The $60,000 Obama Health-Care Plan: It’s “Eye-Poppingly” Expensive on a Per-Person Basis
Obama’s health-care proposals will cost well over a trillion dollars, without providing universal coverage. They are so “eye-poppingly” expensive that even Congressional Democrats have been forced to scale them back. But the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that their bill “would cover just 16 million additional people at a cost of $1 trillion,” reports the Washington Post. That’s more than $60,000 for each additional person covered! Other estimates peg the cost at $1.6 trillion.
The Examiner notes that Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisers estimated that “as much as 30 percent of Medicare spending is unnecessary,” due to poor government oversight, yet Obama wants to expand government control over the “entire” health-care “system.” The Examiner also worries that his plan will close badly-needed cancer clinics and “lead straight to rationing health care.”
Health-care expert (and former New York Lieutenant Governor) Betsy McCaughey says that contrary to Obama’s promise, you won’t necessarily be able to keep your doctor, or your insurance if you like it, under his proposed government takeover of the health-care sector.
Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.
I wonder how long it will be before the President or liberal Congressional leaders similarly retaliate against the Congressional Budget Office for telling inconvenient truths about their disastrous economic policies. Not only has the CBO estimated the enormous cost of ObamaCare, it earlier pointed out that Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.” (The CBO predicted that in the short-run, by the 2010 election, the stimulus would temporarily create jobs. But it hasn’t. Indeed, it has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector.)
The stimulus package also repealed welfare-reform, and wastes taxpayers’ money.
Obama has done nothing to make health-insurance cheaper, like letting consumers buy cheaper health-care policies across state lines (few countries have a more geographically fragmented and balkanized health-care market than we do. Private piggy-back health insurance is cheaper and less regulated even in supposedly socialist countries like France than it is here. When my Marxist French father-in-law left the grim public hospital where he had his quadruple bypass, he was able to stay cheaply and comfortably in a convalescent home using private health insurance that was much cheaper and less regulated than what he could buy in America, where 50 different states apply a bewildering patchwork of complicated rules to health-insurance, and a federal statute, strongly backed by Joe Biden, allows states to block purchase of health insurance across state lines).
Nor has Obama proposed anything to help remedy the looming doctor shortage, like getting rid of unnecessary and time-consuming requirements for becoming a doctor (in other countries, doctors can study medicine as undergraduates, without having to first graduate from college before going to medical school. That dramatically reduces the time and expense of a medical education. One of my former co-workers is the child of a doctor who emigrated from a Third World country to Canada. That doctor began treating patients soon after receiving an undergraduate degree in medicine in her home country, and now practices medicine in Canada).