A Regular Health Care Obama-rama

I have literally received hundreds of emails, IM, text messages and phone calls asking me if I support the Barack Obama health plan. The answer in short. NO.

Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama has a health plan. He promises to make health care more affordable and he promises to make sure we all have health insurance at least as good as that provided to Congress.

Wow. That sounds awfully good. We get cheaper health care and a lot more of it. Who could be against that? Nobody. And that’s why Obama’s promises are so clever. If all you do is hear his promises and believe they can be accomplished, anybody who says Obama’s wrong is just a big ogre and clearly doesn’t care about people.

But this is the problem. I can promise to terraform the moon and turn it into a free vacation spot for everybody regardless of income. That sounds really good, but is the promise meaningful? Of course not. It’s not realistic. Obama’s health care promises are about the same caliber. They just aren’t realistic.

Right now, Americans devote 16 % - nearly a fifth – of our economy to health care. As it turns out, if health inflation had been equal to general inflation since 1960 we would devote only 7 percent of our economy to health care and we would get exactly the same amount of care. In other words, most of the growth in health care’s share of the economy since 1960 has been a result of health care getting more expensive.

The main reason health care prices have risen so fast is that we already follow Obama-style (socialist) policies, on a piecemeal basis. Through our income tax system, we have encouraged people to get employer-paid health insurance plans. Health insurance, rather than being real insurance, is really pre-paid health care with consumers paying very little out of their own pockets. Consequently, we do not bear the true costs of our own choices such as how often we see a doctor, whether we go to the emergency room or to a clinic, and whether we make healthy or unhealthy lifestyle choices.

Obama’s proposals would only exacerbate all of the costly outcomes of our current system by moving closer to a fully socialized system. In so doing, his policies would make fully socialized medicine almost inevitable. Many, perhaps including Obama, worship at the feet of the British and Canadian health care models. And, if you like long lines, limited choices of doctors, and allowing bureaucrats to decide if you get needed care, perhaps you should move to Canada. But, there is plenty of evidence that the Canadian system would collapse if Canadians were not able to come to the USA for care they can’t reasonably obtain in their own country.

A primary provision of Obama’s plan would be guaranteed insurance. Health insurance companies would have to provide a certain level of coverage and they would be prohibited from turning anyone down, regardless of pre-conditions. You don’t have to be an economist to know this drives up costs.Obama would create an insurance exchange at the national level. Why an exchange would be needed is beyond me when everybody is going to have to sell the same insurance. He also says he would allow “flexibility for state plans.” Yeah, right. And where exactly is that flexibility? I guess he’d allow states to mandate the coverage of toe fungus medicine.

Of course, Obama will come to the rescue once he finishes driving health insurance costs into the stratosphere. Why, after he finishes mandating coverage for everybody and forces all employers to help pay premiums through new taxes (as if employees will pay nothing – hello unemployment!) he’ll generously provide subsidies for those who find the insurance unaffordable. Isn’t that nice of him to play hero with other peoples’ money?

And what will happen when, instead of medical inflation doubling general inflation, it starts to triple it? Well, get ready for price controls, controls on doctors’ practices far more comprehensive than any insurance company ever attempted, and controls on what you get to buy with your own money. Ultimately, we will get the Hillarycare we all rejected back in 1994.

Oh well, when a government bureaucrat decides your life isn’t worth the cost of an appendectomy, I suppose there’s always Mexico. Barack Obama – what a guy.

Fighting for the uninsured and underinsured pregnant mom and their unborn babies,
Advocate Aaron