Government Health care

A few of the blogs I frequent are rooting for Obamacare to become the norm for this country. They site the high cost of insurance premiums and the success of military care (although I’ve read enough blogs by military wives that I’m not convinced military care is all that it’s cracked up to be either.)

I don’t think anyone believes that health care in this country doesn’t need to be reformed. It does. But I think there is a lot of question on whether or not Obamacare is the way to go, or that this whole thing has to be pushed through so quickly.

When government gets involved in the private sector, it usually messes things up. Back in the 1930s, the government put a cap on how much employers could pay their people. If an employer wanted to keep a good employee he couldn’t increase his wage. Instead the idea of “benefits” was born including health insurance. That’s where the idea of employer-based health care came from and it arose from government action.

Of course health insurance wouldn’t be such a big deal today if the cost of health care wasn’t so stinkin high. I mentioned a while back that last summer I took two kids to the doctor for sore throats and it cost me $400! That was for the doctor visit and the lab work. That’s outrageous. But again, there was a time in this country when visiting the doctor wasn’t so expensive because the doctors could only charge what the market would bear. Same with hospitals. That all changed with Medicare. When the government could afford to pay $50 dollars for an office visit that’s what doctors started to charge and anyone without the insurance had to pay it too. Government’s intrusion into the market skewed the price of health care.

And don’t even get me started on trial lawyers and their impact on the health care costs.

Of course for a long time people didn’t care much about health care costs. If you worked for GM or another big company and had great coverage, it was no big deal to go to the doctor for anything, because YOU didn’t pay for the costs. That’s changed over the decades but consumer abuse of the system also added to the increased costs.

So there is plenty of room to improve but it seems to me that the best way to right the system is for LESS government intrusion and not more. Let the system right itself and let the private sector do what it does best. Even President Obama admitted this week that the private side works better than the government run.

John Stossel brings up some good points about government run health care as well.

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