Obama's Health Care "Reform" -- Why Medicare-style insurance will kill our health care system

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134222.html

I am doing you a huge favor with this link to the Reason site: You will get a sensible, understandable explanation of why the Democrats' widely admired plan to create a type of government-funded "reformed" health-care system is a really bad idea, one that you, personally, will come to regret. You haven't been getting it anywhere else.

Until now, you will likely have read only praise of the Obama administration's efforts to reform health care in the US, with most criticisms limited to only one of two forms:

1. It's not enough; it's not single-payer enough to do the trick; it's not comprehensive enough; it's only a first step; what a shame the administration and the Dems are unable to really do the job right.

and

2. References to the opposition of most Republican politicians, the health-insurance industry, and other elements of the health-care industry -- details of the opposition are not spelled out in much detail, and are always accompanied by references to special interests influencing these opinions. In other words, the opposition is pretty much dismissed out of hand as dishonest, arising only from industry greed, Republican cupidity, and political cowardice. (This is an example of the partisan worldview of newspaper reportage the conservatives complain about all the time; it's real.)

If you click on the above link and read the discussion, you will find a very different kind of essay from what you're used to: A comparison to the real performance of one of the most disastrous federal programs currently in existence, Medicare, on which the new health-reform plan is modeled.

You can only dismiss these issues out of hand if you are so completely partisan and, let's face it, greedy that you don't *care* what impacts health-reform legislation will have -- you just want to get free health care, with somebody else paying for it. You'll demonize anyone who gets in your way. You've completely bought into the worldview of the politician: Everybody wants what they want, and they want somebody else to pay for it. Unhappily, this is the one promise politicians keep: I can guarantee you that in the future, you will not pay for your own health care--somebody else will. Unfortunately for you, the other guy won't pay for his health care either -- you will.

I pay for yours; you pay for mine; bureaucrats take their cut off the top; new special interests arise that will stymie any future attempt at reform; everyone will fight for more of the pie at no cost.

God help us; because the Democrats and the Republicans (who are just as perverse as Dems think they are--and vice-versa) won't.