By Mike Gray
Obamacare is a disaster. Rather than liberate the American health care system from bureaucracy and waste, it blankets it with more of both, suffocating innovation and destroying freedom. The result is a system that is inconsistent with the freedom, prosperity, high living standards, and traditions of the American people. — Peter Ferrara
Ferrara of The Heartland Institute has done an extensive study (PDF, 448.7 KB):
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a meeting of the National Association of Counties on March 9, 2010. Now that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (henceforth “the Act” or “Obamacare”) is law, “what is in it” is revealed by 3,256 pages of legislative text, counting the 858 pages of the reconciliation bill (as printed at my local library).
This study is a comprehensive review of the Act and an early appraisal of its likely effects. It is the second report by the author on Obamacare, the first being a critique of bills still being debated by Congress in August 2009. Most of the bill’s provisions, except its tax increases, do not go into effect until 2014. So what follows is like a visit from the ghost of Christmas Future, shadows of what will be, but do not have to be, if we will change it. Obamacare instead could be repealed and replaced with far superior reforms … which in fact are the author’s recommendations.
Ferrara makes “ten principal findings”; the first one alone should be enough to discredit “Obamacare” in the eyes of citizens who believe the Constitution isn’t a dead letter—yet:
Government Takeover of Health Care. Obamacare authorizes an astonishing expansion of government authority over doctors, hospitals, insurers, employers, and individuals. It creates more than 150 new bureaucracies, agencies, boards, commissions, and programs to rule over health care in America.
Government authorities are empowered to tell doctors and hospitals what is quality health care and what is not, what are best practices in medicine, how their medical practices should be structured, and what they will be paid and when. Government authorities will mandate exactly what health insurance with what benefits workers and employers must buy, and the Act imposes tax penalties on them if they do not comply.
Government authorities will dictate to insurance companies exactly what health insurance they must sell, to whom they must sell it, and what they can charge. Obamacare even redistributes premium income among insurers under a new “risk adjustment” mechanism. This adds up to nothing short of a government takeover of health care.