Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Obama Confuses Corruption with Competition. So What Else Is New?”

« New Addition to the Encyclopaedia of "Argumentum ad Defatigationem" | Main | Just Out of Idle Hot-Dogish Curiosity... »

June 23, 2009

Obama Confuses Corruption with Competition. So What Else Is New?

Hatched by Dafydd

Another question that answers itself:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday squared off with the insurance lobby over industry charges that a government health plan he backs would dismantle the employer coverage Americans have relied on for a half-century and overtake the system....

"If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care ... then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?" Obama said in response to a question at a White House news conference.

"That's not logical," he scoffed, responding to an industry warning that government competition would destabilize the employer system that now covers more than 160 million people.

Wow, that's a toughie: If the free market provides the best quality health care -- then how can feckless, inefficient, corrupt federal government drive them out of business? Here are a few possible answers:

By jacking up taxes, administrative fees, and punishing profit on private insurance -- but not government-run health care.

By running the government health care at a loss, forcing taxpayers to pick up the difference.

By regulating private insurers out of the market.

By adding so much red tape to private insurance plans that medical-care approval takes too long.

By extorting employers to dump their private plans in favor of the government plan, upon threat of fines, audits, and denial of necessary licenses.

By forcing doctors to charge private insurance a premium, under threat of the feds cutting off or reducing Medicare payments if they don't.

By seizing control of companies (surely the federal government would never do that!), dumping the private plan, and signing aboard the government plan.

By enacting legislation giving unions veto power to block any private health-care plan.

By removing a corporate CEO and installing an Obama crony in his place.

Whew! That exercise took all of two and a half minutes.

Next question?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 23, 2009, at the time of 7:31 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/3712

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Bart Johnson

To get something of an example of U.S. Socialized Medicine, examine the Veterans' Administration.
Its hospitals are known world-wide as the example of how not to run medical care.
Thousands of GIs were contaminated by dirty proctoscopes. Talk about adding insult to injury.
Then the VA says, maybe some people should get HIV testing. Then they say, even if HIV tests come up
positive, "You can't prove that it came from us."
Uh, yeah, you can. Like some other Government agencies, the first response is denial and lawyers. The injured can look out for themselves.

A second example is Medicare. I recently got a bill that was over 9 months old. It turns out that Medicare has allowed itself up to a year to process an invoice.
Doctors and agencies can just wait until the Feds get a round toit.

The best suggestion I have seen is that any bill passed must require that Congress and all Federal workers must live with the system for at least a year before it is unleashed onto an unsuspecting public.

The above hissed in response by: Bart Johnson at June 25, 2009 10:34 PM