Deceptive Obama health-care plan worsens status quo, explodes costs, say Washington Post columnists

The Washington Post endorsed Obama — indeed, it hasn’t endorsed a Republican for president since 1952 — but a lot of Washington Post columnists are not enthusiastic about his health-care plan, which is costly, obsolete, deceptive, and harmful.

Obama’s plan would just aggravate the status quo and increase skyrocketing health-care costs, says veteran editorialist Robert J. Samuelson: “One of the bewildering ironies of the health-care debate is that President Obama claims to be attacking the status quo when he’s actually embracing it. . .While denouncing skyrocketing health spending, he would increase it.”

Earlier, Samuelson noted that Obama’s health-care plan is full of elements that are “naive, hypocritical” and “simply dishonest.”

Elderly people would be subjected to worrisome undue influence regarding end-of-life decisions, says Charles Lane, a liberal editorialist at the Post.

Obama’s plan ignores basic, obvious reforms of the health-care system needed to stem skyrocketing costs and provide health-care security, says Charles Krauthammer — such as a more efficient, less litigious way to decide medical malpractice cases, which wealthy, liberal trial lawyers oppose. But instead of reform, Obama is proposing a massive bureaucracy, “with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity — employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions,” that will increase health-care costs rather than cut them as Obama claims. In short, Obama is proposing “a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care.”

In the New York Times, economist Tyler Cowan calls Obama’s plan “voodoo economics.”

Although the federal deficit has exploded, due to massive new government spending, the Obama Administration wants to pile on even more federal spending, including a health-care “reform” proposal predicted to cost at least $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). In reality, Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted, the way past health-care expansions always have.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 important freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains politically-correct affirmative action mandates and subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but could access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.