Big Biz Revolts Over ObummerCare

This isn’t at all surprising. Big business in America was on board when they thought they could shift the burden of health insurance onto Uncle Sugar. Now that they find out they’ll pay even more if ObummerCare passes they’re having second thoughts.

From The Wall Street Journal:

One lesson that Democrats learned from the failure of HillaryCare in 1994 is that they had to buy the silence, if not the outright support, of the business class. They’ve done this brilliantly by peddling the illusion that ObamaCare will “lower costs” for employers.

But slowly as the legislative details become clear, it is dawning on executives of businesses large and small that reform is boiling down to a huge tax increase to finance a gigantic new entitlement. The cost and quality of care are afterthoughts that will both suffer, as a growing roll of medical experts have been writing on these pages.

The tragedy is that ObamaCare is not inevitable and far better reforms are still possible—but only if the current version is defeated and Democrats are forced back to the drawing board. With only a few exceptions, drug makers and health-care providers have shown that their priority is rent-seeking from government, which means that any last-minute push back will have to come from the other six-sevenths of the economy.

The Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business have finally figured out they were being taken for a ride. And now even the Business Roundtable, the association of CEOs from the largest companies, is engaged in a furious internal debate about the way forward. The Roundtable has been vaguely supportive but restive. But last week Roundtable president John Castellani was informed in a contentious conference call that many of his members will quit if the organization isn’t more assertive against ObamaCare.

What the executives leading the revolt understand is that the current reforms bear no resemblance to the more rational system the Roundtable favors. As Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon accurately put it in September, “The problem with the health-care market in this country is that it doesn’t really function as a market—leaving major consumer needs unmet, costs unchecked by competition, and basic practices untouched by the productivity revolution that has transformed every other sector of the economy.” …

There’s nothing rational about the democrats’ plans for transforming healthcare in America. As the above op-ed points out, if they succeed, they’ll do nothing to improve the health of Americans. All they’ll do is leave behind a great big mess for someone else to clean up. And what a mess it will be.