Paul Krugman says that “There are lots of good reasons for the young to sign up” for an Obamacare health insurance plan. Yet he names only one: “it’s the law.” Actually, it’s not, since being unconstitutional, it is illegal, null and void. But when has a policy being unconstitutional ever stopped the government from using force to implement it? As Krugman knows, the reason the young are supposed to sign up is because they are generally healthier and must be made to pay higher premiums in order to subsidize the costs of care for the sick.
Krugman also comments on the debacle of HealthCare.gov:
And pay no attention to polls suggesting that the young are now down on the whole thing — those polls are colored by the IT mess of October-November, which is not where we are now.
That’s right, now we are well into the IT mess of December!
In another blog post, Krugman writes:
On both the healthcare and inflation fronts, what you have to conclude is that there are a large number of people who find reality — the reality that governments are actually pretty good at providing health insurance, that fiat money can be a useful tool of economic management rather than the road to socialist disaster — just unacceptable.
What planet is he living on? The government’s efforts to centrally plan our health care for us has been a complete disaster. Government intervention and elimination of any semblance of real market prices is why health care costs are so unaffordable in the first place. Obamacare does nothing to address the actual causes of the rising costs of health care. It attempts to keep insurance “affordable” by eliminating competition and limiting consumer choice. Insurers are trying to keep premiums down by having government force young and healthy people by a plan, as already noted, and by creating smaller networks of doctors willing to accept lower rates to provide health care, meaning that many people will have to pay out of pocket if they want to continue to see their own doctor — notwithstanding Obama’s lies that if people liked their old plans, they could keep them, and if they liked their doctor, they could keep him.
As for the claim that government central banks are “a useful tool of economic management”, keep in mind that this is the same Paul Krugman who advocated after the bursting of the dot-com bubble that the Federal Reserve create a housing bubble to replace it by printing money to keep interest rates low. For his abysmal record on the housing bubble, see my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian economics in the financial crisis. The government’s attempts to centrally plan the economy, too, have been incredibly disastrous.
