A crescendo of outrage is growing in the U.S. over the disastrous roll-out of President Barack Obama鈥檚 new health-care program.
An estimated 50 million Americans will have their existing health plans cancelled, even though the president promised (on more than two dozen occasions by one count) this would not happen.
Millions more are reeling at the huge increase in premiums now staring them in the face 鈥� in some instances more than 100 per cent.
The website portal doesn鈥檛 work. Personal data isn鈥檛 secure. In New York, online clients trying to buy coverage were directed to a bakery store.
And these are just the immediate and obvious screw-ups. The real horror show is still to come.
It took 50 years in Canada to develop our universal program, piece by intricate piece. The Democrats in Congress tried to do it in one 2,000-page statute that hardly any of them had read. What could go wrong?
But I want to focus on a different kind of challenge. To meet its budget targets, Obama鈥檚 Affordable Care Act requires a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth.
The people who designed the program wanted the elderly to have better health care, a laudable objective. But the president had promised that overall, prices would actually go down, a virtual impossibility.
To get even close, large numbers of young people have to be signed up, by force if necessary (there are fines to compel compliance). The program needs these clients, because most 20- to 30-year-olds make little or no use of the health-care system.
In a genuine insurance scheme, purchasers like these would be charged less. But under Obamacare, those clients will pay premiums far higher than their risk profile requires.
By this means, prices are held down for the poor and elderly. In effect, young people will be made to buy insurance at rates that are inflated, because the public interest demands it.
Wealth transfers like this are commonly used in the financing of public services. The idea, in itself, isn鈥檛 novel or outlandish.
But usually, the methodology is a little more disguised or nuanced, a little less in-your-face. Progressive income-tax systems are the obvious example. Over the years, we鈥檝e grown accustomed to the idea that the well-off should expect to be soaked.
But what鈥檚 about to happen with Obamacare is a much tougher sale. Fit young adults will be co-opted into buying 鈥渋nsurance鈥� that many don鈥檛 want, at a price that any competent actuary would laugh at.
That鈥檚 a pretty clumsy financing technique, because it invites an almost mathematical refutation. If you鈥檙e 30 or younger, the numbers simply don鈥檛 add up, and probably not if you鈥檙e 40 either.
On every conservative blog-site and radio talk show, there will be armies of accountants ready to tell Johnnie B. Meek how badly he got screwed. And if what he was buying 鈥� and all he was buying 鈥� was health insurance for himself, he did get screwed.
Democrats will insist there鈥檚 a larger transaction going on here. And of course, in a sense, that鈥檚 true. They鈥檙e providing coverage for people who can鈥檛 afford it
But it was a bad mistake, possibly fatal, to fund a new national health-care program with such an easily discredited methodology. It would have been better to go the 91原创 route, and use taxation models that don鈥檛 pretend to be something they鈥檙e not.
As it stands, Obamacare is both a political train wreck, and more broadly, a public-policy debacle. Far from advancing the cause of health reform, this foolishness may have killed any chance of genuine progress for a generation.
Lawrie McFarlane is a retired civil servant. He was deputy health minister in B.C. during the mid-1990s.
