Obama Breaks Promise on Health Care

John Lott has an excellent piece at FoxNews that explains Obama's broken promise on health care, where he stated on the campaign trail that “If you got health insurance, then you can keep it . . . and we won’t do anything about that.”

Last Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, let the cat out of the bag on health care. In explaining why universal health care wasn’t going to increase the deficit, Summers said that people are just getting too much unnecessary care. Summers claimed: “whether it’s tonsillectomies or hysterectomies . . . procedures are done three times as frequently [in some parts of the country than others] and there’s no benefit in terms of the health of the population. And by doing the right kind of cost-effectiveness, by making the right kinds of investments and protection, some experts that we — estimate that we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our health care system.”

...The selective use of statistics by Summers and others in the Obama administration is startling. In 2000, New York had 501 abortions per 1,000 live births, Wyoming had 1. New York had 31 abortions per 1,000 women, Wyoming had fewer than 1. Abortion procedures rarely involve the health of the mother. Yet, presumably, Summers wouldn’t argue that these gaps, which are 10 to 167 times greater than the 3-to-1 ratio that so upsets him for other procedures, imply that abortions should be rationed.

It’s strange that the Democratic Party, a group that doesn’t think the government should intervene between a doctor and a woman when it comes to determining whether or not to have an abortion, appears to have no problem in telling doctors whether they can perform “tonsillectomies or hysterectomies.”

...Possibly Americans should ask Canadians and Brits –- people who have long suffered from rationing — how happy they are with central government decisions on eliminating “unnecessary” health care.