Health-Care “Reform” Bills Increase Costs, Endanger Access for Millions, Federal Experts Say

The healthcare “reform” bill backed by Obama “would reduce senior care,” and “could jeopardize access to care for millions,” report healthcare experts at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The bill also “increases medical costs” through inflation, increasing health-care costs to 21.1 percent of GDP by 2019.

The House of Representatives recently passed the bill by a vote of 220 to 215.

According to the federal experts, the bill would likely either cost much more than projected, or result in some “hospitals and nursing homes” deciding to “stop taking Medicare altogether,” notes the Washington Post.

The bill will increase taxes to “European levels of taxation,” while failing to provide European-style universal coverage.  It will vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It reinforces foolish restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

Doctors afraid of being wrongly sued for malpractice despite providing good quality care order unnecessary tests (or defensive medicine), which wastes at least $200 billion annually. That’s nearly as much money as France spends on health-care for all its citizens.  The bill does nothing to reduce such costs, ignoring lessons from Europe.  (Many European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.)

In European countries like France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less.  European law is generally much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors.  Punitive damages are generally forbidden, and lawsuits are discouraged by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills.

The health-care bills backed by Obama also contain lots of waste and subsidies for politically-correct things like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

Obama’s proposals contain provisions that he falsely claims will cut costs, but which actually exploded costs when tried by state governments.