Remember how the more we learned about ObamaCare, the more we would like it? Well, it seems the more we learn about this law, the less President Obama wants to talk about it. He relegated it to just a few paragraphs, tucked away near the end of his latest State of the Union political rally speech. And while he defended the law, he closed his health care remarks by begging Congress not to repeal it, and asking the American people to nag each other into buying his health plans.
My full response to the president’s health care remarks are over at my Forbes blog, Darwin’s Fool. Here’s an excerpt:
Note what the president did not say: he did not say that [Amanda] Shelley would not have gotten the care she needed. That was already guaranteed pre-ObamaCare. If ObamaCare saved Shelley from something, it was health care bills that she couldn’t pay. It’s impossible to know from this brief account just how much that might have been. But we can say this: making health care more affordable for Shelley should not have cost anyone else their job. It may be that ObamaCare doesn’t reduce bankruptcies at all, but merely shifts them from medical bankruptcies to other types of bankruptcies because more people cannot find work.
Actually, I should amend that. Making health care more affordable will cost some people their jobs, and that’s okay. Progress on affordability comes when less-trained people (e.g., nurse practitioners) can provide services that could previously be provided only by highly trained people (e.g., doctors). When that happens, whether enabled by technology or removing regulatory barriers, prices fall – and high-cost providers could lose their jobs. The same thing has happened in agriculture, allowing food prices to drop and making it easier to reduce hunger. My point was that we should not be making health care more affordable for Ms. Shelley by taxing her neighbor out of a job.