So then what you are saying is that if the government is going to provide an alternatively cheaper health care plan it shouldn't consider who should is eligible for such a plan. I don't get how this means it is a death panel. Would you instead support the government providing health care for everyone? Universally? Regardless of what that would mean for your taxes? Or would you rather let companies decide instead who should be covered and who shouldn't?
We need to put a couple of myths to rest.
The first is this canard of "universal health care". It doesn't exist. Even countries that claim to have it don't. NHS rations care. France discourages people from seeing doctors. Every nation has a means for limiting the amount of care people receive. Every government that wishes to avoid huge cost overruns looks for ways to restrict what it will pay out in terms of health care--just like every insurance company. Care is never universal, and will never be universal. Passing the buck to the government does not eliminate the basic reality of scarcity.
The second is that "comparative effectiveness research" is not about providing a cheaper plan. It is about deciding what treatments and protocols are "effective"--which is to say which ones are worth the price tag. Those pronouncements are going to be pushed upon all doctors, and the Health Exchanges are, if this legislative abortion passes, going to be empowered to mandate that
all insurance companies cover only "effective" treatments and protocols. (The job description of the Health Choices Commissioner is to make your insurance choices for you.)
The third is the notion that anything in the legislation before the Congress has anything to do with making health care less costly. In fact, the CBO's own analyses of the various bills and proposals has been consistent on one thing: they will cost
more, not less; they "bend the curve" up, not down.
The one actual cost containment mechanism being proposed is this notion of comparative effectiveness research, which is simply deciding which treatments and protocols GovernmentCare will cover--which means that, at some juncture, GovernmentCare will be telling you that, rather than pay for a particular medicine, or surgery, or other treatment, it's better to just let granny die.
Dear Leader wants you to believe that such a scenario is nonsense, that the mere mention of it is a "scare tactice", and when he says such things he lies through his teeth. "Effective" is an economic consideration when viewed in the aggregate. "Effective" means, in the aggregate, not paying for something despite the patient's desires and the doctor's judgment. That is what "effective" means. That is all that "effective" means.
Why is private insurance better? Because private insurance can be made a competitive market. Granted, Congress has, in the last half century or so, gone out of its way to make health insurance a most non-competitive market, in particular by making health insurance a tax deduction to employers and not to individuals (there is no better way to remove competition than to restrict the customer base). This, however, is easy to alter, if people will stop long enough to think the possibilities through. With more insurance companies offering more insurance products, patients have more options, and that gives them market power to say to insurance companies what manner of coverage best suits them. If we are going to have insurance, further restricting and regulating insurance markets will only result in a system that is even less efficient and less attentive to patient need than the one we have now--and yet all the Anti-Republicans can think of is more regulation, more restriction, more government, all of which adds up to more cost for less actual care.
There are better solutions out there. We can alleviate restrictions on insurance, if we simply must have insurance. We can make insurance an individual and not an employer purchase. We can end the economic madness of "fee for service" compensation, that pays for procedures and not for outcomes. These are things that will directly lower health insurance premiums, make insurance companies more response to patients, and bend the health care cost curve lower for society and for individuals. They are not things the Anti-Republicans wish to even acknowledge as possible solutions; they prefer ideas which have been proven not to work, ideas which have been proven to result in less care, and ideas which have been proven to increase costs rather than curtail them--that is the Anti-Republicans' notion of "reform".
