The Barack Obama Healthcare Reform - Essay Example

The entire bill is facing significant challenges due to court decisions that are emerging and budget projections which have turned out to be far rosier than reality allows.“The director of the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the health care reform legislation would cost, over the next ten years, $115 billion more than previously thought, bringing the total cost to more than $1 trillion. (Tapper)”The government is conducting a wholesale takeover of what was essentially a market provided service.

Whatever one may think of the merits of the issue, the Nolan Chart allows the reader to determine with fair precision where the speech lands in the political pedigree on the chart itself. Obama declares: “Now, there are some who wanted a single-payer government-run system.  That’s not this bill.  The Republicans wanted what I called the “foxes guard the henhouse approach” in which we further deregulate the insurance companies and let them run wild, the notion being somehow that that was going to lower costs for the American people.

  I don’t know a serious health care economist who buys that idea, but that was their concept.”Obama is admitting that an authoritarian model is being employed through the use of increased regulation of the health care providers in the nation. If that were not the case, why would the legislation be necessary in the first place if it were not designed to increase the power of the government to regulate and control the industry? He goes on to describe the creation of a government cartel to regulate the industry by forcing the market to behave in a non-market fashion: “The second thing this does is it creates a pool, a marketplace, where individuals and small businesses, who right now are having a terrible time out there getting health insurance, are going to be able to purchase health insurance as part of a big group -- just like federal employees, just like members of Congress.

  They are now going to be part of a pool that can negotiate for better rates, better quality, and more competition.”This pool is created by forcing association.  “And number four, this is the biggest reduction in our deficit since the Budget Balance Act -- one of the biggest deficit reduction measures in history -- over $1.3 trillion that will help put us on the path of fiscal responsibility.” This may very well be the scariest notion of all. Imagine the government telling that they are going to regulate and in some cases take over insurance pools and insist that in the process they will make it cheaper, more accessible and better at delivering quality than the private marketplace.

The aforementioned quote from the Congressional Budget Office certainly makes that an unlikely proposition. Through the use of regulation and taxation without overt nationalization of the industry, the new health care reform intends on further cartelizing the insurance industry, increasing the regulatory burden and imposing taxes and fines on citizens and firms that don’t comply. Taxes and fines and the refusal to pay them also imply incarceration for the non-compliant. It is interesting to note that the taxes to pay for the Obama Health Care Reform begin soon yet they will receive ten years of taxes for six years of provision when it takes effect in 2014.

One need only look at the state of the Massachusetts health care reform to see what the nation is in for in the fiscal future. Joseph Rago remarked: “Meanwhile, Richard Moore, a state senator from Uxbridge and an architect of the 2006 plan, has introduced a new bill that will make physician participation in government health programs a condition of medical licensure. This would essentially convert all Massachusetts doctors into public employees.”A sign of things to come; by any measure on the Nolan chart, the speech most definitely champions a big government initiative.