The Wall Street Journal has an excellent story today detailing the woes of the French health care system. This is the model upon which the Obama folks base their current "reforms." The system is awash in red ink and services are being slashed. This, even though the national health care system bargains directly with doctors and pharmaceutical firms over fees and prices. Doctors reputedly are not money-greedy in France and feel that being a physician is a calling. Even with all of this, the system is going bankrupt. It doesn't work. Nothing can keep prices low and services high but a free market in health care. As numerous examples in the US demonstrate and as the French national health care system is now demonstrating, government cannot provide good services for low prices. It is simply not one of the possible outcomes.
If you want to see how private-public partnerships work in government, look no further than Fannie and Freddie. Politically charged from their infancy, these two agencies are a disgraceful living tribute to the failure of the government to provide high service and low prices. The taxpayers have been annihilated by these two ridiculous quasi-governmental (now fully governmental institutions). Turning our medical care system over to the government will mean that only the well-to-do and politically connected will receive good health care in the future. This doesn't disturb Obama, Pelosi, Kennedy, Boxer, Feinstein, Kerry, Rangel, Dodd, Gore, Clinton for good reason. All of these folks are in the wealthiest one percent of the nation's population. They really don't care what gets enacted. Fannie and Freddie didn't lay a glove on them and health care reform won't either.
Only the average American gets hurt by health care reform. The very wealthy and the poorest among us will feel no effect at all.
