If the government really wanted to expand coverage for 30 million people all they would have had to do was expand Medicaid/Medicare. It would have been a lot cheaper than the cost of blowing up the private insurance market. Empowering independent doctors instead of the hospitals, the insurance companies and Big Pharma would have been a much cheaper fix.
The meme of Medicare as the template for universal healthcare as the direction which the country should move because it will provide better, more comprehensive and cheaper healthcare is not true. Welcome to the world of Obamacare were centralized planning applied to medicine places the good of the collective over the rights of the individual who is deemed to be too ignorant to make his or her own healthcare decisions. In short, the answer to healthcare is not more government intervention…it is less.
After months of denial that healthcare reform would involve rationing of healthcare for those who are the most vulnerable, the senior citizens who depend on Medicare, the President has come up with a proposal to decrease healthcare costs and guess what….it’s rationing. Under Obamacare, a 15 member panel known as the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) was created to ‘oversee healthcare costs’. This panel consists of individuals appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress - two ingredients that make it highly unlikely that they would be truly independent. In addition, there is no mandate that members be practicing physicians which is a recipe for cuts that are highly likely to affect the delivery of quality individualized patient care.