Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Bottom-Line on ObamaCare

It's really just as simple as Ace paints it.

If the middle class winds up subsidizing the poor, as they must under Obama's plan, either through higher taxes or rationed care, then the middle class is not, in fact, getting more for less, but rather getting less for more.

There is simply no way around this problem. This is why enormous social-spending programs are met with such resistance. If we were only talking about taxing an unpopular, tiny minority like "the rich," we'd already have all these measures on the books.

But we're not, of course. The rich are rich, but the rich are few. You can't pay for big programs only by taxing the rich.

So Obama's fundamental problem is that he's selling health care "reform" as some kind of advantage to the middle class. But it's not an advantage to the middle class at all; it's an advantage to the poorest Americans, a nice thing in and of itself, but it's coming directly from the wallets of the middle class.

The middle class which wants to pay less for more, not more for less.

And Obama particularly wants to go after middle class seniors on Medicare, slashing their coverage to provide more of it to the younger and poorer.

There is simply no finessing this. Obama can talk all he likes about increasing "efficiency" but no one believes that you can come up with hundreds of billions of dollars in mere efficiency gains, especially not in such a regulation-bound industry like health care.

If you want to have a lot of fun with the LeftOWackies, just ask them "How can we add 46 million people to a system, promising cheaper and better stuff, AND reduce the cost of the system?"

They never answer. They ignore the question; they evade the question; they answer a DIFFERENT question; or they go to automaton-Obama-default: call Nazi and pout.

But they cannot answer the question.

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