Three Dirty Little Secrets in the Public Health-Care Plan

HAT TIP: HotAir.com

I just grabbed three sections to illustrate the three main "secrets"...

1)

First dirty secret of a public plan: Any plan has to involve administration costs, even if it operates on a non-profit basis. The obvious examples here are Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration plans. Costs have skyrocketed under both government-run plans while cutting back on the benefits both afford their patients, thanks to miles of red tape handled by legions of bureaucrats. Doctors get paid less and have to spend more to invoice for their services in Medicare and Medicaid, which has more of them refusing to take new patients under either plan.

However, a government-run plan can hide those costs by simply hiding them elsewhere, in the short term. Sebelius and Obama will juggle the books to make a show of solvency while they undercut the private market insurers, who have to pay their employees to process claims, handle member services, ensure compliance with miles of existing government regulations, and in some cases offer a small margin of return to their investors, who put up the money and risk for the insurance plans in the first place.

2)

Instead of having a robust health-care system that rewards providers and insurers for their work, the public plan and its inevitable market-killing characteristics will create an artificial shortage of health-care providers. Everyone will have coverage, but it may take months or years to get treatments, if at all. That is not a worst-case, hypothetical scenario, either; single-payer systems around the world share this commonplace result.

3)

When the administration talks about cost control via public plans, they really have no idea of the real costs of health care, and the real contribution a free market makes. In this case, they're about to kill the golden goose, and they're completely unaware of it. And that's the third dirty secret of Obama's public plan.

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