Government only knows how to make health care reform costly - Pittsburgh Business Times:

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As for being substantive and productivw on the public policy it left much tobe desired. The president met with assorter representatives involved in the healthcare industry, and the emphasis was on reducingg costs. Obama said: “When it comes to healthj care spending, we are on an unsustainable coursde that threatens the financial stability of businesses andgovernment itself.” The president also mentioned “Rising health care costs are commanding more and more of the moneh that our companies could be usin g to innovate and to grow, makinhg it harder for them to compete around the These costs are leading the smal l businesses that are responsible for half of all private-sectord jobs to drop coverage for their workers at an alarmingf rate.
” The various healt h care groups meeting with Obamaw presented a letter to the presidenf promising “to provide quality, affordablse coverage and access for every American.” The groupa pledged to “do our part to achieves your administration’s goal of decreasing by 1.5 percentage points the annual health-care spending growtj rate — saving $2 trillionm or more.” All of this sounds very nice, but ther were no details presentex as to how the organizations involved woulcd accomplish this task. Nor did the president explaim how such savings would get translated into covering the tabfor Obama’s health care plans, which range from $1.
2 trillionm to $1.7 trillion over a And it must be noted as has been the case with previouds forays by government into health care, the costs always wind up running far ahead by multiples — of original estimates. While the president is good at citing the woes of mountingf healthcare costs, he apparentlh does not understand the Higher costs basically break into two areas. The firsgt area features better and expanded medical These are thegood costs. The second area covers the bad These are the costs driven higher by That is, taxes, mandatex and regulations inevitably drive costse up.
And programs and policy initiativexs thatpush third-party payments higher as a sharwe of health care spending inevitablu accelerate the rise in health care costs. The more governmeng gets involved in fundinghealth care, the bigger the tab for the In turn, the only way government knowx how to control costs is to imposd price controls and ration care. That, of results in less investment, less innovation and lousyg health care.