A Prescription for Limited Health Care Reform

Polls consistently show that most Americans are happy with their own doctors and health care. And they should be. This country is home to the most advanced health care in the world, and it welcomes a steady stream of patients from other nations who live under government-run systems of the kind being pushed on us by President Obama.

Perhaps this explains why more and more people are rebelling against Barack Obama’s proposed takeover of the the health care system (which the president now euphemistically calls “health insurance reform”). By the same logic, since most people are unhappy with Congress but pleased with their own representatives, perhaps we should do away with the House and Senate and replace them with a panel of unelected bureaucrats.

Obama and the rest of the Democrats say health insurance costs are too high and coverage is too low, and in this they are right. The current system, set up with the encouragement of the federal government decades ago, unnecessarily links employment and insurance, and removes the responsibility of the consumer to make choices. As a result, there is no check on prices, and people have no idea what their care really costs. If they lose their job, they lose their insurance and have to face the inflated costs of coverage alone.

Setting aside the fictitious, wildly inflated number of 47 million uninsured (which includes everyone from illegals to healthy young people who choose to do without), they propose to fix these problems of the health care system with a gargantuan, phased-in takeover, and people are getting nervous.

After all, if our elected leaders botched the relatively simple and inexpensive “Cars for Clunkers” program, why should we give them control of one-sixth of the American economy, particularly when lives are at stake? And many Americans don’t like the idea of paying for abortions or illegal aliens, which would be permitted under the current trillion-dollar plan (that somehow will not increase our costs). It’s like pounding a nail with a stick of dynamite: It might work, but I wouldn’t want to get too close.

If the Democrats just for a minute can stop calling their worried fellow citizens Nazis, Klansmen, and racists for refusing to pay for this health care clunker, perhaps they can get down to actually fixing what needs fixing in the current system. At a minimum, they can read their own bill and pledge to apply to themselves and their families whatever reform is finally passed.