Obamacare: A Nightmare in the Making

It amazes me that there are still people who think that the government can improve their lives over the long-term by creating additional costly bureaucracies. Do you really think medical care is going to be better with the government more involved in supplying or controlling it? Then consider this: Would you prefer a public defender or a private attorney to defend you in a criminal case?

You could argue that a public defender is better than no attorney at all, and you would probably be right. You could also argue, correctly in most cases, that public medical care is better than no medical care at all. But, if you try to use this argument to defend the need for Obamacare you are way off-base. Public medical care is already available. Obamacare is being pushed because the currently available public medical care is not as good as the currently available private medical care. That is, the Obamacare proponents are admitting that public medical care is not as good as the private medical care available to those who can afford it, and they want to remake the medical care system so that this disparity is removed.

So, the real question is: How will Obamacare remove the disparity? Will it bring the public medical care up to the level of the private medical care? Will it bring the private medical care down to the level of the public medical care? Or, will they meet somewhere in the middle? This leaves out the worst-case outcome -- that Obamacare turns out to be worse than the currently available public medical care, which I think is a very real possibility.

Obama is not saying that our private system is not providing good medical care; he is saying that some people can't afford it. He is saying that the public system is not providing good medical care to those who can't afford the private care. That is, he is saying the private system is working and the public system is not working. So, he wants to replace the private system with a new public system. Go figure.

I want to emphasize that Obamacare is more concerned with leveling the availability of medical care than with improving the quality of medical care. There are three ways to level something: (1) grind off all the high points down to the lowest low points and discard the excess material, (2) bring in extra material and fill in the low points up to the highest point, or (3)  chop off the high points until you have enough material to fill in the low points so that the whole surface is even and smooth. In most cases the latter is the most efficient and inexpensive. Since Obama insists that he will lower the overall cost of medical care, don't look for him to use the second method. And God help us if he uses the first method.

Comments

Make a comment: