Obama care: The Daily Horoscope of Policy

Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, I noticed something about Obama’s style of oration (and I’m not the only one). He has sweet, flowery, and yes, powerful words, but they are devoid of substance. His locution is very much in the vein of the daily newspaper horoscopes, which are so vague that they can apply to just about any reader–depending on how the reader interprets it. Obama care is everyone’s everything.

He has stated, correctly, that people on all sides of the issue agree that the health care system in this country is in shambles and needs to change. But adding more regulation is no change at all. In fact, moving toward socialized health care is exactly what we’ve been doing for decades.

The problem in the public discourse is that consistent meddling of regulations in America’s system of providing medical care has created such a tangled web of perverse incentives, subsidies, and unintended consequences that most people in this country actually believe that we don’t already have a government run health care system.

In his article Cato scholar Michael F. Cannon argues that despite our reliance on private health care providers, the US health system has the distinguishing features of a socialist economy: that is government controls decisions about what individuals produce, consume, and the terms of exchange.

They are wrong.Things are bad. But more government involvement in medical care will not improve matters. For those who think government will do a better job providing care for patients, I challenge you to walk into the DMV, US passport office, courthouse, or any other government run service provider and then ask yourself, is this how you’d like your doctor’s office to be?

Tagged as: Healthcare, unintended consequences