Obama’s Public Healthcare Reconsidered

Public healthcare is a burden on the young and rich of the country, the young in that they are dolling out cash for those who on average require more healthcare assistance and the rich because their taxes will be increased. Doctors will get paid less, government will pay more, and most likely quality will get worse. Additionally, more pressure will be on small businesses to pay into the program. Good or bad thing? 72% of Americans agree with more government influence over the health care system, do you?

According to Obama’s website, the goal of his plan is to make sure that “every American has access to high quality health care.” To do the plan is to expand coverage, improve quality, lower costs, and holding insurance companies accountable. This sounds great, and may actually work. The problem is convincing people to follow through, after the considerable disasters that followed the socialization of British and Canadian healthcare. The information on the site is sparse, giving no specifics on how issues will be resolved or how to pay for these changes. An Associated Press article described the price of the program to me more than 1 trillion, and mentioned that large cuts would be taken from Medicare. In support of his plan, he said that soaring medical costs threaten the foundations of our economy.

Admittedly, government supported healthcare in the US is a much better use of money than wars for oil or unnecessary spending in other countries. So Obama has a valid point in making this a major issue. I just hope it’s better than the old system.