Once private insurers are driven out of the market, medical professionals will no longer be able to shift costs to them, and the government will have only one option to cut costs: ration care.
Rationing really is the hidden nightmare of government run healthcare. There are people who are so desperate for everyone to be covered that they dismiss (or refuse to accept) that rationing is what always happens.
A government run program cannot, like private insurers, cancel someone who abuses the plan. In addition, it is also known that when people get something "free" that they use it, and abuse it, running to the doctor for every sniffle or cough. So whatever the cost of medical treatment is today, double it, or triple it, and then you will have a more realistic price tag for what the first few years of ObamaCare would be like.
Those costs are not sustainable. There will have to be methods used to reduce the costs, or our taxes will be so high that no one was any room to maneuver. The is never any efficiency or "economies of scale" found in anything the government does. The government does things less efficiently and with higher costs than the private sector:
But it's hard to see through the lens of zealotry. Daschle actually proclaims that government-run health care would not only reduce costs but would be "much more likely to be innovative."
Government as an engine of affordability? Since 1970, Medicare's per-beneficiary costs have risen 34 percent more than the costs of all health care in America aside from Medicare and Medicaid--and that's even without including the costs of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. Government as an engine of innovation? Government lumbers like a walrus and is as flexible as a mule.
What Mr. Anderson does not address, that I will attempt to address here, is the real opportunities for reforming the cost of medical treatment: getting government and tort lawyers out of the process.
Every reasonable person recognizes that there is such a thing as "malpractice." It's meaning has changed over time, to become something equivalent to an idealized, almost magical thinking when it comes to medical treatment. We're all going to die. It isn't if. It is when and how. A patient who dies after receiving a heart transplant, does not mean that malpractice occurred. It means that reality occurred.
Medicine is not a science. It is an art, as there are variables that go beyond our human understanding, against the odds, and despite all efforts to change the outcome. Two exact same procedures can be performed on two different people and one will die and the other thrive. The death of the one doesn't imply or even suggest malpractice.
The public has a lot of responsibility to bear for all of this. We've become a nation of greedy... of seeing a car accident, an unwanted scar, or a broken ladder as an opportunity to win the lottery through a court settlement... passing along the costs of their winnings to all of us, involuntarily.
Certainly damages should be awarded when damage, malicious and intentional, is done. But even there, punitive awards go both ways and the individuals (and the lawyers) who receive those multi-million dollar awards have lost their souls in the receipt of it. They must remain eternal victims, never healing or recovering from their ordeal, lest they must admit to themselves that they're not entitled to the money they received.
We all want evil punished, but a predicable and reliable outcome of medical treatment is unrealistic.
We need tort reform as the best method of reducing medical costs. The ideas of universal care and insuring the "uninsured" are distractions to the real reforms that we need to address. It is not surprising that Congress won't act to reform where reform is necessary, because they're all lawyers, many who made their living as ambulance chasers, and have sold their own souls in the cases they've handled, and the awards they've deposited in their bank accounts.
To admit that we need tort reform would be to admit that they have bloody hands. Chances are good that they'll do anything else, including foisting the scheme of "universal heath care" on all of is, instead of admitting that they were complicit in evil and greed.
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