Barack Obama’s Health Care Death Trap

Obama was pimping his health care debacle today.  Yay.

OBAMA: If you’re a small-business person; if the insurance that’s being offered is something you can’t afford; if you want to shop for a better price, then you can go to this exchange, this marketplace, and you can — look, OK, this is how much this plan costs; this is how much that plan costs; this is what the coverage is like; this is what fits for my family.

As one of those options, for us to be able to say, here’s a public option that’s not profit-driven, that can keep down administrative costs, and that provides you good, quality care for a reasonable price as one of the options for you to choose, I think that makes sense.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t that drive private insurance out of business?

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

What an arrogant, spiteful prick.

First of all, Obama believes that the public plan can compete with private insurers, or he wouldn’t be doing it.  So he’s taking a sarcastic swipe at the private sector here.  He’s deriding them for being “profit-driven.”  As if the government isn’t.

Second of all, the whole point of public insurance is to destroy private insurance.  By offering a guaranteed plan to anyone who is uninsured, which is what he apparently wants to do, any employer who no longer wants to carry the expense of providing health care to its employees can drop it.  And those people will join up with the public plan.  Fewer customers for the private sector means the private insurers go out of business, driving more people to the public plan, and so on.

He’s constantly whining about the cost of health care in the country.  Today his beef was that soon, as a country, we’ll be spending 1 out of every 5 dollars on health care.  I don’t really understand why that’s bad.  Expensive stuff is worth it if you get a good value in return, and that’s what we get in this country.  Canadians come here for medical care that the Canadian government won’t provide.  That alone should send up warning flags.  But even if it is unnecessarily expensive, how does a government guarantee of health coverage reduce costs?  Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are going bankrupt.  Those are government welfare programs.  They’re completely out of control.  If those were run profitably and efficiently, we might have some confidence in the ability of the government to run something.  But they’re not, so we shouldn’t expect anything better from Obamacare.

Let’s think in economic terms for a second.  When demand increases for a service and the supply stays the same, prices go up.  This is a fundamental economic truth.  Is the President really suggesting that giving health coverage to 45 million new people (including illegal aliens, of course) without a massive increase in the number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medical equipment won’t increase the cost of health care?  The only way to do that would be to have government bureaucrats set price controls.  Price controls would reduce the ability of drug companies, hospitals, doctors and equipment manufacturers to make a profit, meaning they’d do less of what they do today, or stop doing it altogether.  Fewer practitioners try to accommodate more patients would also mean rationing health care. It would mean lines and waiting periods before getting tests and surgeries.  It would mean denying surgeries to the elderly that they have access to today, simply because it makes no sense from the government’s perspective to help them.  It would mean women getting less access to mammograms.  It would mean less access to colonoscopies.  It would mean more cancer.  Even though more people would technically be covered, the quality of health care in the country would have to decrease.

Public health care will quite literally kill people.  And Barack Obama is doing everything he can to kill the profit motive that effectively keeps people alive today.