No Need For ObamaCare If Providers Are Liberated

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

We continue to read with dismay about the adverse effects of ObamaCare ... the crafty way it was passed, the 2,700-page bill no one read, the "Cornhusker Kickback" and other secret deals, the hidden regulation and costs. Now our fears about the bill are reality.

The Department of Health and Human Services has generated thousands of more pages of regulation. Even the government admits ObamaCare will cost at least twice its estimates and will increase health care costs by $2,000 annually per family. Many will not keep their current insurance and doctors.

Practicing doctors, who know best how to care for patients most cost effectively, are still today left out of the health care debate . .. a small voice among powerful lobbyists, politicians and regulators. Doctors are particularly skeptical about ObamaCare: 90% say premiums will go up; 70% say it will drive the best and brightest out of the profession; 65% say quality of care for their patients will decline. I am one of those doctors who fears for my patients' future care.

Real health care reform is possible and necessary. But it won't come from government regulation dictating methods of practice and health insurance purchase requirements. Over-reaching regulation depersonalizes patients and dissociates them from its demoralized doctors, favors hospitals that can manipulate the system, guarantees profit for giant insurance companies without regard to health outcome, and disenfranchises patients from authority over, and responsibility for, their own health and its costs.

Real health care reform comes from eliminating the misguided rules and incentives created by government and other interlopers into the patient-doctor covenant.

The high cost and limited access in our current system is caused by government. Here are a few examples:

Medicare currently pays hospitals two to four times more than a nonhospital vendor for the exact same stress test or MRI.