President Obama is lobbying for health care reform and I’m having trouble making sense of what he’s saying. First he says we can’t afford the current system:
President Obama pushed hard Monday for a health care overhaul, saying the system is “a ticking bomb” for the budget that could propel America down “the route of GM” without a legislative fix.
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Obama said that a “health care exchange” would be set up to provide additional options for the uninsured.
“A big part of what led General Motors and Chrysler into trouble,” he said, “were the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers—costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world.”
“If we do not fix our health care system,” Obama said, “America may go the way of GM—paying more, getting less, and going broke.”
But his plan will cost billions and is already being criticized for being too expensive. (Keep in mind that the U.S. already has billions in unfunded liabilities related to Medicare.)
To an audience of doctors Obama plans to say the United States spends too much on health care and gets too little in return. He says the health industry is crushing businesses and families and is leading to millions of Americans losing coverage, the administration official said.
Obama’s turn before the 250,000-physician group in his latest effort to persuade skeptics that his goal to provide health care to all Americans is worth the $1 trillion price tag it is expected to run during its first decade.
The president plans to acknowledge the costs. But he also will tell the doctors it is not acceptable for the nation to leave so many without insurance, the official said.
Unified Republicans and some fiscally conservative Democrats on Capitol Hill have said they are nervous about how the administration plans to pay for Obama’s ideas. There have been indications Obama has been quietly making a case for reducing malpractice lawsuits to help control costs, long a goal of the AMA and Republicans.
Obama accuses his critics of “fear-mongering”:
[Obama] also declared once again that he does not favor socialized medicine and cautioned people to beware of “scare tactics and fear-mongering” by critics who make this claim.
But isn’t suggesting that the country will go bankrupt if it doesn’t accept his plan a great example of “fear-mongering”?
It’s all politics as usual with special interests trying to rig the marketplace deck in their favor.
The fact is that Obama is making all kinds of promises that can’t be kept. And government projections about the cost and benefits of its health care programs have been wildly off the mark in the past.
The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner and Chris Edwards note that government always lowballs its spending estimates in this area. When Medicare was born in 1965, the forecast was for “Part A” spending of $9 billion by 1990—but it ended up at $67 billion. The Medicaid benefit to hospitals, added in 1987, was pegged at $100 million a year; by 1992 it was already at $11 billion.
It will be fun to watch President Obama squirm his way through this healthcare tax crunch. And the squeeze likely will get only worse, for the cruel corollary to healthcare reform is that the more people we cover with health insurance, the more—not less—we will spend on them.
If history is any indicator, it’s Obama’s health care plan that will bankrupt the country, if we’re not already bankrupt.
The only way you’re going to have high-quality, affordable health care is the same way that we have high-quality, affordable electronics–a free, competitive market.
That laptop computer you own is much more powerful than the mainframe computers of thirty years ago and it cost you very little. The mainframe computer systems of thirty years ago cost millions of dollars and required a computer center as big as a city block to house it and keep it cool.
All the new businesses created by the free market in health care would not only improve health care while lowering costs, they will stimulate the economy. With our aging population, health care is a growth industry.
If all those people could order their own tests at their local lab or one tucked away in a corner of Wal-Mart, the prices for the tests would plunge, patients would be better informed and could make better decisions, they would learn more about science and how their bodies work, and all the time and money that is now wasted going through doctors to get the tests could be saved.
Of course, in a free market, patients always have the option to use a doctor or other health care provider when it makes sense to do so. Doctors’ time and skills would be better used treating the most difficult cases.
I’ve been reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying & Start Living (1944) and he repeated emphasizes how worry takes a terrible toll on our health.
One key to improving our nation’s health care is to get the self-serving, dishonest, fear-mongering politicians out of it.
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