Media Declare 'Consensus' for Gov't Intervention on Health Care

The Los Angeles Times said December 1 the "consensus" in America is that we need "unprecedented government intervention to create a system of universal protection."

This consensus is made up of "leading groups of businesses, hospitals, doctors, labor unions and insurance companies," the Times's Noam Levey wrote.

Interest groups and coalitions are spending money to promote health reform, whether their advocacy is detailed or vague. But the American people also have spoken on health reform, and they don't want more government control. 

In its recent study, The Council for Excellence in Government noted that Gallup poll results "over many years ... show that the public has a preference for maintaining a system based on private insurance rather than a government-run health care system."

The CEG study also found a majority of Americans, 57 percent, said they were not willing to pay more in taxes to cover the uninsured. Certainly people were concerned about the uninsured, but not necessarily wild about the idea of having an expansion of taxpayer-funded benefits. 

That's one of the problems with creating a "system of universal protection," and Levey lists more: 

"Hospitals and doctors fear another public program would reduce what they are paid, as Medicare and Medicaid have done. Insurers worry they could lose customers to the government. Also unresolved is what mechanisms might be created to force individuals or businesses to get insurance, both potentially contentious subjects.

And few have tackled how the government will control costs and set standards of care, proposals that raise the unpopular prospect of federal regulators dictating which doctors Americans can see and what drugs they can take."

The "mechanism" to police individual and business insurance regulations is likely to be a tax on both. Since Americans have already said they don't want higher taxes, that's a consensus the media should explore.