Think mandating health insurance coverage at the national level is the functional equivalent of states mandating that drivers carry auto insurance?

Obama does.

He’s wrong.

Again.

As Judson Berger of Fox News points out, there are many differences between mandated health insurance and auto insurance. Here are a few highlights:

Auto insurance is avoidable – health insurance is not.

Car insurance is mandated to protect others – health insurance is not.

Health insurance would be subsidized – by your tax dollars – car insurance is not.

The ultimate irony? Remember candidate Obama? HE was adamantly opposed to mandating health care coverage. That was candidate Clinton’s position if you recall. But in his recent joint address to Congress, Obama eagerly enveloped the concept – never mind potential constitutional hurdles to mandating health insurance coverage for all citizens.

In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal hits the highlights of why allowing Uncle Sam to become Dr. Sam is an inherently flawed concept.

As the Journal recognizes, a new Gov’t plan would become yet another middle-class entitlement (as if we don’t have enough already).

So what’s wrong with entitlements?

Nothing.

It’s just that somebody has to pay for them, and inevitably, tomorrow’s cost is always higher than projected and always underfunded.

In this case,

As an entitlement, Congress’s creation will enjoy potentially unlimited access to the Treasury, without incurring the risks or hedging against losses that private carriers do. As people gravitate to “free” or heavily subsidized care, the inevitably explosive costs will be covered in part with increased outlays to keep premiums artificially low or even offer extra benefits. Lacking such taxpayer cash, private insurance rates will escalate.

Much like Medicare, overall spending in the public option will be controlled over time by paying less for medical services, drugs and technology. With its monopoly purchasing power, below-market fees will be dictated on a take-it-or-leave-it basis — an offer hospitals and physicians won’t be able to refuse. Medicare’s current reimbursement policies pay hospitals only 71% of private rates, and doctors 81%, according to the Lewin Group.

Those in favor of this wacked-out idea tend to be the same ones who complain about the high cost of health insurance today. But what they fail to understand is that the Government is a primary contributor to the escalating cost of PRIVATE health insurance:

A 2006 study in the journal Health Affairs concludes that around 17 cents of every dollar in relative reductions in Medicare payments to private hospitals are shifted onto private patients — and that such cost-shifting accounts for fully 12.3% of the total increase in private payer prices between 1997 and 2001.

This share would be far higher were government payment rates not limited to the elderly and the poor but imposed over the entire system. This will only hasten the flight to government. Meanwhile, employers small and large will have every incentive to dump their plans and transfer their workers to the public rolls. The result will inevitably be a cascade of failures or withdrawals from the market by commercial insurers, with the public option as the only option for the diaspora.

For my two cents worth, it all comes down to money – something more and more of us have increasingly less of.

A solid floor plan needs to be installed for the truly needy. The rest of us need to continue to support ourselves – it’s the responsible thing to do.