If the definition of insanity involves doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, Democrat Senator Max Baucus is as crazy as a rat in a barrel.
The health care plan he announced yesterday incorporates the very features that have doomed every state-level universal coverage plan. Devon Herrick provides a conspicuous example:
The Baucus plan includes many of the same elements implemented in the Massachusetts mandated health plan, which is now suffering from massive cost overruns for the state and escalating premium costs for consumers.
This is exactly what has happened every time this economically illiterate strategy has been attempted. Nonetheless, many people who ought to know better by now are taking this seriously.
Even Kevin, MD seems to believe this plan will be good for primary care despite the fact that such strategies have exacerbated the PCP shortage everywhere they have been tried.
Again, Massachusetts provides an illustrative example. All kinds of people signed for the new government-subsidized plan, but the reimbursement rates were too low to attract PCPs. The result?
Many newly insured patients have been unable to find doctors willing to treat them under the new reimbursement levels.
And “budget neutral” wealth redistribution from specialists to PCPs won’t fix that problem. It will simply move the physician shortage to whatever specialty gets cut.
It doesn’t matter how much lip service Baucus and others give to the cause of saving primary care or providing universal coverage. You can’t repeal the laws of economics by government fiat.
I guess the bright side of this idiocy is that Baucus and the people who now control our government will prove once and for all that they are unable to learn from experience.
Maybe that will cause the voters to give them the bum’s rush—-again.
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