Will health care be better whatever form Obamacare passes Congress?

With significant majorities in both the US House and Senate, some sort of health care bill will no doubt be jammed through the Congress and signed into law. The question has to be asked will health care be improved or worsened in America. With greater government involvement and control, the answer is clearly worse. All we have to do is look at other nations which already have socialized medicine. They're trying to move away from it.

The salient question is about quality of health care not access. Today very few people don't have access to health care though many don't have insurance. Efforts to mandate health care insurance will provide illusory success. What I mean by that is many people still won't have insurance even if you mandate it. It's estimated that 15% of people don't have auto insurance even though it's required by law. But regulations and price control efforts will stifle access to quality health care and reduce innovation and development of treatments for people who are truly sick.

Gary Bauer highlights a couple of these concerns regarding where Obamacare could take us.

The Contradictions Of ObamaCare

In recent days, the Wall Street Journal’s website has posted two columns that have exposed the glaring contradictions of ObamaCare. In the first column, Peter Suderman notes that in our federalist system of government the states have been called “laboratories of democracy,” free to try “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Several states have already experimented with key elements of ObamaCare, and the results are not good. But Obama and congressional Democrats are about to put the rest of the country at risk by nationalizing those failed experiments. You can read Suderman’s article here.

The second column, entitled “Obama’s War On Specialists,” was an analysis of how the Obama plan will impact any American suffering from heart disease, cancer or any ailment requiring a specialist. Here’s what it said:

“Democrats are systematically attacking specific medical fields like cardiology and oncology … trying to engineer a ‘cheaper’ system so that government can afford to buy health care for all -- even if the price is fewer and less innovative ways of extending and improving lives. …The increase in specialists has tracked advances over 50 years in medical science and technology. Democrats look at these advancements and see only the costs, not the benefits. …

“Markets are supposed to determine the composition of the workforce, not a command medical economy run out of Washington. …Americans might take a different view of health-care ‘reform’ if they understood that it means snuffing out the best medicine.”
This is a very important point that cannot be ignored. Last year, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office told Congress, “In explaining why health costs rose over the past several decades, most analysts agree that the most important factor has been the emergence, adoption, and widespread diffusion of new medical technologies and services.” [Emphasis added.] Do we want to save money by going back to 1970s technology, by denying MRIs and life-saving drugs like the socialized “command medical economies” in Europe?

The Washington Times recently pointed out: “A new study by … the University of Pennsylvania shows that for the eight most common types of cancer, Americans have dramatically higher survival rates than Europeans. For all malignancies, the five-year survival rate for men is 66.3 percent in America. In Europe, it is only 47.3 percent. The rate is 63 percent for women in America, but only 55 percent for European women.” The lives those statistics represent are at stake in this debate.

Share these facts with friends, neighbors, co-workers and relatives so that they understand what this plan will do to specialist care in this country.