Obama’s failed diagnosis — VOICES for REASON

In all of President Obama’s health care speech, there is one key sentence that reveals our leaders’ basic method of approaching the problem. It also makes clear why our health care system just keeps getting worse and why nothing that Congress passes will do anything to truly solve this mess.

Here is the relevant section, with the sentence highlighted in bold:

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everybody.

On the right, there are those who argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both these approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.

Surely the first step toward fixing a mess as enormous as our health care system should be to identify the cause of the problem. Without a clear diagnosis of the disease, how can one figure out a course of treatment that will actually work? All one will end up doing is trying to treat symptoms while the patient gets sicker and sicker—which is exactly what has been happening to our health care system for decades.

The basic cause of our health care crisis is decades of creeping government intervention (see here, here, and here)—so the only possible solution is one that is completely off the table: working toward repealing all of the government regulations, controls, mandates, and welfare programs that have caused all the destruction in the first place.

This would indeed be a “radical shift.” But it is the only way to truly fix what doesn’t work about our health care system—i.e., the whole system.