Health Choice Freedoms You Will Lose

John Hood reports today from NRO's "Critical Condition" blog that Shawn Tully, editor at large of Fortune magazine, has identified five basic freedoms related to health care that Americans will lose if the prevailing versions of ObamaCare eventually become law.

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs

3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan

5. Freedom to choose your doctors

The blunt conclusion, Tully reports, is that employer-provided health insurance will probably disappear much more rapidly than the five-year "grace period" being discussed because paying an 8 percent payroll tax and enroling your employees on the "public option" will be cheaper than continuing to subsidize premiums for private insurance. Especially when the government begins increasing the cost of private insurance through regulatory requirements!

... it will happen, since it's likely that the tax will rise a lot more slowly than corporate health-care costs, especially since they'll be lobbying Washington to keep the tax under control in the righteous name of job creation.

So when the president tells you that "if you like your plan, you can keep it" or "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," he knows full well that this will be true only in the very short run.

In the long run, if your employer likes your plan, you may get to keep it, but maybe not, and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it.