It’s a topic this forum has featured before, including Deroy Murdock’s detailed 30-minute presentation on government-run health care as “bad medicine.” The latest print version of National Review offers a succinct case for repealing ? not tweaking or amending ? the 2010 federal health care reform legislation:
The law weakens our economy by adding to the cost of employment. It threatens our already-parlous fiscal condition by creating a new entitlement and only pretending to pay for it. It staves off real Medicare reform by relying on price controls. It impedes upward mobility by raising effective marginal tax rates on low- and middle-income workers. It promises to retard medical innovation. And it is flatly inconsistent with the constitutional design.
The health-care legislation is also an integrated plan that cannot be fixed piecemeal or more than modestly improved. Republicans should not be intimidated by polls that appear to show this or that aspect of the law is popular. Those features of the bill are inseparable from its least popular provisions, the package as a whole remains unpopular, and there is no reason to expect that to change any time soon. The ban on insurers’ taking account of sickness when offering policies and setting rates is popular in isolation, for example, but in order to work, it requires making the purchase of government-approved insurance compulsory.
During this weekend’s 400th edition of Carolina Journal Radio, you’ll hear Joe Coletti describe problems associated with a key plank of ObamaCare: the federal high-risk health insurance pool.
