This week we discover a Whopper in the American Mid-west, specifically in a May 20th column in The Cleveland Plain Dealer written by Kevin O’Brien and titled, “Where the VA has taken veterans, Obamacare is leading all Americans.” O’Brien doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act and his hostility to that legislation has led him into Whopper land.
To begin with, O’Brien’s conclusion from the current VA scandal is that, “Putting a government bureaucracy in charge of one’s health is a gamble likely to end badly.” Here he is engaging in the classic whopper approach of taking a single case (the VA scandal) and generalizing from it to an entire world of other examples. Government bureaucracies always manage health services badly? What about the highly successful government health services in Europe? For that matter, what about the Santa Clara County Health and Hospital system that provides high quality care to hundreds of thousands of people. Its customers (the taxpayers) were so pleased with the institution that 78% of them voted for bonds to construct a new modern main building for Valley Medical Center. Moreover, when the next influenza pandemic strikes, who you going to call – Big Pharma or the Center for Disease Control?
Secondly, O’Brien argues that there is no better predictor of the course of a single payer system than the VA. But the VA isn’t a single payer model; it’s a government health service. The US government does operate a massive single payer system; it’s called Medicare. Want to know how much people hate and distrust that program? Just try taking away a senior’s Medicare card. Then you’ll get a real whopper in the schnozzle, and not the verbal kind.
Finally, O’Brien insists that the true aim of Obamacare is to wipe out the market for individual insurance and then wipe out employer sponsored plans. One might ask – how does the Affordable Care Act seek to achieve these nefarious goals? It apparently tries to wipe out the market for individual insurance by mandating that vast numbers of Americans have to purchase such a policy from a private firm and by creating marketplaces (exchanges) to facilitate such purchases. In its first flawed year of operations, millions of people in fact bought the kinds of individual policies that O’Brien believes the ACA is designed to destroy. Then, the Act apparently tries to eliminate employer sponsored health insurance by imposing penalties on large firms that fail to offer coverage and providing tax credits to small businesses to encourage them to do so.
Bureaucracies aren’t perfect – neither public nor private ones. Accurate critiques of their poor performance might lead to improvements. Whoppers just discredit their authors.
Bob Brownstein is Director of Policy and Research for Working Partnerships USA
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