Contributed by: filbert Saturday, August 08 2009 @ 08:06 PM CST
Tigerhawk[*1] links to Ramish Ponnuru, writing at Time.com[*2] :
There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, “the status quo is untenable.” Our health-care system is rife with “skewed incentives.” It gives us “a whole bunch of care” that “may not be making us healthier.” It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is “bankrupting families,” “bankrupting businesses” and “bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change.”
Obama’s second major point is that–to quote from the same broadcast–“if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don’t want you to have to change … So what we’re saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it.”
So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?
This pretty much sums up the incoherence of the argument for radically re-engineering our health care system.
Of course, this isn’t really about health care at all, it’s about increasing the government’s power over every single one of us–by seizing the literal power to decide who lives and who dies. And hey! Who wouldn’t want Obama and his Chicago machine cronies to have that hanging over them?