United Liberty

Here’s a great editorial from Investor’s Business Daily about the healthcare proposal put forward by Barack Obama and Democrats doesn’t live the rhetoric and how it will eventually wind up killing private health insurance (which is the goal for Democrats):

[T]he argument that Medicare’s administrative costs are 2% is one of the biggest scams out there.

Public figures for Medicare’s administrative costs count only what it takes to print reimbursement checks. Normal operating costs — rent, management, health insurance, taxes, capital to start a business and new equipment — which private insurers must include in their administrative costs, are counted elsewhere in the federal budget.

Official Medicare administrative costs simply exclude what most companies must include. No administrative cost savings exist in the public plan, and the true costs will never be counted because they’ll be hidden in the federal budget.
[…]
The biggest problem with the public plan is it will be in direct competition with the private sector. Like Medicare, Congress will heavily subsidize it and hide the costs, making it financially more attractive compared with the private sector.

Also like Medicare, it will initially appear open and unrestricted. But as costs begin to explode much faster than Congress predicted — the government’s actuaries estimated in 1965 that Medicare Part A would cost $9 billion by 1990; it cost $66 billion that year — the government will begin to clamp down on providers and services.

Health care providers will begin to drop out — if they’re allowed to. And access to innovative, and often costly, treatments and drugs will be excluded. This isn’t guesswork. It happens in all single-payer countries and is beginning to happen in Massachusetts’ much-lauded health care reform plan.

The less people that are insured in the private sector, the higher the cost of private health insurance. All government has to do is cut payouts to practitioners, and they wonder why there is a shortage of doctors, who in turn pass costs off to private health insurers. Public health coverage a lose-lose situation for them and it’ll eventually be for taxpayers as the cost of entitlements continues to add up and coverage turns into the nightmare it has become in other countries.