By Philip Klein,American spectator
Obama is sneaking through Socialized Medicine
While until this point most of the health care focus has been on the Senate side,today the House Democrats released a draft of their own plan. I just read through the outline,though you can check out the full 850 pages here. The short version is that there’s a reason that liberals like it —it reads like their Christmas wish list. The trouble is,that it doesn’t explain how Democrats expect to pay for the legislation. And if the Congressional Budget Office’s valuation of the various Senate bills is any indication,the price tag will be off the charts. Okay,so here are more details.
Most significantly,the House bill includes a government plan at a time when there’s an emerging consensus that there’s not enough votes to get one through the Senate. House Democrats claim that the plan would be “self-sustaining —financed only by its premiums”and thus be on a “level playing field”to compete with private insurers. Of course,in real life,we have to assume that the government plan will ultimately have access to general government revenues if it’s in any danger of failing. A good example is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Though they operated as private companies,they benefited from the implicit backing of government,which allowed them to become the dominate players mortgage market. While the companies’Democratic defenders brushed aside conservative critics who claimed it was in effect a government enterprise,when push came to shove,government did step in to bail out the companies because they had a piece of a majority of mortgages in America. When private insurers can’t make a profit they go out of business. But who in reality thinks the government plan will be allowed to fold if it’s losing money? Is government going to close a plan that provides health insurance to tens of millions of Americans or is it going to pump general revenues into saving it? Anybody who is being intellectually honest knows the answer to that. Private insurers trying to compete against a government plan would be like a gambler trying to beat the house —over time,the house always wins.