The New York Times has published an admission that should turn the election if the issues did not consist of who is the most decrepit human being running for president. The Times, analyzing the state of the affordable care act, also known as Obamacare, in so many words admits that the law has failed and will need to be revisited by the next president. The difference of how each of the two major candidates would reform health care reform could not be starker.
The Times tries to soft peddle the disaster that is Obamacare. “Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement will almost certainly have to change to survive.
The two parties agree that for too many people, health plans in the individual insurance market are still too expensive and inaccessible.” The statement is another way of saying that Obamacare has failed and is collapsing before our eyes, leaving tens of millions of people bereft.
How would the two candidates address the problems?
Hillary Clinton would double down on government involvement in the healthcare system and would institute a so-called “public option,” a camel’s nose in the tent of the abolition of private health care and the imposition of a Canadian-style government system. Such a system would bring along with it health care rationing and systems such as the infamous “Liverpool Pathway” that allowed British doctors and nurses to kill elderly patients by dehydration and starvation whether they were terminally ill or not.
Sarah Palin artfully called that system “death panels.”
Donald Trump, following standard Republican thinking, would remove a great many Obamacare restrictions and regulations, open up insurance markets across state lines, and encourage health care savings accounts. Trump’s approach would apply free market principles to the practice of medicine, lowering costs and expanding access.
In an ordinary issues-oriented election, Obamacare would be a winner for Trump. The law remains wildly unpopular six years after it was signed. The promise that it would lower premiums and expand access to health care has turned out to be a lie. But, sadly, the current election is likely to turn on personalities and not issues, much to the detriment of American voters.
