As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, most Americans are happy with the quality of their health care as well as their insurance coverage. In fact, more than 50% are OK with the cost.
But our new masters are not interested in the opinions of the great unwashed. They want to kill the private health care industry. Here’s how they’re going to do it:
Create a public plan that will compete with your private insurance company.
Use your tax dollars to subsidize the premiums and coverage of the public plan.
Mandate the benefits that your private insurance must provide, without providing the subsidy.
Tax the benefits associated with your private or employer-based plan.
The Heritage blog highlights a study by the Lewin Group that shows how this morass of perverse incentives will affect the private health insurance market:
At Medicare payment levels we estimate that about 131.2 million people would enroll in the public plan. The number of people with private health insurance would decline by 119.1 million people. This would be a two-thirds reduction in the number of people with private coverage (currently 170 million people).
In other words, Democrats and the Obama administration plan to herd you off of your private coverage much the same way native Americans once herded buffalo off cliffs.
And, once they have you in their clutches, and have the private insurance market safely buried, then the rationing will start. There will be universal access … to a waiting list.
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