Nationalized Health Care: Hazardous to Your Health

By all measures, Obamacare has been an abject failure. Most Americans are choosing to pay a fine rather than purchase care through the system. The current maximum fine for 2016 is either $695 or 2.5 percent of taxable income — whichever is greater.

Those who do buy in are faced with deductibles of over $8,000. In other words, your insurance won’t pay for anything unless you pay for the first $8,000. Rarely do people meet that limit.

Politics, lifestyle of patients, and philosophical differences of those in power could determine who gets what.

Obamacare doesn’t work — because it couldn’t work.

It was poorly designed from the get-go, engineered by bureaucrats and academics who had little or no knowledge of how the health care marketplace operates in the real world.

Young, healthy Americans aren’t enrolling in Obamacare plans, and insurance companies are struggling to turn a profit on marketplace plans, leading countless insurers to head for the exit.

Related: There is No ‘Fix’ for Obamacare

Earlier this year, the nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group, announced it would be completely pulling out of Obamacare by 2017 and tens of millions of Americans would be left with no health insurance. Aetna and Anthem are likely to follow. In other words — “you can’t keep your doctor.”

Yet “no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise,” President Obama told the American Medical Association in 2009. “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

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Hillary Clinton and the Democrats seem to be in favor of expanding the bad idea of Obamacare to a government single-payer system, which is likely to have even worse consequences.

Below are seven reasons a government-run health care system is a bad idea.

1.) Government decides who gets what.
Patients may be subjected to extremely long waits for treatment (as is the case in other countries with National Health Services) as the government rations out things like MRIs, drugs, specialty physician visits, and more. Politics, the lifestyle of patients, and philosophical differences of those in power could determine who gets what.

2.) Government controls drug prices.
This would lead to the bankruptcy of drug companies and the loss of millions of scientists working in those fields. To be exact: The world depends on for-profit drug companies to invent new drugs and vaccines to treat new and mutating drug-resistant viruses, bacteria, cancers, and vaccines for diseases.

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3.) Fewer will enter the field of medicine.
Since medicine-related jobs will no longer be for-profit and reimbursements will be government-controlled, there will be less of an incentive for America’s best and brightest to go into clinical practice and medical research.

4.) The healthy will further cover the cost of care for the unhealthy.
Health-conscious people who exercise, eat right, and take care of themselves will have to pay for those who make bad health decisions and choose to smoke, abuse illegal drugs, have type 2 diabetes, become obese, etc.

5.) Special interest groups may not have your best interest in mind.
The health care industry likely will become infused with the same kind of corruption, back-room dealing, and special interest-dominated sleaze that is already prevalent in other areas of government.

Related: Scrap Obamacare and Start Over

6.) Free nationalized care isn’t “free.”
The Congressional Budget Office has said that “free” nationalized health care and subsidies will cost the taxpayer in excess of 1 trillion dollars per year, and would raise the income tax rate to close to 60 percent per year. This 60 percent tax rate is the case in all other countries with national health care. (I still remember when Barack Obama said Obamacare will add “not one dime” to the deficit.)

7.) Government rarely runs efficiently; this would be no different.
It also creates a panel of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats empowered to make rulings that reduce health care spending. Nationalized health care would likely be monitored by the IRS. Knowing there isn’t a single government agency or division that runs efficiently — do we really want an organization that developed the U.S. tax code handling something as complex as health care?

Dr. David Gortler is a professor of pharmacology and a former Food and Drug Administration senior medical officer, now a Pharmacology expert and FDA expert with FormerFDA.com  He is also the former FDA/health care policy adviser for the 2016 Ted Cruz presidential campaign.