Mark Steyn writes The Doctor Won’t See You Now in The National Review, 12/14/12.
Excerpts:
So good luck retaining any meaningful doctor-patient confidentiality in a system in which more people — insurers, employers, government commissars, TSA Obergropinführers, federal incentive-program auditors — will be able to access your medical records than in any other nation on earth.
No foreigner can even understand the American “health care” debate, which seems to any tourist casually surfing the news channels to involve everything but health care. Since the Second World War, government medical systems have taken hold in almost every developed nation, but only in America does the introduction of governmentalized health care impact small-business hiring practices and religious liberty, and require 16,500 new IRS agents and federal bonuses for contributing to a national database of seat-belt wearers. Thus, Big Government American-style: Byzantine, legalistic, whimsical, coercive, heavy on the paperwork, and lacking the one consolation of statism — the great clarifying simplicity of universal mediocrity.
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, Obamacare governmentalizes one-sixth of the U.S. economy — or the equivalent of the entire French economy. No one has ever attempted that before, not even the French. In parts of rural America it will quickly achieve a Platonic perfection: There will be untold legions of regulators, administrators, and IRS collection agents, but not a doctor or nurse in sight.
HKO
Once the bureaucrats take root in the system then struggle becomes like a victim caught in a spider web. This is why doctors and patients will choose to exit the system, offer concierge medicine, and develop other relationships. Health insurance has become very expensive and so restrictive that one can conceivably spend tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket and still pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year. And the government’s solution to this is to force everyone to buy it.