Let's stipulate upfront that I could be wrong. We will all be much better off if I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. Let us all make sure that Mark is Wrong!!
That said, let's understand how monumental the challenge will be to repeal, reform or replace Obamacare, the Frankenstein monster of health care reform that promises to transform the United States' top-tier system of medical services into a Soviet-style muddle of inefficiency and injustice, pain and death.
Americans increasingly are alarmed as they learn what Congress has wrought with the passage of President Barak Obama's reform plan. The stealthily approved 2,400-page legislative monstrosity effectively will bring most of U.S. health care under direct government control in the short term, with the clear intent of bringing complete Big Brother control in the long run.
Conservative and libertarian think tanks have cranked up opposition. Politicians are making headlines bashing the new law. Tea parties are almost tipsy with rage. Prognosticators predict vengeance will be exacted at polling places in November, maybe even resulting in control of one or both houses of Congress wrested from Democrats.
But neither these intellectual nor emotional responses are likely to undo Obamacare in any significant way.
Let's stipulate a few more things: Obamacare will remake virtually the nation's entire health care system based on the lie that drastic action was needed to provide coverage for the uninsured. In reality, the willfully uninsured amount to about 10 million – 3 percent – of the nation's 300 million residents. Many of those identified as "uninsured," for instance, qualify for MediCal, but have not applied. That leaves a tiny fraction actually lacking affordable health care coverage, but it's been illegal since 1986 to turn even them away from hospitals for emergency care, as Pacific Research Institute President Sally Pipes explains in her new book "The Truth About Obamacare."
To cure this relatively minor problem, people will be forced to buy insurance, even if they don't need it. Insurance companies will be forced to sell coverage, even if it means their economic ruin. Employers will be forced to provide coverage or pay $2,000 fines per worker. Taxpayers will be forced to subsidize coverage for the relatively well-off, and 159 spanking new government boards, commissions and agencies will be set up to run the show at a conservatively estimated 10-year cost of $2.5 trillion.
Don't be fooled. The clear goal ultimately is to remove health care from the private sector and put it in the hands of omnipotent government bureaucracies, czars and politicians, under the banner of assuring equal health care outcomes for all. Don't confuse the goal with what actually happens, as Thomas Sowell would say.
There are better ways, including moving from third-party paying systems anchored to employers and the government to a portable private-ownership health insurance market; providing ala carte coverage rather than broad mandated coverage and permitting insurance to be sold across state lines.
Nevertheless, the reality is that people like to get something for less than it costs them. They like even more getting something for nothing. And although there is no free lunch, when revenue-raising is diffused and confusing, but the benefits are identifiable and specific, people act as if it doesn't really cost them anything. The perception is that lunch actually is free.
Obamacare taps into this lust for unjust gain in a big way. And Democrats and the president have done so shrewdly, a point conceded by experts from two of the nation's foremost free-market think tanks, PRI's Ms. Pipes and Robert Moffitt, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, both of whom met recently with the Register's Editorial Board.
The alleged "benefits" of Obamacare will begin soon – expanded Medicaid and mandated coverage, among them. The full bill for these benefits won't come due until later, in some cases many years later. Almost never will the entire country simultaneously feel the entire pain of paying for what the government is doing. Obamacare segments the costs, which fragments the opposition by imposing separate levies on employers, individuals, pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment manufacturers, even punitive 40-percent taxes on those who still buy gold-plated insurance coverage and, incredibly, a 10-percent excise tax on tanning salons.
"The people must feel an evil before they can see it," George Washington said long before Medicare, Medicaid or Obamacare.
The reality is that Obamacare necessarily will have the same evil effects of Britain's and Canada's socialized systems. There will be shortages and rationing. Quality of care will diminish. Inevitably, doctors will close their practices. Innovation in treatments, new devices and wonder drugs will be stymied.
But as outrage mounts, the targeted taxes make for splintered opposition. How do you mount a broad-based campaign against a narrowly targeted tax, such as the one on medical device makers?
That's why America is likely to be slowly bled to death by our nationalized healers. Like George Washington in the hands of the health care providers of his day who thought it helpful to drain blood from the sick, Americans will become increasingly light-headed, faint, then dead, as the system figuratively bleeds them from their present, adequate health care while at the same time draining their pocketbooks.
I want to be wrong. But how likely is it that a broad enough consensus will emerge to do much other than tweak the grotesque features of the Frankenstein monster?
Repeal it? What politician will risk his career by taking away "benefits" that voters imagine they gained from Obamacare? Reform it? When in history has the political class fixed something they've created without adding more to it instead of subtracting from it? For those who imagine Republicans on white horses will save them from Obamacare, remember it was the most-recent GOP president who presided over, not the contraction, but the greatest expansion of federalized health care in four decades by granting more Medicare drug coverage.
In our Editorial Board meetings with the Heritage Foundation and the Pacific Research Institute health care experts, everyone in the room acknowledged these difficulties. The most plausible fallback among our visiting experts seemed to be, "Well, at least a Republican Congress can choke off funding to implement Obamacare."
Maybe. But that approach works only as long as Republicans retain control – provided they can even get control in November. Then there's the George W. Bush factor. Who's to say a new Republican Congress won't fund even more of the parts of Obamacare their constituencies clamor for? So-called "conservative" senior citizens reliant on Medicare come to mind.
It seems, at least to this writer, much more plausible that the government will increase Medicare spending (which Obamacare already reduces? will reduce to shift more coverage to nonseniors), than to expect government to roll back new, tax-financed coverage for middle-age Americans – especially, when all it takes is a few more billions in deficit spending. When's that ever been a deterrent?
"Government programs, once launched, never disappear," Ronald Reagan told us. "Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth."
The income tax was limited to 7 percent when enacted in 1916. How'd that work out? Do you know any senior willing to forgo Medicare coverage? How about Social Security, which, incidentally, began as a 2 percent tax? Does anyone you know return those checks to the government? In fact, across the board, beneficiaries of these socialist programs, deluded into thinking they are free lunches, demand more, not less.
Repeal, reform or replace Obamacare? I hope I'm wrong, but it's not likely.
By MARK LANDSBAUM
Register editorial writer
Contact the writer: mlandsbaum@ocregister.com or 714-796-5025
Should we be foolish enough to consider Amnesty, let us remember that: Amnesty Means Massive Medicaid Costs
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