Killing The Patient To Save It

CNBC goofball Dennis Kneale gives the old "Kill Obamacare to save health care reform" argument only he has the worst logic I've ever seen for it.

Do you really want the feds forcing you to buy insurance and taxing your family almost $4,000 a year if you refuse or decide you can't afford it?

That's what happens when health coverage--a personal responsibility of each of us--is transformed into an obligation of government, which now supposedly must provide it for all of us.

We simply can't afford it. Rather than aim at all 300 million of us, an ObamaLite overhaul should narrow the target to two groups:

First: The 15 million or so Americans who are the Truly Uninsured: they want coverage, can't afford it and don't qualify for government help. So let's give them some help.

Second: the 12 million who buy individual freelance policies rather than get coverage on the job. They need easy online access to a newly formed marketplace with interstate competition among the nation's 1,300 private insurers.

Wait a minute--we have 46 million uninsured, based on the latest U.S. Census data. Why help only that first one-third? Because, among all the uninsured, one-third are people who could afford insurance but elect to take the risk of going bare.

Which is their right--until Bam & Co. take it away as the Baucus bill would do.

Now Kneale does have a point here: the Baucus bill sucks. What we need is an affordable public option which the Baucus bill does not have. But then he goes into spiriling lunatic land.

After narrowing Obamacare at the start to just the Truly Uninsured--the 15 million lower-income folks who want coverage but don't qualify for government help—we also should make them pay some portion from their own wallets.

For them, Obamacare could cover, free of charge, catastrophic care and chronic care (for five often preventable diseases that pose over half of all costs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and pulmonary disease).

That "doughnut" would leave recipients to cover the hole in the middle: regular doctor visits for routine ailments and maintenance.

One big cost problem we already have is a function of too much insurance.

Some 50% of all healthcare costs already are paid by government. Employer health plans cover the other biggest chunk. And only a sliver of the total cost is paid directly out of our own pockets.

If that personal portion went up, only then would we behave as tougher, smarter shoppers and worry more about keeping our own expenses down.

Got that? He doesn't want people who can afford health insurance but choose not to have it to be forced to pay for it, because that's unfair and something these folks can't afford, but on the other hand he wants people who can't afford health care now to pay more for it in order to discourage them from using health care.

In other words, rich people who don't want health insurance shouldn't be forced to buy it, but people who do want it should be forced to pay a lot for it...more than they can afford. This will drive costs down somehow.

And people wonder why I think this guy's a knucklehead.