Hennessey hits “reply all” to Obama e-mail on health care

Former Bush economic adviser Keith Hennessey got an e-mail from Barack Obama this week.  Oh, it wasn’t to ask Hennessey for better advice than Obama gets at the moment, which wouldn’t be difficult to beat.  The e-mail came from Obama’s campaign staff, who apparently remain employed eight months after Obama won the election as some sort of stimulus package, and it explained the need for ObamaCare in a spam attack on millions of inboxes.   Hennessey gives a virtual “reply all” to explain why ObamaCare will make health-care delivery worse, more expensive, and unmanageable:

President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs.  Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children.  The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I.

Congress has gone in the opposite direction.  Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else:  you.  The facts are not in dispute.  The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:

• No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
• More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
• $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
• More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.

The U.S. economy is struggling to recover from a deep recession.  America cannot afford a bill that imposes these extra burdens on an already weak economy.  Rising health care costs are the problem, and so Congress’ solution begins by spending a trillion dollars more on health care.  That doesn’t make sense.

Hennessey understands that the key to reform is expanding the role of competition in health insurance.  ObamaCare does the opposite; it forces all insurance plans to offer essentially the same profile in order to qualify in the “exchanges” to come.  That magnifies one of the anti-competitive bottlenecks already creating problems — the human resources offices at businesses who offer health care.  When insurers have to compete to get individual business, they will innovate and create a multitude of choices for the consumer.

Read all of Keith’s excellent reply.  It makes so much sense that it’s almost guaranteed that Congress won’t listen — unless we all keep calling to make them listen.

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