We have now heard this said by the president: “Keep in mind that most of the folks who got these cancellation letters, they’ll be able to get better care at the same cost or cheaper in these new marketplaces. Because they’ll have more choice. They’ll have more competition. They’re part of a bigger pool. Insurance companies are going to be hungry for their business.”

Is this true? Non-Austrian economist Jonathan Tepper makes a strong case that it is not only false, but that Obamacare has done the very opposite:

“The main egregious problem with the ACA is that it increases concentration in the insurance and medical markets. It forces consumers to buy into oligopolistic and monopolistic marketplaces. Insurance and medical companies stocks have all gone up since Obamacare passed. (They’ve gone up twice as much as the S&P this year.) What these companies are all telling us is that the act is good for their business and good for their margins.”

If Obama actually understood markets or actually wanted a competitive market, which would occur with a free market, then he would never have pushed for Obamacare. In my judgment, his prime immediate aim was to do something about the uninsured outside of any free market, by government edict. He hoped for a government-created remedy to a problem whose dimensions he saw only from his mistaken point of view, which means he saw there were uninsured people, felt that the market (as he saw it) was inadequate, saw political gain in doing something about it, and felt that he was doing something good about it. He then went through the political process to get legislation, which of course was written by the lobbyists and certain influential interests in the insurance industry. This was democracy at work, in the end and as typical of democracy, producing results worse than doing nothing.

Now, Obama’s greater aim is surely “free” universal health care in some form or other. He moved the system closer to that on paper and actuality. He may even have moved it closer in the minds of enough Americans to create greater support for a single-payer system. I do not know.

One thing is for sure, however. When he says that there is more competition in the marketplace, he is completely wrong. Does he believe what he’s saying or has he crafted a lie? It really does not matter. You cannot believe a word of what he says. He’s simply trying to save his power and the legislation and get it past a very rough spot. He’s buying time, saying what he has to say to buy time, and saying the minimum in order to buy time.

The health care system, already a heavily regulated government system, is an abomination, a socialist-fascist-collectivist-progressive abomination. Obamacare simply dipped into the same rotten collection of government edicts (called “solutions”) and made it worse.

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