'Reform' No One Wants to Pay For

Real Clear Politics ^ | 10/17/2009 | Michael Barone

[fiscon1]

The legislative process can also be a learning process, and as Congress considers health care legislation -- the latest act being the Senate Finance Committee's vote in favor of Chairman Max Baucus' bill, or "conceptual language" -- we have been learning something useful. It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health insurance coverage to almost all Americans, but that no one wants to pay for it.

[Need4Truth]

We may be in the process of learning something else. Which is that insurance coverage that further insulates patients from costs results in unanticipated increases in health care spending.

Or it could be that politicians are well aware of this but simply lie about it. Either way, to quote a former president, "government isn't the solution, it is the problem".

[sphinx]

It's really pretty simple. We have a private sector medical and insurance system which is the best in the world. We also have government sector health insurance which ranges from ok to mediocre, and which is bankrupt despite heavy subsidies. And we have too many people who don't have health insurance at all because they earn too much for Medicaid but can't afford/choose not to participate in the private health insurance market.

In addressing this problem, we can try to copy success or subsidize failure. Copying success means moving government sector medicine in the direction of the market and reducing the cost of insurance (tort reform, interstate purchasing, etc.). Democrats oppose this because they are ideologically committed to government control and because they want to condition the public to dependency.

So the dems choose to futher subsidize failure. Their strategy now is to cannibalize what is working in U.S. health care to subsidize what is not. Their first tactical problem is how to shift the blame for reduced standards of care and higher costs onto the insurance industry and providers. Their second problem is how to arrange (and disguise) a parallel, high quality system for themselves and key allies, especially the unions.

I do not believe for a moment that Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, et.al, intent to spend time in line at Medicaid clinics with the rest of us. One way or another, they will be in the nomenklatura system.

[penowa]

It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health insurance coverage to almost all Americans...

ALMOST is the key word here. As Robert Reich admitted, the Democrats want old people to die and do it quickly at the least cost. Once they put the framework in place, they will politicize the heck out of who receives what kind of health care. Gold-plated for Democrat supporters; nothing for those of us who disagree with them.