When the Buyer has to Buy, the Cost will be Inflated

   With the morning paper, comes news that the costs for Medicaid are soaring well beyond what was anticipated.
   I have a thought: Whenever you leave an open checkbook on the table, someone is going to write themselves a nice, little check. If you leave your checkbook there, and say, "Go ahead, write yourself a check for however much you will," Someone is going to do it. If, when we set up the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we crafted it so that someone would pay the bill (the federal government), but we did not place adequate constraints on how much they would pay, we erred.
   The usual procedure for holding prices down, in a free market system, is that the buyer does not have to buy. If the price is too high, he can say, "No, I think I'll pass. You go sell your goods to someone else." But, in this case, Uncle Sam is being told he must buy the product. The Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- mandates that he must buy the product.
   You can imagine what havoc would be wrought if we did this elsewhere in our economy. What if car dealers got Congress to pass a law saying we all had to go out and buy new cars? We must buy them, no choice. And, what if those car dealers could name their own price, as to how much they were going to charge for their cars?
   Sooner or later, you'd have a news story on how the prices for new cars were soaring well beyond what was anticipated.
   This would not be a good system for selling cars. I'm at a loss as to why we think it is such a good system for selling health care.