A Losing Proposition

President Obama has once again made the decisive argument against the Obamacare bills working through Congress. It's amazing that he doesn't realize the damage he's doing to his own cause:

The costs of Medicare and Medicaid will bankrupt this country if we don’t reduce the cost inflation of health care. You’ve got families who can’t get health care because of pre-existing conditions or they bump up against some lifetime cap if a family member gets really ill.

Nothing that the President and Democrats in Congress are proposing will do anything to make Medicare or Medicaid solvent. Both continue to be billions in debt, and will continue to see increasing deficits as Baby Boomers retire and add to the burden already covered in Medicaid.

The President and his fellow Democrats are hoping to expand health insurance to still more people by pushing a government-centric option, which means that the government tab will increase. There is little incentive for the government to cut costs because the government can always fall back and find new sources of revenues in the form of higher taxes or reducing services.

Those states that have already implemented government health insurance have found that higher taxes aren't favored, so rationing of care in the form of reduced services is necessary.

Now, as far as health care goes, I've consistently said I would love the private marketplace to be handling this without any government intervention.The problem is it's not working. What we're seeing is about 14,000 folks lose their health insurance every single day. We are seeing health care inflation go up about twice as fast as regular inflation. Businesses are being crippled by it. Small businesses especially have almost no access to the marketplace because they've got no leverage with insurance companies.

So all we've said is let's keep the private system intact, but let's make sure that people who right now can't get health insurance -- about 46 million -- that they're able to buy into the market. And number two, let's have some consumer protections to make sure that those of us who have health insurance don't end up getting a bad deal because we didn't read the fine print and we think that we have coverage; when we finally get sick and we need it, it turns out that we're vulnerable because insurance companies aren't operating in the interests of their customers.

If this was about getting more poeple covered by insurance, demand that all states allow any other state's approved insurance policies to be purchased. That would automatically improve portability and bring down costs because there would not only be more choice, but people could choose policies that are tailored to their own specific situation, rather than the gold-plated standards pushed by states like New York, New Jersey and California. It is no coincidence that insurance costs are highest in those states, which also happen to have community rating, which causes those in good health to further subsidize the costs of those who aren't in good health.

While President Obama is claiming that private insurers aren't operating in the interests of their customers, he might want to take a closer look at the government health care programs already in existence that are rife with fraud and bureaucratic red tape that result in the Veterans Administration and Indian Health Service providing substandard care. It would be better to fix those first before trying to rejigger the entire health care system.