Freedom always remains the highest social value; without it, all others are destroyed. Still, when attempting to persuade others, it's often helpful to state the costs - dollar and regulative - of current and proposed Federal insanity.
Michelle Malkin outlines some here.
The administrative costs and spillover spending effects will be astronomical. Look at existing federal programs. In 1966, the Office of Management and Budget put the total taxpayer costs for Medicare at $64 million. In 2011, Medicare costs are expected to balloon to nearly $500 billion. Medicaid cost $770 million in 1966. By 2011, that program will cost taxpayers an estimated $264 billion. The Virginia-based Council for Affordable Health Insurance estimated that the administrative expenses of both programs last decade were 66% higher than those of private sector health insurance companies.
And we ain’t seen nothing yet. House Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee sifted through their opponents’ 1,018-page health care bill and released a dizzying flow chart detailing the Byzantine bureaucracy Obamacare would create. Washington would become the home of at least 31 new federal programs, agencies, and commissions to oversee the government-run health insurance regime.
Because 32 “czars” isn’t enough, the Democrat plan would add another overlord to the Obama administration. The new “Health Choices Commissioner” would helm the new “Health Choices Administration” (Section 141 of the bill) – separate from the already existing Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service.
Because the government has done such a boffo job managing the near-bankrupt Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, the Democrats have proposed creating a “Public Health Investment Fund” and a “Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund.” The latter would create a “transparent and functional marketplace for individuals and small employers to comparison shop among private and public insurers.”...
And, shades of Anthem...! (the Ayn Rand novel):
To coordinate all the new bureaucrats, Obamacare would create a new “Health Care Program Integrity Coordinating Council” to “to coordinate strategic planning among federal agencies involved in health care integrity and oversight.”
2 comments:
IOW, health care/insurance would become the new dumping ground for all those degreed children of privilege (politicians and high-level bureaucrats) who can't cut it in real life, hence the new, unionized, unaccountable bureaucracies.
Adam-Smith-style Capitalism is a better idea.
Perhaps the time will come for U.S. to finally try it, once the Obama regime has dealt the final, fatal blow to the system decades of socialism and corporatism have already crippled beyond recovery!
Federal programs always cost more than when they are sold to the gullible taxpayer as a solution to a social ill. Not surprisingly, the very same political elites that want to drive us into a public health care plan are very much against the same plan for themselves. Classy.
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