Karl Rove offers a warning in today’s WSJ about the irreversablility of embracing socialized medicine. He provides government medicine’s opponents with 5 arguments to oppose the move. I think the most persuasive is this:
Third, government-run health insurance would crater the private insurance market, forcing most Americans onto the government plan. The Lewin Group estimates 70% of people with private insurance — 120 million Americans — will quickly lose what they now get from private companies and be forced onto the government-run rolls as businesses decide it is more cost-effective for them to drop coverage. They’d be happy to shift some of the expense — and all of the administration headaches — to Washington. And once the private insurance market has been dismantled it will be gone.
Most people who want government medicine want it to provide for someone else, but they like their own healthcare plan. If everyone understood that their healthcare would inevitably be affected by a government take-over, support for socialized medicine might vanish. But will the media let that message and these figures out? Hard to imagine…