Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 2:45:16 PM
If Barack Obama had his druthers, he told an Albuquerque audience yesterday, he’d have a single-payer system for managing health care.
Unfortunately, the transition would throw a lot of HMO employees out of
work, so Obama says we have to fix the present system instead.
Can we breathe easier, knowing Obama doesn’t want to overthrow the American system of medicine? Not really:
“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need
relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s
make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more
efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”
“Other ways”, huh? Perhaps Obama means that a better use of
free-market principles for routine health care, using pre-tax HSAs and
insurance for catastrophic coverage would force providers to compete as
they do in non-covered elective medicine such as cosmetic surgery.
Maybe he means that reducing government mandates and reining in
malpractice awards could assist in lowering the overall cost of
medicine to insurers and consumers.
But I rather doubt it.
I’m not sure what success anyone can find from socialist policies
that continues to encourage visions of government-run Utopias, but all
of the evidence runs to the contrary. Even the architect of Canada’s
government monopoly on health care now advocates for private-sector providers.
The UK’s NHS has horror stories galore about lack of responsiveness and
capacity for both medical and dental care. In the US, one need only
look at the VA to see how well a single-payer system would operate.
And yet, Barack Obama still thinks that Utopia can be realized through government-run societies.
Ever hear of Claude Castonguay? Maybe not, but those who follow the
health-care debate have certainly heard of his creation. Castonguay
fathered the single-payer system in Quebec that locked out private
insurance, the one which advocates of nationalized health care in the
US love to cite as a success story. However, Castonguay has reached a far different conclusion about his creation