At the Presidential transition web site:
The Obama-Biden plan provides affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, builds on the existing health care system, and uses existing providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan. Under the Obama-Biden plan, patients will be able to make health care decisions with their doctors, instead of being blocked by insurance company bureaucrats.
Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.
(Via Coyote Blog.)
Look at this in the aggregate: we’re going to increase health care spending (by removing any restraint from insurance companies), and at the same time everyone’s costs go down. Nice trick. The difference must be made up somewhere. So who gets stuck with the bill?
Certainly doctors aren’t going to work for free. It can’t be the insurance companies; they would pass on the cost, and that’s exactly what Obama is promising won’t happen. The government? There’s no way the government will be shelling out for whatever doctors and patients decide, no questions asked. (Plus, I hear the government is a little short on money right now.)
No, if they’re serious about this, they have to intend some government oversight. In other words, they’re replacing the insurance company bureaucrat with a government bureaucrat.
POSTSCRIPT: Since pages at change.gov have a tendency to, uh, change, here’s an archive.
Internet Scofflaw 