The Whole Thing

Remember the old ad for indigestion--I can't believe I ate the whole thing. Well, it's a massive case in the making with ObamaCare, and Americans are wary. Arthur C. Brooks, WSJ, Why Government Health Care Keeps Falling in the Polls: The health-care debate is part of a larger moral struggle over the free-enterprise system:

Many are searching for explanations. One popular notion is that demagogues in the media are stirring up falsehoods against what they say is a long-overdue solution to the country's health-care crisis.

Americans deserve more credit. They haven't been brainwashed, and they aren't upset merely over the budget-busting details. Rather, public resistance stems from the sense that the proposed reforms do violence to three core values of America's free enterprise culture: individual choice, personal accountability, and rewards for ambition.

This third point hasn't gotten enough attention:

Third, ObamaCare discourages personal ambition. The proposed reforms will institute a set of government mandates, price controls and other strictures that will make highly trained specialists, drug researchers and medical device makers less valued now and in the future. Americans understand that when you take away the incentive to make money while saving lots of lives, the cures, therapies and medical innovations of tomorrow may never be discovered.

It may be news to our President Barack Obama, but most people get rewarded for actual accomplishments--they earn income as a result of consumers making the choice to buy their product, which often is the result of years of hard work.

Public plan mirage. Robert Samuelson, WaPo:

In reality, the public plan, also known as the public option, is mostly an exercise in political avoidance: It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn't. [snip]

The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more "choice" and "competition") to expand government power. But why would a plan tied to Medicare control health spending, when Medicare hasn't?

A closer look at the uninsured. Not 46 million, but closer to 10. Plus some details on alternative ideas for reform. Here's one:

As for people with preexisting conditions, one way to help them in the short run would be, as Anderson advocates, to increase federal subsidies to the high-risk insurance pools currently operating in 34 states. Over the long run, the best solution would be to create a dynamic, competitive market for individual insurance. Economist John Cochrane of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business believes this would fuel the rise of “health-status insurance” policies, which would allow people to purchase insurance against developing an illness or chronic condition sometime in the future. In a robustly competitive market, argues Cochrane, private insurers would “compete for the business of every customer, even the sickest.”

Health insurer profits not so fat. Enough with the demonizing.

Healthcare wastes up to $800 billion a year. Defensive medicine a big cost. How about that tort reform?

And even before this trillion plus entitlement gets enacted the deficit widens to unsustainable levels, the Dem spending rolls on.

Do we have to swallow the whole thing? How about some real bipartisanship--tort reform being right up there, and real competition across state lines. Dump the phony public option. Once we're saddled with the whole one size fits all thing, what will be the cure?

Take a number (you're just a number to Big Government), get in line.

More. USA Today, ObamaCare will leave millions uninsured and drive costs up.