Megan McArdle points out just how well Massachusetts health care "fixes" - which were the model for the federal plan - are working out:
Watching the Massachusetts health care reform unfold is like watching a tragic game of whack-a-mole. As I noted before, the expected cost-savings have largely not materialized, pushing the thing way over budget, and despite the fact that it already had the highest rates in the country, the cost of insurance is rising at a brisk rate of roughly 10% a year. The best you can say about this cost problem is the wan defense that I've now heard several times: that by provoking a crisis, the system may now finally do real delivery service reform that will control costs.
Side note - how come "starve the beast", when used by conservatives as a way to prevent the growth of government, is laughed at by the left (and rightly so, in my experience), but is then a perfectly legitimate defense for government failure on health care?
She continues:
The quality of legislation coming out of Massachusetts on this stuff right now is really frighteningly bad. There's none of the technocratic fine tuning that we were assured was the greatest reward of this sort of program, just crude, blanket rules that do[n't] much reflect the realities of the market. Rather, they're a cathartic outlet for legislators frustration that any reality exists outside of the power of their pens.
The war against health care spending is shaping up to be a lot like the war on drugs, the war on obesity or the war on terror. No matter how much it fails, the claim will be that the moral imperative is too great to do nothing, so more and more money and more and more erosion of our freedom will be required to really fix the problem.
Comments