Obamacare Still an Awful Idea

If you’ve not read about the recent McKinsey & Company study investigating the likelihood of businesses dropping employee health coverage due to Obamacare, The Weekly Standard has all the gory details.

The study finds that, “Overall, 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014… Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50 percent.”

You didn’t actually believe President Obama when he promised you could keep your current coverage, did you? This particular mandate, of course, isn’t mandatory for government medicine’s loudest proponents, as summarized fiendishly by Karl Rove’s minions at Crossroads GPS -

Cato Institute writer Michael F. Cannon opines about one of Obamacare’s central cost-saving schemes, and why it’s destined for failure:

Inefficient providers have effectively killed nearly every pilot program that previous administrations promised would make Medicare more efficient. Suppliers of wheelchairs and other medical equipment have blocked efforts to reduce the inflated prices Medicare pays them. The industry has killed or sabotaged at least four federal agencies dedicated to researching which medical treatments don’t work.

Cutting costs is sort of a big deal, with unfunded Medicare obligations already totaling $24.8 trillion before Obamacare’s shady accounting and expanded entitlements kick in. Another Obamacare stick, Comparative Effectiveness Research, might reduce the cost of health care… while gravely damaging its effectiveness:

CER can be beneficial if used solely to inform doctors and patients to guide decision-making. However, the new law lays the groundwork for bureaucrats to use CER in Medicare to make coverage decisions and otherwise compel physicians to treat patients not according to what is best for the individual but according to what the evidence shows is best in most cases.

Back at The Weekly Standard, numbers from a Rasmussen poll of likely voters don’t look good for fans of socialized medicine.

By a margin of more than 2 to 1 (48 to 20 percent), likely voters think Obamacare would reduce, rather than improve, the quality of health care. By a margin of more than 3 to 1 (53 to 15 percent), they think it would raise, rather than lower, health costs. By a margin of 4 to 1 (56 to 14 percent), they think it would raise, rather than lower, deficits.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi’s immortal words: the more that we find out what’s in Obamacare, the more appalled we are that you passed it.

Bigger, more expensive, more intrusive government is not the answer to big government’s past and current failures in the health care industry. As responses to Paul Ryan’s budget remind us, Washington leftists have no connection to fiscal reality, no interest in personal freedom, and certainly no concern for the will of the voters.

Have you signed a petition supporting the Health Care Freedom Amendment yet?

Follow me on Twitter: @jasonahart

Cross-posted from that hero.