Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Domenech on "Bigger Is Better"

Ben Domenech has a nice OpEd in the 9/6/2012 Daily Caller, "The Obamacare Fallacy: Bigger is better".

ObamaCare law explicitly drives increasing consolidation of doctors, hospitals, and providers.  Proponents argue this allows of increased efficiencies of scale. 

But the real agenda is that it allows greater government control.  It's much easier for the government to regulate 100 large "Accountable Care Organizations" than 100,000 individual hospitals and private practices.

Such consolidation is merely a continuation of a much older strategy. Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism described how the Roosevelt administration sought similar consolidations of American agriculture and business during the New Deal. As Goldberg noted:
[If] you want to use business to implement your social agenda, then you should want businesses themselves to be as big as possible. What’s easier, strapping five thousand cats to a wagon or a couple of giant oxen?
Bigger may be "better" for the government, but not for patients or doctors.