As health care becomes politicized — with basic economic principles being denied — the Obama administration considers coercing states to issue price-controls on health insurers, by threatening to withhold tax revenue to states if they don’t. This would effectively leave private insurers with only two options: ration care, or go out of business.
“Physician Hospitals of America — an organization based in Sioux Falls, S.D.– said the reform law will ‘virtually destroy’ more than 60 hospitals that were under development and leaves few prospects for the future of the industry. ‘Patients across the country should be outraged that, at a time when the government is supposedly attempting to increase access to care, it has chosen to stop the growth of many of the best hospitals in the country,’ said Molly Sandvig, PHA’s executive director.”
The history of federal health-care programs shows that costs have surpassed estimates by tremendous margins. The exception has been the Medicare prescription drug program, which has controlled costs by injecting the sort of private competition and choice that ObamaCare would dramatically diminish.
Robert Samuelson writes that, when it comes to selling ObamaCare, the “disconnect between what Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it.”
As the Congressional Budget Office has said, ObamaCare would raise the cost of health insurance — it would raise the average family’s annual premiums by $2,100 in the individual market — but the mainstream press and the Obama administration have responded to this condemning news with a mix of yawns and cheers.
ObamaCare eschews the one proven way to cut health costs — so, while the price of ObamaCare would be higher federal spending, increased deficits, and diminished liberty, what Americans would get in return would be higher health costs and reduced quality of care.
ObamaCare would increase costs, increase deficits, and reduce the quality of health care — and outside of President Obama and other Democrats who are ideologically driven to expand federal power and control, no one wants it.
Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan provides a concise summary of the true costs of Obamacare at the bipartisan health summit, on February 25, 2010.
ObamaCare is even more deplorable than the Senate process that produced it, and every Democratic Senator effectively cast the deciding vote.
At the health-care summit, Democrats tried hard to claim that there’s basic agreement between Republicans (none of whom voted for ObamaCare in either chamber) and Democrats (279 of whom voted for ObamaCare) on health-care issues, but in truth there is a canyon separating the two sides over the question of whether decisions should be made by the American people or by Washington.