There’s No Free Health Care: Obamacare will raise costs–and everybody knows it.
No tags for this post.There’s No Free Health Care: Obamacare will raise costs–and everybody knows it.
Fred Barnes | Weekly Standard
Give President Obama credit for persistence. And stubbornness. And lack of imagination. He declared again last week that his health care plan “will slow the growth of health care costs for our families and our businesses and our government.” And this historic achievement will be accompanied by a dazzling array of new medical benefits that everyone will receive–guaranteed by law. Okay, you’ve heard this before. But that’s the president’s story, and he’s sticking to it.
The question is, why? Does he think we’re stupid? His argument has failed to persuade a sizeable majority of the American people precisely because they’re not stupid. They understand the laws of addition and subtraction. When you offer more–much, much more in this case–of a good, it’s going to cost more. Somebody has to pay for it. Yet Obama says we’ll all be paying less, and that includes businesses and government.
If he could actually pull off this feat, he would indeed be the One we’ve been waiting for. But he can’t. This is apparent whenever Obama explains where the “savings” will come from. They’re from eliminating “hundreds of billions of dollars” in waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA) in the health care system. Surely, he knows better. Everyone in Washington recognizes these savings are imaginary. They’re offered with a wink. They never happen. President Reagan promised to slash WFA in the 1980s. The result: zilch. Where Reagan failed, Obama is not likely to succeed.
Obama may be unaware, but there are three programs–in Maine, Massachusetts, and Tennessee–currently testing his
idea of get-more-pay-less. The evidence is already in: Expanded health care coverage costs more, an awful lot more. There are no known exceptions.
I have been following, with a great deal of interest, the debate on health care reform. Particularly the part about how the reform will be paid for.
The consumer pays for everything, in this country, either through taxes or through consumption. Businesses do not pay taxes, they act as tax collectors and pass the taxes they collect on to the consumer. The same holds true for license fees, and permit fees etc. Those in the health care profession do not pay malpractice insurance or malpractice settlements. The consumer pays. Wealthy people do not pay taxes at the rate that the tax code implies. They use financial instruments such as tax-free bonds and various kinds or trust to either avoid or postpone paying taxes. A real life example, GE is not paying for the dredging of the Hudson River. The consumer is. No mater how they package it, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like a duck it is most likely a duck and the consumer pays.
By their own admission, Government does not have a very good track record when it comes to running anything. Just read your local newspaper. It is full of examples i.e. Amtrak, the Post Office. The list is almost endless.
By the governments own figures one sixth of the population is without any form of health insurance. To cover all of these people, at the same level of service enjoyed by those presently covered, the total medical cost to this nation will need to increase by 20 percent. The only other solution is to reduce the level of service. To pay part of the cost by increasing efficiency and reducing fraud is unrealistic giving the track record government has continued to demonstrate in the past.
I am no better then anyone else. I do not have all of the answers but I do have a couple suggestions. First we need tort reform. Second we need to hold people responsible for making unhealthy decisions. People who are obese, people who use drugs and people who smoke, to name a few, should be made to pay more for their health care.
By the way everyone in this country has health care insurance today. Anyone who is sick can go to an emergency room and by law the hospital must treat them and the consumer pays.