The Liberty Papers

In addition to my own take, there are two other takes on the speech I’d like to highlight as being dead on. The first is from Cato@Liberty, which offers us a look at Obama’s speech in plain English:

Translation: I, Barack Obama, ignoring thousands of years of failed price-control schemes, will impose price controls on health insurance. I will force insurers to sell a $50k policies for $10k. What could go wrong?

With a dose of lightweight sarcasm, this would make a good warm-up read before getting to the more incisive analysis by Shikha Dalmia in Forbes:

t gets worse. In exchange for these bitter tax pills, Obama promised Americans would get eternal health care “security and stability.” To deliver that, he would of course ban insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions–tantamount to forcing fire insurance companies to write coverage on a burning building. He would also prohibit insurers from putting any limits on the coverage they offer and cap what they can require patients to pay out-of-pocket.

In other words, Obama would encourage unlimited health care consumption by patients while eliminating the last vestige of price consciousness.

Insurance is dead. Long live insurance! Really, the more people actually parse and analyze this speech, the more I wonder just how stupid Barack Obama thinks we really are.