Dalmia Debunks Obama

Shikha Dalmia debunks President Obama's claim that government-run health care will save our economy in this May 5, 2009 piece from Forbes. Here is an excerpt:

Obama's Health Care Reform Tactics

True to the advice of his chief of staff to never let a good crisis go to waste, President Barack Obama is using the current economic crisis to sell a top item on the liberal wish-list: universal health care. "You can't fix the economy," he has repeatedly said, "without fixing health care."

But the president needs to take a chill pill before committing America to a huge new entitlement: One is hard pressed to find any evidence from abroad showing that universal coverage has grown the major industrialized economies more than ours in the past--or shielded them more than us from the global slump now.

...But whatever else universal coverage might bring, there is no evidence that it will bring economic nirvana. If anything, contrary to what the president suggests, the correlation runs the other way for countries with universal coverage such as Canada, England, France, Germany and Japan. On nearly every economic front, their performance has been worse than America's--even, surprisingly, in controlling health care costs.

...All in all, there is no major industrialized economy with universal coverage that has performed as well--let alone better--than the United States in the last decade

(Read the whole thing.)