The big problem with governmentrun health care

The big problem with government-run health care systems is that people have no skin in the game. Why question the cost of anything when “it’s for free”? In a private system where you pay for a portion of your health care, your costs will keep you vigilant about your checkbook.

Most people are oblivious about their own health even though it’s the ultimate “skin in the game.” Look at the steepening obesity and addiction rates. To make a health care system work, a monetary cost has to be attached. If you gamble with your own money, the odds are you’ll win more than if you gamble with my money.

“Obamacare” is named after one of the most incompetent presidents in our history. So why should his eponymous health care system ever have given anyone hope that it would have worked? And the Dems’ only strategy is to let it inevitably fail so that we have Obamacare on steroids — a single-payer health care monopoly dictated by the massive Washington bureaucracy whose philosophy is, “Expand government and don’t worry, all you have to do is breathe.”

If the Senate Republicans fail to reform the current system, it will send a signal to those Republican governors who declined to take the “free” Washington Obamacare Medicaid money that entitlement expansion is permanent. These governors too will then take the money and opt into the soaring Medicaid debacle.

Without reform, it’s a sure prognosis for more government debt, an ever-stagnating economy, and therefore, a continuing lower standard of living for Obama voters who are already hurting from his economy.

The upper 15 percent, as throughout history, will stride blithely on in Manhattan, Washington and coastal California, never having to wait for a table. And the irony will be colossal. STEPHEN M. SOKOL

Mt. Lebanon