Chris Navin

Vermont can’t keep moving towards single-payer, as even the folks in charge of Vermont have determined it’s not economically feasible.

The ACA isn’t single-payer, of course, but I’m guessing much support for Obamacare comes from similar pools of sentiment: Those sympathetic to activist models of governance and the progressive coalitions held together for a time by this President, as well as those who stand to gain the most from the law: Some lawmakers, like-minds in California’s health-care system, many health-care bureaucrats with dogs in the hunt, direct recipients and the few ‘winning’ companies and contractors who will receive the money, prestige, and political power required to implement the law.

Megan McArdle foresaw the likely outcome Vermont back in April:

‘So this is going to be expensive. So expensive that I doubt Vermont is actually going to go forward with it.

This should be instructive for those who hope — or fear — that Obamacare has all been an elaborate preliminary to a nationwide single-payer system. It isn’t. The politics are impossible, and even if they weren’t, the financing would be unthinkable.’

From another piece of hers:

‘The problem is that Obamacare promised too much: universal coverage, and no rationing, and lower costs.’

The problem as this blog sees it, is that you can end-up harming everyone more than helping in the long-run; over-promising and under-delivering ultimately to those you’re claiming to help and through taking away a lot of liberty, wealth and public trust in the process.

The moral case has never been sufficiently made to me that health care is a right. Of course, there were serious cost problems with the jerry-rigged system we had going (where our health-care delivery system was used to dispense care inefficiently to save lives), but the solution we’ve legislated will now require much more government oversight of a limited resource, potentially increased politicization of the issues at stake, and the likely growth of a vast bureaucracy with its own inefficiencies, self-interested politics and inertia. It’s as if we’ve backed into a forest of potentially unnecessary hazards without necessarily having the potential rewards to show for it.

Richard Epstein At The Hoover Institution: ‘The Obamacare Quaqmire’