Summary: Barack Obama opposes monopolies – but not a government monopoly on paying for health care, a.k.a, single-payer health care. Then it’s OK. The “Audacity of Hypocrisy,” anyone?
“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” said Barack Obama at a town hall meeting in New Mexico. (And he’s said it before.) Under single-payer government is by definition the only entity that pays doctors and other providers of medical care. There would be no insurance companies. Government would be the monopolistic insurer in this form of socialized medicine.
How how does this fit with Senator Obama’s view of antitrust laws? In a statement to the American Antitrust Institute, he said:
Antitrust is the American way to make capitalism work for consumers. Unlike some forms of government regulation, it ensures that firms can reap the rewards of doing a better job. Most fundamentally, it insists that customers—not government bureaucrats, and not monopoly CEOs—are the judges of what best serves their needs. …
Regrettably, the current administration has what may be the weakest record of antitrust enforcement of any administration in the last half century. … And in seven years, the Bush Justice Department has not brought a single monopolization case.
The consequences of lax enforcement for consumers are clear. Take health care, for example. There have been over 400 health care mergers in the last 10 years. The American Medical Association reports that 95% of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated and the number of insurers has fallen by just under 20% since 2000. These changes were supposed to make the industry more efficient, but instead premiums have skyrocketed, increasing over 87 percent over the past six years.
As president, I will direct my administration to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement.
So if Senator Obama were “designing a system from scratch,” he’d monopolize the entire health insurance industry. Apparently government monopolies are OK. But he decries the voluntary mergers of insurance companies and that authorities did not step in to make such mergers criminal acts.
Obama claims that antitrust “insists that customers—not government bureaucrats, and not monopoly CEOs—are the judges of what best serves their needs.” Under single payer medicine that Obama supports, government has a monopoly on medical insurance. Hence, under single-payer medicine a monopoly CEO is also a government bureaucrat, and shall be the judge of what best serves customer needs!
