You’ve no doubt heard Obamacare referred to as a train wreck. It’s a good metaphor for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that train wrecks don’t just destroy the train, they cut a swath of destruction through the countryside.
The American Enterprise Institute recently published a paper, authored by eight economists, detailing the alternative health care system they prefer to Obamacare. I disagree with much of what they have to say, but I want to focus here on one crucial problem: The paper tries to achieve the impossible.
In my recent interview with Sally Pipes about Canadian health care, we discussed how Canada succumbed to socialized medicine. According to Ms. Pipes, calls for government-provided health care began in the province of Saskatchewan in the 1940s.
A recent NPR story described efforts to extend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) to long-term care insurance providers. GINA, passed in 2008, prohibits health insurers from taking into account genetic information about you when deciding what coverage to offer you and at what price.
Next year Obamacare will give more than thirty million Americans completely subsidized health care under Medicaid, or mostly subsidized health care under the state exchanges. As the demand for health care will dramatically increase and the supply of medical professionals able to service that demand will remain essentially unchanged, we can expect to experience things like longer wait times for surgery, having to drive further to visit a specialist and even the possibility that no doctor in drivable distance is accepting new patients.
