Hit the brakes on government health care — VOICES for REASON

Nicholas Kristof gives us his best case for passing ObamaCare:

Critics doubt that the Senate and House bills would succeed in containing health care costs very much, and they may be right. It’s hard to know. But the existing system is a runaway roller coaster. Isn’t it prudent to try brake pedals even if we’re not sure how well they’ll work?

You’ve got to love likening a sprawling new government program to further bureaucratize, politicize and intervene in American health care to putting on the brakes.

No, Kristof, I don’t think it’s particularly prudent to expand government’s control over health care based on nothing but the blind hope it will work; I don’t think it’s prudent to approach any problem without understanding the nature of that problem.

A truly prudent course would start by challenging the false alternative between today’s crippled health care system and the bloated monstrosity that is ObamaCare. It would ask: what is the cause of the spiraling costs of health care? And it would discover that the reason health care is so expensive is because of decades of byzantine government regulations and medical welfare programs.

Far from putting on the brakes, ObamaCare would slam on the gas pedal, injecting more and more of the interventionist policies responsible for today’s crisis, and making it even more difficult to move toward a genuine cure: a truly free market in health care.