Posted by
Andrews on Monday, August 24, 2009 11:20:29 AM
It struck me while writing my last post "
Who Will Decide", that what the advocates of ObamaCare say makes absolutely no sense.
First, they say we are spending too much on health care. But then they say that there will be no "death panels" or even rationing under ObamaCare. Yet they admit, even under our system "spending too much", there is "rationing by insurers".
So, let me think this through. We spend too much already, yet people still don't get what they want or need, but somehow, while covering even more people, ObamaCare will spend a smaller portion of our GDP to provide absolutely unlimited care to everyone?
Unless I was right in my last post and they expect Obama to do a "loaves and fishes" type miracle with liver transplants and interferon, I don't see how they expect this miracle to come off. I know they pretend they can cut costs by removing "inefficiencies", especially under a single payer plan, but as I argued before, most of those "costs" are essential to the competition which keeps costs low. Removing competition trades a short term cut in minor costs for a long term loss of efficiency*.
But even allowing for their cuts, the numbers just don't work. There is not so much waste in the system Obama can cover everyone, while at the same time imposing no rationing at all, and fail to spend more. Someone is playing fast and loose with the numbers here.
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* Read "
Government Efficiency", "
High Cost of Medical Care", "
The Problem With Tort Reform", "
Clarification of My Argument for a Free Market in Medicine", "
Cutting "Costs"", "
Misunderstanding Profits" and "
Contradiction" for more details. These posts actually relate pretty strongly to my earlier posts on the absurdity of CEO salary caps and restrictions on the practices of bailed out industries, such as "
A Really Foolish Idea", "
Greed", "
Greed Part 2", "
A Little More On CEO Salaries", "
Pointless or Destructive", "
Another Bad Idea", "
Crippling Business", "
AIG Absurdities", "
AIG Nonsense" and "
Living Large During the Good Times". And, of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention the most relevant posts, "
Planning For Imperfection" and "
Greed Versus Evil", which describe why profits, advertising and other "waste' of the free market is so essential and why such "savings" are likely ot impose costs many times higher in the long run.
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POSTSCRIPT
In many ways, the true believers in ObamaCare remind me of the FairTax zealots who tried to convince me they could cut taxes, cut overhead and keep revenue the same, all while forcing the economy to grow. It sounds nice, and some can even make the numbers add up on paper, but the hidden assumptions required to make those numbers work are absolutely absurd, and the same is true here. (See "
An Interesting Analogy".) At least the ObamaCare zealots don't have a book, so I don't have to hear "Read the book" in response to every criticism.