President Obama has repeatedly assured us that the private health insurance system is safe under his reform plans, but that he wants a public policy to serve as competition to the private plans as a way of keeping costs down. But that is camoflauge. It seems clear that the point of reform is to kill private health care.
The House bill proves it. As written, the legislation would make it all but impossible for companies to create innovative new policies once the health care reform law goes into effect. From the Investor’s Business News editorial busting the scam:
It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal…It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states: “Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
Actually, that would not outlaw private coverage, but would cause it to whither it on the vine since it would prevent companies from creating new policies unencumbered by new onerous government regulations making it impossible to keep costs down, as this Heritage Foundation blog points out. In the end, the effect of the bill is to create a public mandate via the back door.
Some of these interpretations are controversial–which is precisely why we need the time to sort it all out. That Obama wants to deny us that time should set the alarm bells ringing off the decibel chart.
The more we learn about what is in the 1000-page + bill, the more it becomes clear that we are being pushed into a UK or Canadian style system, albeit in slow motion. It is urgent that the train be slowed so that we can create proper and needed reform, without destroying a system that for the vast majority of our citizens is the best in the world.
July 17th, 2009 | 12:58 pm
[...] the AMA endorsed the House version of Obama care, which as I pointed out yesterday, would spell the death knell for private health insurance (did the endorsers have time to read the 1000 + page bill?) and institute a utilitarian oversight [...]
July 17th, 2009 | 8:08 pm
Public plan , private plan. Which is really better.
Theoretical opinions aside, One way to gauge how the US health care system stacks up against other countries is to ask citizens of each county what they think of their system.
Harris conducted a poll in 2008 to answer that question
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=927
Not surprising that 33 % of Americans believe that the American system “has so much wrong with it that we need to completely rebuild it”.
Only 12% of Americans thought their health care system was working well.
In Britain, where they have an “evil public health care system” only 16% of the Brits felt their system needed overhauling.
In fact the 58% of the Brits and 70% of the French are so enamored with their public system that they feel theirs is the “envy of the world”.
I’m not sure it is , but you aren’t going to find anywhere near that many Americans who feel their private “for profit” free market health care system is anything to crow about.
July 19th, 2009 | 11:49 pm
Gee I thought government was for things like having a military, roads, bridges, a justice system, schools, libraries, elected officials, legislatures, law enforcement, public buildings, tax collection, and congressional junkets. And that people are supposed to be free to run their own lives. What next? Is it going to cook and clean for us ? We don’t need the government to “fix the health care system.” There isn’t even supposed to BE a “health care system,” and that’s where the fallacy begins, and the fallacy of a “health care system” began with insurance companies that turned medicine from a profession into a business and people into craven fearful unthinking sheep who are willing to participate in the insurance system, hoping that if they pay something, and let their premiums get pooled with everybody else’s, if they need what they’re paying for they’ll get in return what actually costs much more than they’re actually paying, on others’ dime. Now ask me why every time I go to the store and have to wait while some fool is buying lottery tickets I’m infuriated. We’ve lost the freedom not to have to live in the middle of a bunch of morons.
July 19th, 2009 | 11:54 pm
It’s just unAmerican. Why do we have to be like Canada or France or what used to be England? We’re not those countries, we’re us. Or at least used to be. This is really unhealthy. It sounds of loss of identity and self, boundary issues, the works. Do they want to be us? Are they changing over to be like us? Can’t we just let them be as they are and be ourselves and respect and appreciate the differences and make our own decisions?
July 19th, 2009 | 11:58 pm
Well I guess not, if we elected a this guy who behaves as if when in Rome do as the Romans do every time he goes anywhere, even if it means bowing, and thereby disrespecting our own tradition, and his wife doesn’t respect the tradition of another country enough to keep her hands off the Queen of England. Meanwhile England didn’t even have the guts and respect for their own tradition to raise hell about it, and we want to be like them now?
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