of Medicare and Medicaid Services - also reportedly favors a more-string-attached approach to the disbursement of government assistance, including a requirement that "able-bodied" applicants meet employment requirements in order to qualify for benefits. Verma has described Medicare as ”dysfunctional" and - like Dr. Price - strongly supports the reintroduction of personal responsibility as a way to counter out-of-control entitlement spending.

The left will probably smear this needed reform as a "cruel" attack upon the "poor." But is it really cruel to expect people who can work to work in order to get "help" from people who do work (i.e., the taxpayers)?

Dr. Price will also be accused of "slashing" needful programs, but like most of the left's harangues, this is fundamentally dishonest. Dr. Price - and Donald Trump - are trying to control spending because they don't see the taxpayers' pockets as bottomless or the property of the federal government.

It’s a crazy idea like that might just make America great again.

Eric Peters is a freelance political columnist. He is the author of “Automotive Atrocities” and “Road Hogs” (MBI) and is currently living amongst the Edentulites in rural Southwest Virginia.

The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.