No golden eggs to pay for Obamacare
By: Jay Ambrose
Examiner Columnist
June 17, 2009
Oh, dreadful, dreadful. The lobbyists are coming.
They are coming from large businesses, hospitals, doctor associations, insurers and drug companies,. and their mission - please, quake in your boots - is to defeat elements of Barack Obama's health care plan. Can we somehow turn back the greedy special interests viciously vying against the common good?
Let's hope not, despite Jeremiads like the one above from "reform" supporters trying to infect our thoughts with fear and loathing. Let's instead cheer the lobbyists. Among other benefits, their efforts just might save thousands of lives.
How? Well, one administration proposal is to lower the amount of money firms get for drugs sold to Medicare recipients. It sounds good because of demagoguery to the effect that these firms are getting rich off public misery.
The truth is that it can cost $1 billion or more to develop a drug. And if the companies can't get recompense for approved drugs to make up for that, pay the bills and make investors happy, you can forget nearly as much rescue as has been provided for terminal patients. In Europe, where governments routinely control drug prices, the firms develop about one-fourth the number of life-saving drugs as in the United States.
Some lobbyists understand that, and some understand, too, that Obama's plan could cost you your job. He figures on telling large businesses not only that they have to give employees health insurance benefits, but that they have to be very nice health insurance benefits.
This might seem fine to those not understanding that businesses have to keep outgo less than income and that when they are forced to increase outgo by more than they can afford, they will have to make up the difference by raising prices, by paying less in wages, by layoffs or by shutting down entirely.
Government-always-knows-best theorists don't seem to get this; by their dim lights, all businesses all the time can shower untold goodies on workers. They think they can enforce efficiency better than market competition and do this at the same time they are mandating inefficiencies, as in requiring health insurance companies to grow charitable in ways bound to raise the cost of premiums.
Obama also wants to ration health care, although he employs euphemistic language in discussing restrictive-treatment guidelines of a kind that Americans utterly rejected when they were employed by health maintenance organizations during the Clinton administration. He tried out some of these idea at a meeting of doctors the other day while repeating the canard about 46 million Americans being uninsured.
He did not explain that millions of these are illegal aliens, that others are qualified for Medicare or Medicaid and that still others can obtain affordable insurance if they choose. That leaves about 10 million American citizens who at least temporarily cannot get insurance.
Addressing their problems and finding ways to make care less expensive can be achieved with far less drastic means than establishing a government-run insurance program that could easily end up as the only show in town and, along with other Obama-sought innovations, cost $1.5 trillion or more over the next decade.
Without breaking the bank, you can address the issues - and they are certainly real - through such means as Medicare vouchers and tax credits for private insurers, various group alternatives to employer-based insurance and special provisions for people with pre-conditions.
The fact that some (certainly not all) health-care lobbyists endorse these ideas does not make them bad - what is good for special interests can sometimes be good for most of us - and they are far more likely of success than grandiose visions stripping away free choice.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: Speaktojay@aol.com.
Follow The Examiner
