One reason not to put government in charge of so much of the health-care system: that just gives lobbyists more say over where health-care spending goes.
Peter Suderman at Reason has been making this point for years. Today, he blogs on a related theme. Democratic Senate candidate and liberal darling Elizabeth Warren has placed an op-ed in the trade journal for medical devices, and she has finally found a tax hike she opposes — Obamacare’s tax on medical devices.
Suderman sees in this something much more interesting than Warren’s ideological flexibilty:
This is one of the reasons why the cost savings schemes in the 2010 health care overhaul probably won’t work. Those provisions generally save money by either taxing someone’s benefits (specifically the sort of expensive health plans held by many union members) or reducingsomeone’s payments (higher payments to Medicare advantage plans). Those people, their friends, and their industries all have friendly representatives in Congress, as well as people who would like to be their representatives in Congress—people who will sing whatever tune they believe is necessary in order to win. You can’t count on future members of Congress to stick to the cost control schemes dreamed up by past members of Congress, especially if those schemes are disliked by vocal, influential constituencies.
