Obamacare not as easy as ABC

Originally Posted At OC Register
By Jay Ambrose
June 26, 2009

During ABC's health-care session with Barack Obama the other night, our charming, articulate, exceedingly clever president essentially repeated the same answer to all the questions in roughly the same way.

Leave the system alone and it will deteriorate, he said. Sure, there are some questions and problems with what we plan to do. But there has already been plenty of debate. We know what the best answers are. We are going to phase this thing in and it will be pretty much OK in the end.

Obama himself admits huge costs, but says we can institute more preventive health practices and eliminate waste in the entitlements at the same time we are limiting care to what the medical community agrees really works. The fact is, the extent to which government can induce preventive measures is severely limited and, while some waste can certainly be attacked, doing so won't come close to footing the bill. Which brings us to rationing, a word Obama does not like to use.

But that's what it is when the government dictates or greatly influences what treatments you can and cannot receive, and when you add a new entitlement to the old ones. It becomes more and more imperative to ration because, otherwise, you will be adding trillions to the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities already incurred.
Under the Obama scheme, a chief device for our future agony will be a government-run health insurance program that he portrays as just one more competitor in the field. It's an extraordinary claim when you consider it will be subsidized We'll all pay through taxes, deficits, a damaged economy, diminished care or otherwise.

There's another way to go, and that's essentially through market competition. People hate health insurance companies but what is insufficiently understood is that these companies are so burdened by government mandates that it has become increasingly difficult to function as efficient businesses. Even so and despite grumbling, most people are pretty happy with what they are getting – something like 77 percent of all Americans.

Things could get better and that number could rise if we moved from health insurance exemptions for employers to health insurance exemptions for individuals, allowing for policy ownership, portability, far more shopping around for what works best for you

individually, accompanied by greater use of medical savings accounts and more reliance on catastrophic, high-deductible insurance.

As think tank analysts and others have also argued, you could move toward a voucher system for Medicare, enabling its recipients to shop around, too.

Still more is needed, but nothing in the cost range of the Obama proposals; we could still have some of the best medical treatment in the wo
 

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