ObamaCare’s increased regulations, restrictions, and oversight would more adversely affect doctors than those working in any other profession, and they would further undermine the doctor-patient relationship.
In a 2008 speech in Great Britain, President Obama’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid under ObamaCare calls for health-care decisions to be made by politicians, not privately; praises the British system and criticizes the “American plan”; and says that a just health system “must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
The House Republican leadership ought to get behind a simple, one-sentence bill to repeal Obamacare — now.
Since 1997, 13 years before the passage of ObamaCare, it has been illegal for health insurers to drop someone because they are sick — and, even before then, the practice almost never happened.
Those concerned that ObamaCare would produce an American health-care system that’s all-too-similar to Britain’s National Health Service will find no solace in President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick, Harvard professor and staunch advocate of the NHS, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
If nothing else, ObamaCare may prove a stimulus to the paper industry, as its expansive utilization of IRS Form 1099 would force Americans to spend countless irritating and unproductive hours filling out and transmitting additional federal paperwork.
Insurance companies largely supported ObamaCare because it would require all Americans to buy their product under penalty of law, but ObamaCare’s requirement that insurers cover higher costs without raising prices puts a noose around insurers’ necks — and while they deserve their predicament, the rest of us don’t deserve to be shuttled into government-run health care after the private insurance market’s inevitable collapse.
ObamaCare is causing insurance companies to buy up medical clinics and doctors’ practices so that they can manage doctors more closely and thereby comply with ObamaCare’s myriad of mandates, restrictions, and requirements, while doctors are selling their practices to hospitals — all of which would mean longer lines, more impersonal treatment, and less patient choice.
The truly effective way to lower health-care costs — and to increase fairness at the same time — is to allow all Americans to deduct their full health-care costs (not just their insurance costs) from both their income and payroll taxes, thereby leveling the playing field between those with employer-provided insurance (whose taxes wouldn’t change) and those who purchase insurance on the open market (who would no longer be the only ones taxed on income used to purchase health care). Not only would this actually bring down health costs — while ObamaCare would raise them — without increasing the size or reach of the federal government — while ObamaCare would increase these dramatically — but it would foster adult self-reliance and self-respect, not childlike dependence encouraged by a paternalistic government.
The Massachusetts health-care experiment foreshadows the almost inevitable results under ObamaCare: rising health costs, insurers struggling to stay in business (with the government poised to take over), increased wait-times to see doctors, and a shrinking numbers of doctors willing to accept new patients — except that, under ObamaCare, relying on the federal bailout money that has kept the Massachusetts program afloat won’t be an option.