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‘Not reform ... stupidity’
Posted Oct 12, 2009 by Tom Jackson
Updated Oct 12, 2009 at 10:33 PM
Democratic complaints about the insurance industry’s independent audit of the Baucus health “reform” bill has been predictably synchornized, if tissue-thin.
A brief but scorching take-down of Democrats’ criticisms is available here from the fellows at Powerlineblog.com.
Key to the nonsense:
[I]n the current version of the Baucus bill, there is no requirement to buy health insurance at all until after 2013, and by 2017 the penalty for failing to buy health insurance still amounts to only about 15% of the cost of the insurance. Now, think about it: if you know that you don’t have to buy health insurance when you are young and healthy, but if you should get sick, or just get older, you can apply for health insurance at any time and it will be illegal for the insurance company to turn you down, what would you do? Obviously, you would defer buying insurance unless and until you get sick. This means that the pool of those who are insured will be lower quality, and the cost therefore higher for everyone who buys insurance. It is as though you could wait until you die, and then your heirs can buy life insurance on you.
This isn’t reform, it is stupidity.
It actually would be very easy to make health insurance cheaper. All we have to do is allow insurance companies to compete nationally instead of state-by-state and eliminate all mandates that limit consumer choice. It has been estimated that these simple reforms—which are not part of any of the Democrats’ “reform” bills, for obvious reasons—would reduce health care costs by one-quarter to one-third. Instead of such common-sense reforms, the Dems are proposing Rube Goldberg measures that will make health care more expensive. Instead of eliminating mandates, their measures, including the Baucus bill, increase them—in effect making cheaper health insurance illegal.
Once more: this isn’t reform, it is stupidity.
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