Poll after poll shows Americans are almost universally dismayed over the high cost of health care, as well they should be.
Poll after poll shows Americans are almost universally dismayed over the high cost of health care, as well they should be.
Supporters of socialism have regularly exploited the troubles in the nation’s health care system to call for a government takeover in the form of so-called Medicare for All.
Given that the cost of health care has risen very suspiciously in lockstep with ever-greater government spending and regulation in this sector, skepticism toward salvation-by-government is amply warranted and grossly underrated by the public.
The latest news on ObamaCare fraud buttresses the argument against additional government interventions into health care. The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud found 760,000 fraudulent accounts in the system, the cancellation of which will save the nation’s taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion.
“We are announcing $2.2 billion in American taxpayer money that we’re saving by doing what should have been an obvious thing,” task force leader J. D. Vance wrote on X last week. “We’re actually making sure that the people receiving ObamaCare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them.”
The phony ObamaCare accounts are just a small portion of the total amount of fraud in federal health care programs. Estimates of annual fraud range from $100 billion to more than $300 billion, according to the National Health-Care Anti-Fraud Association.
Fraud, the high cost of health care, and public dissatisfaction with supposed market failure are related products of the same unforced error: government intervention. Government policies have vastly increased the incentives for people to use health care while suppressing the supply. That has driven prices up while transferring money from health care providers to health-care financers: insurance companies.
Proponents of the Affordable Care Act, which established ObamaCare in 2010, promised it would lower prices for everybody. “But that law’s command-and-control regulations drove industry consolidation and pushed up prices instead,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes. “Premiums for employer plans have roughly doubled since 2010, rising at about twice the rate of inflation.”
ObamaCare also drastically expanded the number of people on taxpayer-funded Medicaid by loosening eligibility standards. Medicaid cost U.S. federal and state taxpayers $949 billion in FY2024, an increase of 51 percent since 2019.
Meanwhile, in establishing a parallel insurance system beside the existing one and pushing people into it, ObamaCare managed to double the price of supposedly unrelated and unaffected employer-provided health insurance premiums. As if that were not enough pain, the average deductible for those health plans doubled over just the past 10 years.
While transferring money and buying power to giant insurance companies and away from consumers, the supposedly compassionate and market-friendly government incursions of ObamaCare suppressed innovation by erecting an enormous thicket of new mandates on health care delivery and payment systems, supposedly to keep costs down. Instead, prices and fraud skyrocketed.
The public is justifiably outraged about the effects of these policies. Unfortunately, politicians, the press, and social media giants have deceived the American people about the cause of the problems. It is government, not the free market.
The health care market is anything but free, and the socialist left intensifies the government’s destruction of health care every time it takes power in Washington, D.C. Congress and President Biden expanded ObamaCare enrollment radically beginning in 2021, even though the nation’s poverty rate has been falling since 2014.
Unsurprisingly, the enrollment hike reflected massive fraud, as Vance’s announcement indicates.
Read the rest at American Thinker.
