That said, the basic terms of discussion have become clear. The main question is whether congressional Democrats will be able to include a government-funded health plan to compete with existing programmes. This public plan would have the scale to negotiate with providers and drug companies and would, therefore, set prices for the industry as a whole and set a floor on cost. Republicans oppose the move, regarding it as the first step towards socialisation. A public plan would, on this view, bleed business away from the prvate providers with whom it was ostensibly in competition. That would lead, in turn, to a gradual reduction in quality, with regulation proving less effective than competition at maintaining standards.
President Obama himself has invested too much political capital in reform for nothing to happen. There will be a Bill. It will increase coverage and a victory will be declared. But the escalating cost will have been laid aside as too difficult an issue. It cannot be avoided for ever.
Just print more money.
A government-funded health plan would provide patently unfair competition to private insurance, clearly intended to destroy it.
A non-government-funded (but government-run) health plan would be a not-for-profit outfit, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing that now, so there’s no need for government involvement.
In the meantime, the [i]existing[/i] government-funded health plan — Medicare — remains a bloated, cumbersome, expensive, and rude operation, highly resistant to change and unpopular enough that the government has to force people into it by threatening to cut off their Social Security if they don’t participate in Medicare.
Until Washington can fix Medicare (along with the VA and Indian Affairs hospitals) I shall remain adamantly and utterly opposed to additional government involvement in medical insurance.
I believe that Hawai’i tried universal health care for uninsured children a few years back. After a year, the state was almost broke due to the program, as parents would stop carrying their children as part of their employer health care, saving a few hundred bucks and enrolling them in the state offered plan. The state had to repeal the program.
Is there any reason to suspect that this would go any differently?
I encourage other T19 readers to review the opinion columns discussing government run health care, appearing in today’s Wall Street Journal at wsj.com. One does not need to subscribe to read this article.