The Obama Administration and Health Care Reform

Last week I spent an afternoon going through printouts of my hospital bills from the last few years. After wearing out a few of the keys on my trusty TI-84 calculator, I confirmed what I had only suspected previously: that since May 1, 2005 Medicare, along with a potpourri of state medical assistance programs, has spent just over 1.1 million dollars keeping me alive.

Whether or not this 1.1 million dollar raid on the Social Security Trust Fund, as well as the State of New Mexico's oil and gas royalties, represents a bargain is a matter of personal opinion. I mention it only to call attention to the promises regarding health care "reform" made by then-candidate Obama during the recently concluded campaign season. The only problem I foresee regarding health care "reform" is that, in political terminology, "reform" is Orwellian Newspeak for "government meddling."

Depending on who you talk to, the Obama Administration or some other equally partisan group, "reform" will probably add around 40 million people to an already over-extended health care system. If you think that having to wait 12 hours just to get into an Emergency Room or Urgent Care Clinic is bad, try to think about what adding another 50 people to the line ahead of you will do for your attitude.

I realize that there will be some who believe that more government involvement in health care will lead to cost control through "greater efficiency." If you believe that line, just talk to any veteran that uses their local Veterans Administration Hospital and see what kind of testimonial to government efficiency that you get. Better yet, visit my old stomping grounds at the Indian Health Service Hospital in Gallup, New Mexico to see what kind of a bureaucratic mess that government supervision of health care can make.

Under Obama's proposed Economic Recovery Plan, or whatever it's being called this week, the government proposes to spend $87 billion for the state-run Medicaid programs, $20 billion to improve health information technology, and about $4 billion for improvements in preventative medicine. While this may look good on paper I must ask what the cost will be next year, or in its third year. I can assure you that the 50 states will run through that $87 billion of Medicaid funding in a matter of months! Does Obama's proposed spending include funding these programs 5 years down the road? And the part about "preventive care" may look like a good idea, but it's an even bigger joke.

Preventive care is great but you don't see its results until years, if not decades, later. As an example, take all the money that has been spent to persuade people to give up smoking. After a few hundred million dollars, the incidences of heart attack, stroke, and lung cancer are the same as they were 20 years ago. Whatever the overall population has been gained by those that quit smoking has been offset by an aging Baby Boom generation that would develop the same conditions purely at random as a consequence of aging. The long-term health care costs associated with chronic obesity and/or chronic alcohol abuse are far greater than those of smoking, but I don't see anyone pestering overweight drunks about their "unhealthy" lifestyles.

Since President Obama is endeared to the tenets of socialism I predict that he will, sooner or later, order wage and price controls over a large portion of the health care industry. Should he do so, it will be the worst mistake in recent memory. Since the time of the French Revolution there has been not a single case where wage and price controls have brought anything but shortages and misery to the very people that they were supposed to help. Nixon tried wage and price controls in 1971 and it was a miserable failure that hurt the very people that they were supposed to help.

Once the dust has settled, I think Obama's grand scheme to force his distorted sense of reality down the taxpayers' throats will fail. But at the same time, I'm sure that he will have some lame excuse such as "big drug companies" or "big oil" or "Wall Street" at the ready to take the blame for his own incompetence.

And finally, in reply to those that would ask "Well, what is your solution to the problem?" I will again quote the great H.L. Mencken.

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fraud."