Attempts to justify increasing intrusion of the Federal government into health insurance and health cost distract from the purpose of the practice of medicine, which is to treat patients.
Remember when doctors talked about “medical care” of individuals, not “health care” for populations?Remember when medicine was an “art,” not an “industry?” People aren’t machines with interchangeable parts and neither medicine nor “health care” are amenable to assembly line production, except in very rare instances.
The bottom line is that employment in the health care sector should be neither a policy goal nor a metric of success. The key policy goals should be to achieve better health outcomes and increase overall economic productivity, so that we can all live healthier and wealthier lives. Our ability to ensure access to expensive but beneficial treatment is hampered whenever health care policy is evaluated on the basis of jobs. Treating the health care system like a (wildly inefficient) jobs program conflicts directly with the goal of ensuring that all Americans have access to care at an affordable price.
WingRight 
I corrected the typo in the heading. A friend asked me whether the “d” was lost due to the ObamaTax.
Posted by bnuckols | July 4, 2012, 1:54 PM