single payer

Just what IS in those enormous health care bills?

by Michael Fumento on November 4, 2009

in Healthcare

With the House version stacked bigger than Dolly Parton at about 2,000 pages, anybody who says they know for certain is lying. It’s not just the verbiage but how it will be interpreted in the years to come. Still, there’s more than enough to be alarmed enough to want to kill the bills off.
“Rather than overwhelm you with arcane details of each bill,” writes Robert Bidinotti in an engaging and highly annotated essay, “it is more important that you understand in principle what ObamaCare will mean for you and your family.” Going into detail (but not too much), he says they include:

  • Outrageous Costs.
  • Soaring Taxes.
  • Perverse Incentives.
  • Government rationing.
  • Broken promises.

He states:

A single-payer, government-run program of socialized medicine is the stated objective of those who designed this legislative monstrosity—from President Obama, to the vast coalition of unions and advocacy groups, to the congressional leaders who drafted these bills. They explicitly intend to bankrupt the private-insurance marketplace, so that only the government option remains. Far from adding “choice and competion,” then, ObamaCare aims at imposing on us a government health-care monopoly.

Urge your congressman to vote for Dolly Parton instead.

Government health care monopoly–not in consumers’ interests

by Fran Smith on July 9, 2009

in Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

dmvRegina Herzlinger, chair of Harvard Business School, in National Review takes on health care and the Obama Administration’s arguments that a government-run plan would increase competition, provide more choice, and lead to greater cost efficiencies:

But before we get swept away, let us remember that these health-insurance markets would be monopolies run by government, two characteristics that normally do not enhance consumer welfare. Picture the efficiency of your Division of Motor Vehicles, for example.

Also consider government-run monopoly liquor stores. Despite their ability as the single payer to extract better volume discounts from wholesalers than private liquor chains can, their prices are not lower than private stores’. Additionally, they slight consumers through shorter operating hours, inconvenient locations, limited brand availability, and inadequate advertising. By forcing consumers to adjust their shopping habits, they raise prices through loss of time. Although some advocates hope that these features limit liquor consumption, this is not the case.

The results attained by government-run health-insurance markets in Massachusetts and the Netherlands provide equally cautionary evidence: Such markets limit competition, do not control costs, discourage entrepreneurial efforts, and thus cause consumer dissatisfaction.