Health Care BS

Betsy McCaughey suggests some health care questions for tonight’s Presidential debate in Austin. Since Hillary appears to be on the verge of becoming an “also ran,” I’ll focus on three queries relating to Obama’s proposals:

You have said that you will require all parents to have health insurance for their children. What will you do to enforce this law?

This is the question that should be asked about all mandates, including those involving children. Is Obama going to fine parents who don’t comply? Will the Social Service goons descend on them? Obama needs to tell us.

You have pledged to make health insurance “affordable” …. Would you allow Texans (and all of us who live in states with similarly costly insurance requirements) to shop for cheaper insurance outside our own state?

One of the most important contributors to the high cost of health care is the morass of state laws governing the purchase of health insurance and the coverage the plans must provide. Obama’s plan contains no provision for fixing this problem.

Some doctors and hospitals are worried about [your plan] to make electronic record-keeping compulsory. What will be the penalty for a doctor who doesn’t get computerized?

This is another of Obama’s deceptively innocuous proposals. Who could be against modernizing health records? Well, how about the providers who must foot the bill for yet another unfunded mandate? This kind of technology upgrade will be very expensive, particularly if there is some penalty (like medicare payment cuts) for not meeting some arbitrary federal standard.

Questions about the universality of his plan notwithstanding, Obama has been given a mostly free ride from the press and much of the public on his health care proposals. It’s time to start hitting him with the hard questions that any president will have to deal with on this issue.

UPDATE:

I didn’t possess the intestinal fortitude to watch the debate, but the liveblogging makes it pretty clear that no one pressed the above issues. There was a brief and futile riff by Hillary on mandates, but that was pretty much it.  Big surprise.