Now that it is becoming increasingly obvious, even to
diehard defenders, that Obamacare is failing, I see the usual suspects are once
again raising the suggestions of (a) a public option, and (b) universal federal
health care.
The public option essentially involves the government
putting up its own insurance company. Why liberals think the government, with absolutely
no experience in the field, can make money or at least break even when professional
insurance companies can’t is beyond me.
So really the public option involves the taxpayers (ie – the rest of us)
subsidizing yet another, probably inefficient government agency. I don’t think so!
We already know how the government would do with universal
federal health care, because they already run two such systems – Medicare and
the VA system. The Veteran’s
Administration health care has been a scandal for years now, and despite lots
of embarrassing revelation over the past two years, it STILL isn’t fixed. In Phoenix
this year, for example, the average wait time for a first appointment with a
doctor was still 115 days, almost 4 months, and 1700 veterans were simply “lost”
from the waiting lists.
So that is one model of how a federal health care system
might look.
Medicare works better, but is economically unsustainable in
the long run. In 2014 Medicare accounted for nearly $600 billion in the federal
budget, or about 14% of the total budget. This year’s report from the trustees estimates
that the fund will be depleted by 2028. And it is so poorly run that the Government
Accounting Office recently estimated that
in 2014 it lost over $60 billion (yes, BILLION) in fraudulent charges
So yes, the nation’s health care system badly needs a major
overhaul, but turning it into another expensive, bloated, inefficient, and
unresponsive government agency is likely to make the problem worse, not better.
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