The recently passed health care bill demonstrates how insane the American political process has become. The fact that American cannot afford the costs is the least of its problems.
Lets face it. No matter how personally repugnant the idea is to our ideological sensibilities, America can afford national health care. The reason America can’t afford this health care bill is because America wants everything.
We want to be a super power. We want to subsidize agriculture. We want to drive the biggest cars and eat the biggest burgers. We want everyone to be able to buy their own home (and we spend more government money subsidizing mortgages than any socialist European country). And so on and so on.
A “progressive” sort of person might reasonably argue that it is unfair to blame the health care bill itself for the fact that American can not afford it. To me, that still means that we should wait until the country is not on the verge of bankruptcy before we even begin to debate the issue.
But whatever. I am a charitable sort of dude. So lets forget the fact that the bill is going to help bankrupt this country. This bill is still one of the most insane things that this nation has ever done.
The simple fact of matter is that the same people who talked about the evil nature of insurance companies are going to give the insurance companies an extra 200 billion dollars a year. On top of that, they are going to force lot of people to pay their own money for insurance who have previously spent their money on other things.
To help pay for this bill, they are going to cut payments to health care providers. This will make providing health care less profitable.
If your goal is to make it easier for people to see a doctor, this is an insane way of going about it. At very least, it is not very cost effective. At the worst, you will have insurance, but you will not be able to get an appointment because everyone will be able to afford to go to the doctor but very few people will want to be doctors for the pay offered.