1. Obamacare has been justified as necessary to provide health insurance to millions of people who lack it. But never explained is why it is necessary to mangle and ultimately destroy the insurance market for those who now do have insurance in order to provide it to those who don’t. Why not just expand Medicaid?
2. What is the math — no, not even math; what is the arithmetic — that allows most people who now have insurance they like to get “better” insurance — even though “[t}hey don’t necessarily know it right now,” Obama just told NBC News — and pay less ($2500 on average, according to Obama) for it while at the same time “bending the cost curve” of national expenditures on health care?
The answer to No. 1 can only be pure politics. Obama and the Democrats could never have passed Obamacare if they had admitted that their goal was to put the private insurance market on “the course of ultimate extinction.”
Regarding No. 2, I suppose it would be possible to borrow enough money from the Chinese to provide large enough subsidies to those to buy “better” insurance (maternity care for men, etc.) for millions of people that their costs would go down, and they would use the “better” provisions so infrequently that their higher premiums (paid for heavily by the borrowed Chinese dollars) would subsidize the new policies for the sick and the poor. Whatever that would do to the “cost curve,” however, it would certainly bend the debt curve heavily upward, not down.
