The Locker Room’s George Leef says this is required reading for the healthcare debate. He didn’t lie. A sample to help you judge for yourself:
Don’t “improve” welfare programs — cut them. At the behest of conservatives, Jeb Bush and other governors have made Medicaid more consumer-friendly. The only problem is that Medicaid and SCHIP are welfare programs, and making welfare more attractive leads to…more welfare.
There are probably ten million people who are eligible for Medicaid but do not enroll. (Some of them actually have private coverage. Riddle me that.) Giving recipients (A) a choice of insurance plans, (B) cash in an HSA, or (C) a voucher for private insurance encourages more people to become dependent on government for their health care.
Conservatives’ number one objective in this area should be to reform Medicaid and SCHIP the same way Congress reformed welfare: eliminate all federal entitlements and return the money to states as flexible, fixed-dollar block grants. That would be a nice step in the direction of getting the federal government out of the welfare business entirely.
….We’ve already got socialized medicine. Government already pays for half of Americans’ medical care. Government controls production and consumption by determining the number of physicians; what services medical professionals can offer and under what terms; where they can practice; who can open a hospital or purchase a new MRI; who can market a drug or medical device; and what kind of health insurance consumers may purchase. Government even sets the prices for half of our health-care sector directly, and indirectly sets prices for the other half.
Much of the U.S. health-care sector is private. But private markets are not necessarily free markets. What matters is who controls how the resources are used. More often than not, that “who” is government.
