Begin with the White House Web homepage for the administration's health care program initiatives. It contains many links LFTC readers may follow as desired. The WH Web page points to, among many links, HealthReform.gov, the official government ObamaCare website.
Hudson scholar Betsy McCaughey, who more than anyone else saved America from HillaryCare 15 years ago, calls "Voodoo Health Economics" ObamaCare's numbers; Betsy has additional analysis in a TAS piece. Betsy's arguments are supplemented in the TAS piece with great graphs. Her detailed case against ObamaCare explodes myths that dominate the health care debate, and have for a long time.
Some key points Betsy makes:
(1) Since 1960, Americans' share of expenditures devoted to the Big Four--housing, food, energy & health care--has been constant; what has changed is the mix. Housing has stayed the same percentage, food & energy have declined & health care risen. Because food & energy costs have fallen, health care increases have been affordable for most households.
(2) 90 percent of the difference between what Americans spend on health care and what Europeans spend reflects the greeter wealth of Americans--not wasteful consumption.
(3) Key Obama officials see physicians as overly concerned for their individual patients and not concerned enough about social justice and the larger needs of society.
(4) Private doctors will be forced to follow bureaucratic protocols as to what care is "appropriate" & "cost-effective"; by 2014, those who are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face financial penalties.
(5) In the name of "comparative effectiveness" the new system will impose rationing of care based upon age. As 5 percent of consumers consume 50 percent health care expenditures, targeting them is inevitable.
(6) At least half of increases in health care expenditures reflect better -quality treatments--and get better results for the patient.
(7) Of the 47 million uninsured, 14M are eligible for government-supplied care but fail to sign up; 10M have households incomes above $75,000; only the remaining 23.4M need new assistance. Debit card technology can be applied to minimize fraud, as is now done with food stamps. Sliding scale assistance based upon income within this target group would cost about $20-$25B annually.
(8) Rising Medicare costs are driven not by health care prices, but by aging Boomer demographics.
Read Betsy's superb 11-pager in full to get all the rich detail.
\\
Gorge Will, with his customary concision, said on "ABC News This Week" that President Obama, who has aid he would select a single-payer system were he starting from scratch, makes four flawed arguments to justify a public plan in some form: (1) a public option is needed to improve honesty in plans; (2) a public option will play by the same rules; (3) more consumer choice is needed--despite the existence of 1,300 private entities today; (4)people aren't smart enough to make complex choices--yet they can choose computers. Added Will, "he Left knows that what is wants is a slippery slope towards a single payer."
A recent NY Times front-pager reports that Team Obama plans a big push on health care. Tom Daschle, originally slated to be Health & Human Services Secretary until tax games sank his nomination, wrote a book on health care setting forth his plan for a public system. As policy maven Ronald Bailey notes, Daschle's plan would deny coverage for treatments bureaucrats deem not cost-effective, or those it deems simply ineffective. A doctor asks probing questions, based upon chilling quotations from Daschle's recent book on health care policy.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius advances Team 44's most clever rationale for the ObamaCare plan: to create a public alternative to private company monopolies she alleges exist in in certain areas. Michael Gerson assesses ObamaCare in a WP column. A WSJ editorial sees ObamaCare based on cost illusions. David Frum looks at Canada's ObamaCare. An NRO piece looks at RomneyCare in Massachusetts for lessons. NRO's Mona Charen sees "the whole ball game" in health care. The WSJ published a brief doctor's lament re ObamaCare impairing patient care.
Hudson Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes major issues & choices in health care. Notable is DF-R's focusing on Democrats being willing to do now under President Obama what Candidate Obama assailed: eliminating the tax deduction for employer-paid health insurance premiums. DF-R sees two benefits from such a change (if not canceled out by other Team 44 policies): (1) it fosters growth of private plans; (2) it fosters labor mobility. Safeway is cutting health care costs via market solutions.
A recent NRO issue featured major articles on health care that, being away, I missed. Here is the NRO sub-page for the May 25 issue, which has links to five articles for digital subscriber login; I believe you can join without charge. The articles are those by Ponnuru, Goodman, Hertzlinger, Cannon & Capretta.
The New York Times reports that the American Medical Association opposes Team Obama's public insurance proposal. Karl Rove offers 5 arguments the GOP must make against ObamaCare. Policy ace Peter Ferrara has read the White House's June 2 document, "The Economic Case for Health Care Reform" (56 pages) and calls it "murder by bureaucracy": it expressly contemplates migration to a single-payer public system.
Politics maven Jay Cost analyses health care politics in several essays: Part I; David Broder sees "the rock" in the politics of health care reform. A Forbes article sees "no more Kumbaya" in health care politics, offering rich detail of inside baseball interplay. Michael Barone sees "qualms & questions" about ObamaCare. Kim Strassel sees Team Obama facing a "health tax taboo" created by their own campaign 2008 theme. Time Magazine's Karen Tumulty sees Team Obama "papering over" health care details in its push. Yuval Levin & Bill Kristol argue for defeating ObamaCare, as it is far from assured to pass. The Washington Post reports that the public feels "growing unease" about the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits for year, which can undermine support for health care reform on the grans scale sought by Team obama.