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Liberals Bailing Out on Obamacare
By Kyle | July 20, 2009
When you’ve lost such a staunch ally as Jacob Weisberg at Slate, you know you’re in trouble — and Weisberg has a devastating critique of the catastrophically bungled Obama health care plan. In January, I would have guessed there was maybe a 10 percent chance Obama wouldn’t get what he wanted. Now it gets harder to find Obamacare supporters every day. Says Weisberg:
The premise of [Sen. Ron] Wyden’s bipartisan bill is that we should move away from job-based insurance. It would do this by converting the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance into a tax credit and requiring that individuals use it to buy insurance. Wyden’s bill would achieve universal coverage, apply meaningful cost controls, and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, pay for itself within a few years. It’s going nowhere. Instead, Democrats are poised to pass legislation that spends an additional $1 trillion, fails to restrain spending, and shores up an anachronistic employer-based system. I guess you could call it a uniquely American solution.
Topics: Barack Obama, Politics |
July 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Instapundit had a good solution. Take three Democrat plans and two Republican plans. Try them in five states. The one that works best we implement. Of course, trial and error and such, that’s for tools in the real world, not politicians with lobbyists to feed.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
That kind of trial and error is unnecessary and makes the same mistake as socialists in assuming that one plan is necessary for everybody. If insurance were unhooked from employment by the simple expedient of either taxing all money paid for health insurance premiums, or taxing none of it, insurance companies would then have to compete for the business of *individuals,* not companies who decide for their employees what coverage they will get, charge them for it, and then call it a “benefit.” Then companies could offer drastically different plans to different individuals and families, such as “catastrophe-only” coverage under which you paid rates similar in scale to your car insurance and paid the doctor yourself every time you decided to go in for a cold, flu, ache or pain. The insurance would only kick in if you needed surgery, hospitalization, or some other hyper-expensive course of treatment.
Tax it all or tax none and make private plans truly competitive and affordable. One-plan-for-all, whether Obamacare or some other solution, is silly, restrictive, and needless.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
And don’t forget tort reform as a large factor in making medical care more affordable.
Since that would cross a large source of Democratic party funding there’s little or no chance of that happening.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
The only real solution is the government has to pull back from healthcare entirely. If they want to provide subsidy to private plans to insure the impoverished fine, paying the premiums for the private plan would be far cheaper than insuring them. Medicare and Medicaid both have to be phased out entirely and the payments made to physicians need to be attached to the market value of the service and not the arbitrary Medicare Fee Schedule.
Also discrimination laws must be repealled so that insurers are free to charge people based on their risk (as is the case in auto insurance and all other insurances except for health) and insurance groups should be based off of risk categories not employment. Doing this would dramatically reduce the cost of health insurance to 90% of the population who are in average to good health but would raise prices on those who were “high risk”, the government could subsidize these premiums if their economic circumstances qualified. The insurers could then place policy escalators that encouraged people to improve their risk category and obviously the financial penalty of higher premiums would also provide incentive just as high auto insurance premiums discourage reckless driving. This could all be verified through insurer mandated checkups which would be required to maintain the policy.
There are so many things that could be done that could with relative ease improve our nation’s healthcare but none of them will happen because all of them require the government to relinquish rather than expand control. Kyle you need to hook me up with the Post so I can get them to publish all of the things that those of us in the industry have put together. The government and MSM will not give us a voice to get the info out.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:31 am
It’s going to be tough sledding to pass a bill that Congress and Federal employees are exempt from. Or at least it would be if the media were willing to mention this exception…
July 21st, 2009 at 11:13 am
But Obama’s so cool!!
Hope and change!
Remember those good ol’ days, when experience and maturity didn’t matter.
July 21st, 2009 at 1:42 pm
His inexperience really is showing and badly but it’s not all his fault. The Liberal wing of the Democratic party has gotten completely out of control. The fact that a Senate resolution requiring all members to actually read the legislation they were voting on can’t get passed really says something.