Realizing the True Cost of Obamacare

The New York Times finally decides to spill the beans.
By Jeffrey H. Anderson
June 4, 2010

Much of the focus on Obamacare has rightly been on its fiscal recklessness. But in a New York Times story —the type of story the Times couldn’t seem to find space for prior to Obamacare’s passage — we see a clear glimpse of the kind of care that Obamacare would likely spawn.

With the nomination brewing of Dr. Donald Berwick — a gushing admirer of the British National Health Service — to head Medicare and Medicaid and with Americans already clamoring for repeal in ever-greater numbers, the story, although tardy, is an important one. It highlights the very real dangers of having millions of the decisions made by doctors and patients across America replaced by the decisions of government administrators in Washington — who rely on studies they don’t understand and pick studies to rely on that aren’t worth understanding.

In this case, the relied-upon study was completed by Dartmouth researchers, who were thrust into the national limelight by an administration searching to find an angle, any angle, to try to sell its unpopular overhaul. As the Times writes, “The debate about the Dartmouth work is important because a growing number of health policy researchers are finding that overhauling the nation’s health care system will be far harder and more painful than the Dartmouth work has long suggested. Cuts, if not made carefully, could cost lives.” the rest

In short, the president’s claims that Obamacare would lower costs have been widely debunked, even from the Medicare chief actuary in President Obama’s own administration. Now his inferences that by lowering costs (which Obamacare wouldn’t do), Obamacare would also increase the quality of care, have similarly been debunked — although one marvels at the insular environment in Washington that allowed them to take hold in the first place.