Health Care BS

I was reminded of Barack Obama’s deceptively innocuous health care plan when I listened to him describe his “overall policy” on energy and coal-fired power plants in this audio:

If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

In other words, he isn’t going to outlaw coal power plants. He’s just going to make sure they aren’t economically viable. Well, that’s pretty much what he’s got planned for private insurance.

As Grace-Marie Turner explains, Obama wants to create a new taxpayer-funded health coverage program that would compete with private insurance. This would effectively drive private carriers out of business.

Under Obamacare, the government would dictate what benefits private insurers must provide, and who these carriers must cover. This would drive the cost of private insurance even higher than it is now.

Meanwhile, the new public plan would also lose money because of Obama’s benefit mandates and guaranteed issue stipulations, but it would be able to make up its losses with taxpayer subsidies.

In other words, the federal government would have the ability to drive up the cost of private insurance while keeping its own program artificially cheap.

Because of the artificially low premiums that would result, Americans would drop their private insurance (as they have done in the states that offer such plans) and sign up for the cheap public program:

Advocates of government-run healthcare would claim “victory” and demand an expansion of it. Slowly but surely, private insurers would be supplanted by the public program. The new costs would be borne by taxpayers.

So, as with coal, Obama is too smart to come out against private insurance and openly advocate a shift to government-run health care. But he will create an environment in which this result is inevitable.

Is this the change we need?