Morning Bell: President Obama’s Health Care Strategy
Conn Carroll /
Campaigning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past summer, then-candidate Barack Obama told a 1,800 person town hall meeting: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.” So while President Barack Obama indicated yesterday that he is open to altering his health plan, Americans should always keep in mind what President Obama’s true end goal really is. And after just six weeks in office he has already made two significant steps towards that goal. If Americans hope to retain and expand their right to make their own health care decisions, there are two elements of President Obama’s future health care reform that must be avoided at all costs.
This past August the U.S. Census Bureau released a study the results of which will probably surprise many Americans listening to the rhetoric from yesterday’s White House health care forum. Both the rate and number of people without health insurance declined from 15.8% in 2006 to 15.3% in 2007. The reason for this drop? The percent of Americans with private health insurance is on the decline, mostly as a result of the steady erosion of employer-based coverage, while the percentage of Americans with government insurance is rising even faster. This trend is due entirely to the never ending expansion of government run health care eligibility and the inevitable private sector crowd out that accompanies government growth.
President Obama achieved an acceleration of this trend when he signed into law an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that removed requirements that participants either be poor or a child. But President Obama’s call to create a public health care plan that will “compete” with private plans is far worse. According to a study by the Lewin Group a public health plan open to all Americans and set at Medicare reimbursement levels would force 118.5 million Americans out of private health care and into nationalized medicine.