When Politicians Decide Healthcare
If you need a good idea of what government-run healthcare would mean to you and your family, look no further than Medicare, or the wrangling taking place in Washington surrounding Medicare funding.
With much of the media focused on the Democrats’ efforts to expand eligibility and funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), much less publicity has been given to Congressional deliberations on Medicare. While SCHIP is a backdoor effort to grow government-run healthcare, the Medicare funding process is a good example of what happens once politicians get to decide how much and what sort of healthcare participants receive from the federal budget.
The Democratic-controlled Congress has been working all year to determine how to allocate an estimated $390 billion dollars to cover more than 40 million seniors and other recipients. The process is byzantine, as the legislative process tends to be. It involves everything from possible changes to Medicare Advantage to physician fees to reimbursements for a host of treatments and therapies housed in this mammoth program.
What the process isn’t principally about is the best healthcare for Medicare recipients. Foremost, this is a political process with political ends in mind. And therein is a cautionary note for voters who are flirting with the idea of socialized or universal healthcare, or some lesser proposal that is a Trojan horse in all but name.
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For liberals like Paul Krugman, perhaps these are small prices to pay for healthcare decided by Washington politicians. For the rest of us, these prices are just too high.
Read the whole thing. When you turn anything over to the govt, it becomes political, and everything else goes out the window.
Scary stuff.
