JOHN STOSSEL DESTROYS OBAMA’S HEALTH CARE PLAN
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In my view, the problem is that most folks are completely ignorant of the basic laws of economics.
I was, too, until late last year when I got interested in it from another angle. I got some texts and started reading. Now my ignorance has been corrected, and I grasp the elements — and it is obvious that there is no way American health care will be the same after the government takes over. Rationing is inevitable. Stossel says the same thing but doesn’t explain why.
There is rationing now, due to cost and supply/demand, but it going to get much worse under goverment care. Innovation will definitely suffer too.
Here is an off topic post, which is a very sad story. Not on point for this post. Choice or mental illness?
That was well worth the 6 minutes to watch.
I’m curious–what specifically about Obama’s “plan” is “destroyed” here?
Grover: The silly notion that we live in the sort of world where we can get everything we want AND have it be “deficit-neutral.”
“The silly notion that we live in the sort of world where we can get everything we want AND have it be ‘deficit-neutral.’”
That’s not what I see in that clip. The clip tells us that Obama wants to nationalize health care and we’ll all end up waiting in line and pulling our own teeth.
So where is this “plan” to nationalize health care? All the current proposals that I’ve seen focus on reforming the insurance system.
Doesn’t it seem obvious that the reform plan is a stalking horse? The president is on record preferring, in principle, a nationalized health care system. His chief advisor on these matters, Tom Daschle, has written a book one of the main arguments of which is that in America that end state will have to be reached incrementally. The current round of reforms bear a striking resemblance to some of the intermediate proposals in Daschle’s book.
If, after all that, you still don’t see it — well, sorry, guess you can’t help the willfully blind.
“Doesn’t it seem obvious that the reform plan is a stalking horse?”
Only to the ideologically stubborn. There’s nothing proposed that even remotely resembles nationalized health care. Instead of insurance reform, Medicare reform, or any sort of approach to health care costs, we’ll get nothing because people are being filled with junk like this Stossel piece. David Gratzer almost single-handedly sank Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign with his bogus statistics about prostate cancer survival rates. The Pacific Institute and the Galen Institute want to scare us away from any sort of reform, insisting that the market works. Well, it isn’t working. People of average means like myself can’t afford dental work, pay huge out-of-pocket expenses even *with* insurance, and are watching their coverage grow increasingly unaffordable and inadequate.
We’ll all have to wait in line! As if we don’t already Tried to see a dermatologist lately? Good luck–three to six month waiting lists. Four days to get my wife into a new family doctor to see to a leg infection, while they “approve” her. Six or seven hours at a small-town emergency room.
We’ve discussed this before. You’re happy with some minimal plan, presumably because you’re young and healthy. I’m 53 years old with pre-existing conditions. Soon my employer-based insurance is going to collapse and the only alternative I’ll have is the private market, which will cost me about $6000 a year for a similar plan–and that’s just for myself. Covering all three of us is a $13,000-a-year proposition. That’s more than a QUARTER of my annual income. And that’s assuming that they’ll even cover issues like recurring basal-cell skin cancers, back problems and other things that are currently in my medical records.
At my age a visit to the doctor is more often than not an event of some magnitude. I frankly don’t know where people who are fighting this reform are getting their health care. Either they don’t need it, or they just ignore their health, or they’re covered by Medicare, which they’re terrified of losing.
It’s very interesting watching these “town hall” videos–older people screaming to keep government out of Medicare (as if that made any sense) while they simultaneously complain that the government can’t do anything right. It’s inane and irrational. Don’t take it away but don’t reform it either, even though the rest of us pay for it.
“If, after all that, you still don’t see it — well, sorry, guess you can’t help the willfully blind.”
Talk about willfully blind… I don’t know how old you are, but I probably won’t be around when you’re 50 and looking at the bills.
I do not favor the policies I do because of how they will affect my own situation. I would like to think it’s because I’m never that solipsistic, but mostly it’s because I realize my health situation is apt to change at any moment, and will certainly change over time — so it would be silly to take a selfish position based on what’s good for me now.
My position is based on what I think is the best possible policy mix given the world in which we live. I’m sorry your family is having trouble affording health care. But what you must come to understand is that there is no solution. There is no way to make health care technologically advanced, excellent, cheap, and universal. Put that thought out of your mind, strangle it, snuff it out. It’s a chimera. Ours is a fallen world, and we cannot reach Paradise by way of public policy.
You should also admit that you cannot possibly know the unintended consequences of the radical sorts of reforms being talked about in Washington. Given that, you would have to acknowledge the prudence in trying to improve the current system in the least destabilizing, least disruptive ways we can.
The reason caution is not the hallmark of the approach being taken by the reformers in DC is, at the risk of belaboring what I have already said I think is obvious, they *want* something *radical*. They want to nationalize health care a la Europe. I have confidence I’m right because they have said so: repeatedly, in public, in print, for many years. It’s a serious commitment on their part. They have, in those very same speeches and books, identified just the sorts of reforms currently under consideration now as half-measures intended to put the country’s health care system on a course of inexorable nationalization.
After all that, if you still doubt they intend to nationalize health care, either you do not take them seriously or you are not serious. I am curious as to which it is.
That’s a pretty high and mighty response. I’m “selfish” and “solipsistic” because I’m in the same boat with tens of millions of other people just like me, and we want a change in the system. We want that change because our experiences with the current system tells us that IT IS NOT WORKING.
I’ll admit that I can’t predict all the unintended consequences of reform. What I *can* predict with some confidence is that 12-20% annual increases in health insurance premiums is unsustainable.
“There is no solution. There is no way to make health care technologically advanced, excellent, cheap, and universal.”
This is *simply not true*. Other countries do it, and do it quite well. Switzerland and Holland do it with a mix of private and public health insurance. Other countries do it with nationalized health care.
“The reason caution is not the hallmark of the approach being taken by the reformers in DC is, at the risk of belaboring what I have already said I think is obvious, they *want* something *radical*.”
So, because some people want radical change, we dare not make any. Frankly, that’s pathetic.
“After all that, if you still doubt they intend to nationalize health care, either you do not take them seriously or you are not serious. I am curious as to which it is.”
Neither, I’m afraid. I’m well aware that there are people who want either a single-payer system, or to nationalize health care altogether. Some day, if enough people want those other things, maybe we’ll get them. Right now there are a lot of people who *don’t* necessarily want those things, but want to see some sort of change in our system. I am one of them and I assure you that I am dead serious about that. You are welcome to your conspiracies and dead-end thinking. I want no part of it.