It is a wealth transfer scheme. High rates, offset by subsidies for those the government determines deserve the subsidies. The rest pay through the nose.
The other dimension of the wealth transfer is the creation and funding of new government bureaucracies to administer the system and provide grant funding to favored progressive nonprofits, advocacy groups, academics, and consultants for a never ending series of expensive studies. These studies and projects do nothing but line the pockets of people like Gruber and Cass Sunstein who continue to think of ways to exert more control over the population. The bureaucracies themselves siphon billions of dollars off the top to fund the salaries and benefits of bureaucrats who contribute nothing to improved health or real cost reduction.
The only way to control costs in such a system is to reduce demand. This is accomplished by driving costs so high the elderly cannot afford care and will forego care thereby hastening end of life. If these collective decisions to reduce demand don’t do the job, the death panels, and regulations directing specific treatment for conditions at various stages of the life cycle, will do the job.
Effectively all that has been accomplished is layering billions of dollars of additional cost on an already bloated system and changing the way the costs are allocated.
Well said.
And the gov’t control inhibits new procedures and ways of delivering healthcare, that could both improve it and drive down costs.