On the gurney to serfdom 108
Investor’s Business Daily explains how the Democrats are moving steadily towards single-payer total government control of health care:
Are the Democrats who want to place price controls on premiums trying to destroy the health insurance business? If we didn’t know better, we’d say yes. And we do know better — don’t we?
It was just a month ago that the Democrats passed and signed a radical overhaul of the country’s health care sector. But 3,000 pages of new law apparently are not enough for lawmakers who don’t read the bills they vote on.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, says there’s “an enormous loophole” in her party’s reform effort that must be closed. So she’s introduced a bill that would give the secretary of health and human services the authority to review health plan premiums and block “any rate increase found to be unreasonable.”
This, after the public was told many times over that the Democrats’ health care legislation would bring down costs and rein in those troublesome health insurance companies that are making so much money.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to see where the Democrats are going with this. Their regulators will establish price controls, which will drive health plan providers out of business as the restrictions make it impossible or unreasonable for them to make profits.
To deal with the shortage of health plans, Democrats will then complete the government takeover of medicine by placing Washington in the position of being the sole provider of health care.