Health Care - our other Afghanistan?

As we all know, Barack Obama adopted the good war/bad war patter and wedded himself to Afghanistan, a war he evidently did not believe in and was definitely not committed to.

Bringing home Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the last American captive and an alleged deserter, may have served a practical purpose in closing one more door to our continued involvement in Afghanistan. A goal might also have been fostering a tacit understanding with the Taliban to lay off U.S. forces as they make their exit, after which of course Afghanistan is no longer our problem.

What we are witnessing is an administration sinking in cynicism or even worse - an administration that no longer knows what its own hidden agendas and private reasonings are.

Also, you'd expect that Obama, since domestic policy and health care are so close to his political heart, to be at least more on top of matters. It's hard to escape the feeling, just like with Afghanistan, that the administration has become lost in its own disingenuousness. President Obama gave us ObamaCare - therefore you might assume, he actually considers ObamaCare a model for addressing America's health-care dissatisfactions and would jump at an opportunity to propose enrolling veterans under the Affordable Care Act. Well, you'd be wrong.

It seems that Obama and his “worker bees” believe in ObamaCare about as much as they believe in the Afghanistan war. ObamaCare was a political kludge because Democrats couldn't muster voter support for a single-payer system.

If for example a private hospital operator in a competitive market saw wait times growing, it would raise prices to maximize profits, which would have the effect of reducing demand. Another hospital, seeing this, might keep prices low to fill empty beds. Then the first hospital might decide profits can be better maximized by increasing capacity rather than by defending high prices. And so on: competition, the basic stuff you learned in high-school economics.

None of this can happen in the VA, where excess demand means either Congress must allocate more money, administrators must bark hopelessly at doctors and nurses to work faster, or all must engage in fraud. Republicans inevitably will inherit ObamaCare someday, along with the VA and all our other junky health-care interventions.

So, how about this you guys? What’s your opinion on the matter?