Health Care BS

In an allusion to Boston’s incompetently executed and egregiously expensive road repair project, today’s WSJ calls Romneycare The New Big Dig:

The Massachusetts nonmiracle ought to be a warning to Washington. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale, with similar promises that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs.

But, as anyone remotely familiar with the fundamentals of health care economics understands, you can’t increase coverage while reducing costs. And Massachussetts has proved it:

One lesson here is that while pledging “universal” coverage is easy, the harder problem is paying for it … Over the coming decade, the expected overruns float in as much as $4 billion over budget.  

So, in a way, Massachussetts has done the country a favor:

We can be thankful that Massachusetts ignored the cost problems that doomed other recent liberal health insurance overhauls in California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Illinois. The Bay State is showing everyone how not to reform health care.

Let’s hope those boneheads in D.C. have enough sense to absorb the obvious lesson.

[HT Kevin,MD]