Last night, President Obama made bold claims about his healthcare plan. Democrats believe that the American people will take them at their word and as they rush a healthcare bill through Congress. National Review sums up the “snake oil” Obama peddled during the news conference:
President Obama’s press conference Wednesday night offered an ideal encapsulation of the Democrats’ case for their health-care-reform proposals: outlandish promises about benefits and patently dishonest denials of the costs. He said essentially all of the uninsured would be covered, the insured could keep their existing coverage and would be guaranteed to keep it if they lost or changed jobs, the quality of care would rise, waste and fraud would be slashed, the deficit would decline, and no one would have to pay a price for all this except a few millionaires. Oh, and by the way, the plan would also “keep government out of health-care decisions.”
If the president can persuade the American public of all that, then maybe we don’t even need medical care — we can just have him tell us all we’re perfectly healthy and we’ll go on our way.
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The cost of the health-care bills now coming out of the key congressional committees is staggering, and the Congressional Budget Office has said these bills will not reduce health-care-cost inflation in the long run, so that even the trillion-dollar ten-year cost estimates do not begin to describe the full burdens taxpayers will assume. The notion, again repeated by the president, that anyone who is happy with his health insurance now will be able to keep it is patently at odds with every study and analysis of the Democrats’ proposals, all of which foresee many millions displaced. And even the president himself seems no longer to believe that only the rich will pay a price: His language Wednesday night was carefully calibrated. He said reform should not be “completely shouldered on the backs of middle-class families,” or “primarily funded through taxing middle-class families.”
But the greatest weakness of the Democrats’ plans, and the most important concern regarding their implementation, has to do with the rationing of care and the centralization of treatment decisions. While President Obama claimed, preposterously, that the proposals he supports would limit the government’s role, he also made clear that decisions about the availability of care — especially for the elderly at first, but for all in the long run — would be made by a panel of experts in Washington, setting one-size-fits-all rules that would govern doctors’ decisions. This was held up as a model of efficiency, but it is a recipe for disaster, as the public seems increasingly to understand.