Health Bureaucrat Pens Bland Op-Ed Saying Health Bureaucrats Deserve More Power

One thing you can certainly say about Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius: She knows her talking points. Her op-ed making the case for health-care reform in this morning's Washington Post is a nearly perfect example of the generic case for liberal reform: Lead with the moral need to cover the country's uninsured, proceed onward to bashing the health insurance industry, claim that expensive reform will actually save money, and finish by calmly reassuring the reader that no, there are no plans to give the U.S. medical system over to "socialized medicine."

As op-eds go, it's about as exciting as doing laundry, which seems to be par for the course for Sebelius, whose State of the Union response last year was a bigger snooze-fest than Andy Warhol's "Sleep." It also fails to tell the whole story about health-care reform.

Liberal health-reform advocates constantly tout the fact that there are roughly 47 million uninsured in the U.S. But that statistic ignores the fact that many of those individuals are already eligible for existing health-care programs, or only temporarily uninsured, or wealthy enough to be able to buy insurance on their own. The real number of chronically uninsured is, instead, about, 10 million.

The health insurance industry, meanwhile, isn't perfect, but there's a strong case to be made that it's actually a more efficient provider of quality care than the government. As Cato's Michael Cannon argued in a paper last week, government programs make their administrative costs artificially low by making little effort to root out waste and fraud, and by hiding their true costs in other parts of government. And part of the reason premiums are so high is that insurance companies are subject to various government-imposed coverage mandates that drive up prices by squeezing low-cost plans out of the market.

As for the claim that health insurance reform will save money, there's just no indication that currently proposed legislation will do so. As I wrote a few weeks ago, "according to CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, it will 'significantly expand the federal responsibility for health-care costs,' exacerbating rather curing the dire, health-care driven budget problems we already face."

Granted, Sebelius is right that, in the strictest sense of the word, current overhaul plans wouldn't "socialize" medicine, at least not in the government-employs-all-the-doctors British sense. But there's no deny that it would greatly expand the government's already-significant involvement in medical care. Of course, as Health and Human Services Secretary, that's exactly what Sebelius wants—an expansion of her agency's power and responsibilities. Overhauling the nation's health-care system in the manner proposed by Sebelius, Obama, and Congressional Democrats might not make the lives of most Americans better, as the op-ed claims—but it would certainly be a boon for Kathleen Sebelius.

I wrote a recap of what's wrong with health-care reform proposals here. Shikha Dalmia wrote about the myth of free-market health-care here. Reason's health-care archive is here.