Worse and Worse for Obamacare

The Obama administration's big idea about health care reduces itself to this: the US health system is so irrational and wasteful that simply by spending money more intelligently we can insure the uninsured at no additional net cost. Nice, if true. But is it true?

Yuval Levin, working hard on a Saturday, seems to have been the first blogger to post on the latest bucket of ice-water thrown upon the Democrats' health plan: the CBO's Saturday morning release of a new study debunking the Obama administration's plan to control Medicare costs. Levin:

Their best assessment, in other words, is that the idea could save $2 billion over ten years, or in the neighborhood of two-tenths of one percent of the amount the Democrats want to spend on their health care program in that period. But the probability is high that it wouldn’t even save that much.

The Obama administration's big idea about health care reduces itself to this: the US health system is so irrational and wasteful that simply by spending money more intelligently we can insure the uninsured at no additional net cost. Nice, if true. But is it true? The Obama administration's big idea for saving money reduces itself to this - central command and control is so much more efficient than private competitive markets that simply by switching from one to the other they can save all the money they need. You have to wonder why such a blindingly obvious idea has never been tried before. Oh wait: It has. And it always proves wrong.