Health Care reform or something more?
Bloomberg and other news services are announcing today that Congress will soon begin deliberation on the 1,012 page bill to overhaul America’s health care system. Although the costs of this plan have not been officially disclosed most estimates put it at near 1.4 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Historically, government estimates of a program’s costs are usually off by at least a factor of two, which would put the actual cost near 3 trillion dollars!
It is reported that enacting this legislation, which effectively puts government in control of virtually every aspect of health care, will reduce the number of Americans who currently are without health insurance by 37 million. So let’s look at the numbers: 1.4 trillion (we’ll stick to the current estimate for now) divided by 37 million gives us 37,837 dollars per beneficiary. That’s over $300 per month over ten years per person. I checked the cost of insurance for a 30 year old single male, non-smoker with a $1000 deductible in my area of the country and found policies as low as $62 per month.
My point is, if Obama’s goal is to insure all Americans we could do it for an average of perhaps $100 per month and leave the rest of us alone. This would cost a “mere” 3.7 billion per year, realizing a savings of over one hundred billion dollars per year, or one TRILLION in ten years! In fact, at that rate, we could have the government pick up the tab for every single American and it would only cost about 3 billion per month or 360 billion for ten years. Compare that to the 1400 billion of the proposed Obama plan. You could even waive most of the deductible for the poorest Americans and it would only cost another 30 billion for ten years, topping the cost at 390 billion–still a substantial savings from what Obama, Pelosi and Reid have planned for us.
The money that we would have to pay in deductibles would be more than made up for in the additional money in our paychecks when employers are relieved of the costs of providing health care insurance. It can only be that the goal of the Obama plan goes well beyond ensuring every American has health insurance. Obama is asking physicians like me to shoulder a large portion of the cost of his plan so any speculation by me could be seen as biased and self-serving, so I’ll leave the comments section open for you, dear readers, to weigh-in with your thoughts.
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