Scott Gottlieb and James Capretta argue in a National Review Online column that the federal government’s health care policy would be worse under a Hillary Clinton administration than it has been under President Obama.
The only real daylight that has ever been visible between Clinton and Obama on health care occurred in 2008, over the individual mandate. Clinton, campaigning for president, supported a mandate as part of her health-care plan. Then–senator Obama, also campaigning for president, opposed it and vigorously attacked Clinton over the issue, only to drop his opposition after getting elected. With that flip-flop, Obamacare became indistinguishable in all of its key features from the plan pushed by Hillary Clinton 15 years earlier.
So it is not surprising that Clinton is now campaigning to “build upon” Obamacare, mostly by trying to blunt the high cost of Obamacare’s regulatory excess with yet more costly regulation. Nor is it surprising that what she is promising sounds an awful lot like what Obama promised nearly seven years ago — free health care, with no consequences. In recent days, she proposed a $250 annual limitation on what people must pay for pharmaceutical products (with insurers presumably covering all costs above that amount and charging higher premiums as a result). She also wants to give everyone in the United States three free trips to the doctor each year, along with a $2,500 tax credit ($5,000 for couples) for people with high out-of-pocket expenditures. Who would pay for all of this?
She claims it would be paid by cost savings from painless government-imposed cost controls, especially on drug companies. But, of course, price controls are never “costless.” Access to new drugs will suffer. By definition, with price controls there will be less innovation and fewer new products to address the many ailments that afflict millions of patients every year.
