Shawn Tully, editor at large of Fortune Magazine, maintains the proposed health care legislation going through Congress and the Senate contains severe restrictions on what Americans can have in the way of health care.
Despite promises made to the contrary, careful reading of the bills going through the legislature reveal the following new restrictions on American’s choices or freedoms in health care:
# Freedom to choose what is included in your health plan.You will have to take a government approved plan which will no doubt include things that you don’t want or need and may leave out things you do need and want.
# You will not be allowed to take out very high deductible insurance.This would keep you from having a Health Savings Account. As I noted in an earlier blog the health savings account is one of the best vehicles for getting the country into a market oriented economy for medicine. See “Buddy Davenport’s State Farm Understands the value of Free Market Health Savings posted May 30, 2009.”
# No one will be allowed to issue insurance that gives people a break for having healthier lifestyles. In other words the healthy will be burdened to pay for the unhealthy. Since this type of insurance pricing is foisted on the healthy by present state laws many young, healthy people have opted not to have health insurance because it is over priced and they feel they don’t need it.
# You will not be able to keep your existing plan. It may take a while but your existing plans will be forced out of existence. Note that this has happened in all socialized medicine systems so there is no historical reason to hope to keep your present plan no matter what the legislation might say.
# You will not be able to choose your doctor. Even if it wasn’t spelled out in the legislation, no state run system has ever let the patients choose their doctors and there is no reason to think that ours will.
To top this all off, the Congressional Budget Office has revealed that it could not find cost savings to be gained in these plans. Since the CBO is controlled by the Democrats and has been put under great pressure by the administration to deliver a favorable report, there is no reason to believe that there is some economic virtue in this plan.
To top it all off, the health plans put forward will severely cut old people off from medical care. Ironically the AARP has endorsed these plans, which says that it has “ratted out” on its own constituency.
In view of the above considerations plus many more, it appears that the American public will come to oppose the health care reform more and more as time goes on. There is very little in nationalized health care that Americans will really like.