Tangled words
They sound smooth and authoritative when Barack Obama speaks them. And people who have little to no understanding of the complex issues underlying them, believe him. He’s so…..self-assured, among other things.
But as Rich Lowry calls it at NRO, it is “exceptionally brazen sophistry”.
Pres. Barack Obama knows health-care policy. Give him an hour and a half to hold forth, as ABC News obligingly did at a town-hall meeting, and he will invariably impress with his fluidity.
This makes it all the more remarkable that he often appears unable to understand how his health-care program threatens private insurance. At a recent press conference, Obama argued that the very notion of it doesn’t compute: “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.â€
And he thus fools some of the people some (okay, maybe all) of the time. But plenty of experts are warning Congress and the public about the dangers of this plan as it is.
Private insurers are at a disadvantage vis-à -vis the federal government because they don’t have the power of the government to dictate prices to doctors and hospitals. That’s what Medicare does, and why it pays less for health services than private insurers.
Surely Obama understands the competitive advantage that this confers on the government. If the public option in ObamaCare underpays providers in a similar fashion, it will charge cheaper premiums than private insurance. Employers will dump their employees into the public plan, and a massive “crowding out†will occur. The respected health-care research firm The Lewin Group estimates as many as 119 million people could migrate from private insurance to the government plan, whether Obama considers it logical or not.
Follow the logic…..that of the Lewin Group, of the Heritage Foundation, among others. This much is clear:
Obama wants to pretend that getting to universal coverage is an essentially costless, win-win proposition, when it will come at enormous expense and disrupt the insurance of millions of Americans happy with their health care.
Everyone wants health care reform. The president wants dialogue, or so he says. These people are eager to engage him on it.
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Let’s go back in time. A simpler time when we had less problems, October of 1995. Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House. Ole Newt made a speech before the Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference… He spoke about privatizing Medicare. This is what he said,
“Now let me talk a little bit about Medicare. Let me start at the vision level so you understand how radically different we are and why it’s so hard for the press corps to cover us.
Medicare is the 1964 Blue Cross plan codified into law by Lyndon B. Johnson, and it is about what you’d — I mean, if you all went out in the marketplace tomorrow morning and said, “Hi, I’ve got a 1964 Blue Cross plan,” I’ll let you decide how competitive you’d be. But I don’t think very.
So what we’re trying to do, first of all, is say, O.K., here is a government monopoly plan. We’re designing a free-market plan. Now, they’re very different models. You know, we tell Boris Yeltsin, “Get rid of centralized command bureaucracies. Go to the marketplace.”
O.K., what do you think the Health Care Financing Administration is? It’s a centralized command bureaucracy. It’s everything we’re telling Boris Yeltsin to get rid of. Now, we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don’t think that that’s politically smart, and we don’t think that’s the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it’s going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it — voluntarily.”
What Gingrish was saying was that if private health care orgs could compete with government plans, the government plans would be so cumbersome and seem so bloated and bureaucratic that the public would gravitate to the public plan.
Fast forward to 2009. The same people who were so sure that government could not compete with private healthcare orgs because of inefficiency are now crying that the government has an unfair advantage! Government plans aren’t effective and are outdated compared to big business models, yet big business can’t compete with them. To quote that great American, Ricky Ricardo, “Lucy ‘splain!”
The biggest fear most folks should have about their present plan is that if things don’t change, their employer will not be able to afford to carry them, and they’ll be forced to foot the bill on their own. If you don’t think that is expensive, when you get laid off, look at the COBRA plan you are offered.
What healthcare organizations are really afraid of is that they will not be able to raise rates 3-4 times inflation each year. But I think they and we will survive. In America we pay more for less in healthcare than anywhere else in the world. Call me crazy but I do not think that is the American way.
Obama did make a mistake in so bluntly saying, “If you like you’re current plan, you can keep it.” That speaks more to a man who has, for the most part, always been covered by a public health plan.
He was more accurate to emphasize that if nothing is done to reform the U.S. health care system, individuals may be forced to change health plans anyway. That is the annual reality for anyone with private insurance through an employer. Each year, employers look at the costs of their health benefits programs, and they tweak them. If they offer more than one option to their employees, they may eliminate a high cost choice, requiring employees to switch plans — and maybe providers.
Employers may increase cost sharing for employees, which may lead employees to change plans, and also providers.
Health insurance plans are currently regulated by the states, which adds another layer of uncertainty and enforced change on employees. For instance, if your child is a full-time student in college, he/she will likely be covered under your health plan. But if the child becomes a less than full-time student, they lose coverage, requiring them to either go without insurance or forcing them into the individual health insurance market (which can be expensive, whoever is paying the monthly premium — child or parent).