Good Intentions Aren't Enough with Health Care ReformRead the former governor's latest opinion piece unabridged here.
Now that the Senate Finance Committee has approved its health care bill, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at the long term consequences should its provisions be enacted into law.
The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. [1] It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.
However, the maximum fine for those who refuse to purchase health insurance is $750. [2] Even factoring in government subsidies, the cost of purchasing a plan is much more than $750. The result: many people, especially the young and healthy, will simply not buy coverage, choosing to pay the fine instead. They’ll wait until they’re sick to buy health insurance, confident in the knowledge that insurance companies can’t deny them coverage. Such a scenario is a perfect storm for increasing the cost of health care and creating an unsustainable mandate program.
Those driving this plan no doubt have good intentions, but good intentions aren’t enough. There were good intentions behind the drive to increase home ownership for lower-income Americans, but forcing financial institutions to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them had terrible unintended consequences. We all felt those consequences during the financial collapse last year. Unintended consequences always result from top-down big government plans like the current health care proposals, and we can’t afford to ignore that fact again...
- JP
I worked for the feds for 32 years, and don't want them anywhere near the health care for over 300 million people. They can't even efficiently run a health care system for 20 million veterans, all of them adults, 90 percent of them men. What makes anyone think that they can run a system for over 300 million, more than half of whom would be women and children. If anyone thinks that the feds are up to the task, they should go spend the day at their local VA Medical Center.
ReplyDeleteShe calmly, meticulously, uncovers the disastrous consequences of socialized medicine, reiterates several free-market good ideas, and just happens to drop in several of Obama’s broken promises for good measure. Man, she's good!
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