Problems with Kennedy's Health Plan

The most unpopular features of the Kennedy plan are being kept under wraps, but here are some of the bad ideas being floated. The plan is to force young, healthy people to pay more for their insurance in order to subsidize older, less healthy people under the words modified community rating. The liberals plan to impose fines on employers who don't provide health care for their employees. This will incentivize employers to terminate their current health-benefits and simply pay the fine, which is sure to be less expensive. Another scheme being talked about is to make employees pay income tax on this benefit (which is now is tax-exempt).

The biggest way to cut health care costs is hiding under the euphemism: "comparative effectiveness research." This means that government bureaucrats will assess all health treatments to determine whether or not they are cost-effective and can be approved for payment. The real word for this is rationing. Life or death decisions will be made by bureaucrats on the basis of treatment cost and patient age, rather than by medical diagnosis.

That's the way health care works in Socialist Canada and England, but it's not the American way. Free-market competition, health savings accounts, and letting individuals spend or save their own money, are the best ways to cut health care costs.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.