More Thoughts on Obama’s Health Care Speech

Here are some poignant comments on Obama’s latest health care speech:

Greg Scandlen notes that in Obama’s “29th speech devoted exclusively to health care since he became president” he offered plenty of platitudes but few details. Questions Obama failed to address include:

What benefits will be covered? What premiums will be charged? How much will subsidies be worth? How will it be enforced? What is the long-term cost? How will it be paid for?

Redstate offers a similar critique, asking “was he talking about some new bill he has in mind or was he talking about the bills before the U.S. House now” – since the rhetoric of his speech didn’t quite match the leading Congressional proposals.

CAHI takes on Obama’s arguments about “competition”, noting that a lack of competition (or a least a dominant market share) is caused by government regulations. (Given Obama’s decry of profits in health insurance and proposal to foster competition by creating a government-chartered “non-profit,” it should also be noted that almost all of the insurers with dominant market shares are Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations – which in many states, including Pennsylvania, are non-profit and given numerous advantages in the marketplace). CAHI recommends instead that to foster competition, Obama should push to allow competition across state lines.

Finally, the Tax Foundation takes up Obama’s comparison of the “public option” to public universities – which, while better than saying it would be like the post office,  is still a bad analogy, as public universities don’t work the way Obama says the public option would work (or even the way Obama thinks public universities work).