November 18, 2009, - 12:04 pm
Germany Trying to Escape Obama’s Great Idea of German-Style Healthcare
The geniuses in the Obama Administration pushing ObamaCare keep telling us that we need to be like Europe. And, in that vein, they’ve modeled the national healthcare plan they’re pushing on the German one. They keep telling us ours won’t be like Canada’s or Great Britain’s.
Nope, it’ll be like this gem in Germany:
Germany’s century-old universal health-care system, a model cited by reform advocates in the U.S. Congress, is buckling under the weight of a growing deficit that has forced the government to explore an overhaul. . . .
Costs are shared between employers and workers, whose premiums are staggered according to income.
Recently, however, the costs of the system have exploded. Rising medical costs and unemployment will leave the system €7.5 billion ($11.1 billion) short next year. Germany’s sinking birth rate and rapidly aging population mean the gap will only get worse.
Those trends will likely leave the government with no choice in the short term but to raise mandatory employee contributions. Germans already pay 8% of their gross wages into the centralized health-care pot, while their employers contribute an amount equal to 7% of gross wages.
Steadily rising health-care costs mean raising premiums can serve only as a stop-gap solution. In the long term, analysts say, Germany will almost certainly be forced to make painful cuts to a system that to many here is sacrosanct.
The financial strains on Germany’s health-care system underscore the challenges the U.S. could face if it adopts elements of the Bismarck model. Critics of U.S. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats’ health overhaul plans argue the legislation winding through Congress doesn’t do enough to rein in spending and would saddle the government and Americans with higher health-care costs.
Charged with shaking up the system is Germany’s new health minister, Philipp Rösler, a rising star in the Free Democratic Party, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new governing partner. . . .
Ultimately, Mr. Rösler and his allies want to establish a basic level of coverage for all that could be bolstered by buying additional private insurance.
Ah, so nationalized healthcare doesn’t work, they’re essentially saying. And to make up for the gap, people will have to buy private insurance. Hmmm . . . isn’t private insurance allegedly “discriminating” against the poor and those with pre-conditions the thing ObamaCare is supposed to solve?
It’s very clear it doesn’t solve that. Germany, with this move, is moving away from government healthcare toward private providers because government can’t afford it. And yet the ObamaCare proponents are citing Germany as an example of how government healthcare works better than private insurance?
Someone’s not paying attention. And it isn’t the opponents of this looming disaster of nationalized healthcare.
Meanwhile, our “universal healthcare heroes” in Germany are facing a horrible economic crisis, to which their healthcare plan contributed in no small part. Angela Merkel is proposing tax cuts in addition to her man Rosler’s suggestion of a return to partial private insurance coverage. They’re trying to be more capitalist and conservative in order to raise themselves up. And we’re trying to emulate their failed socialism to “raise” ourselves down.
Tags: Germany, nationalized healthcare, obamacare, Phillip Rosler, socialized medicine, universal healthcare
We’re facing the same problems as Germany and want to destroy a mostly good health care system in the name of “saving” it. The Germans can’t afford nationalized health care anymore.
We can’t afford Obamacare and no – it still wouldn’t be a good thing to have even if it really cost us nothing.
NormanF on November 18, 2009 at 12:40 pm