What does he want Obama to do? Set price controls? Look at the empty shelves of Venezuela super markets to see how well that works. Shall we cut the pay of doctors, nurses, technicians or other hospital workers? Health care costs a lot for a number of reasons. New technologies cost money. Pharmaceutical research cost money, Liability insurance costs money. A high level of health care costs money, and you just can't wish that away. Businesses involved with health care are incentivized to provide quality care in large part because of the money involved. You tamper with that at your peril.
Sure, there are things that can improved efficiency and lead to trimming of costs at the margins, but I just don't believe that a government bureaucracy is the mechanism to achieve these efficiencies.
That’s what amuses me about many “conservative” criticisms of Obamacare. At their core, they seem to be that it isn’t socialist enough.
The reason you'll get that for grocery items is because the value chain provides very few opportunities for savings. Profit margins in grocery stores are minimal, maybe 1%-2%. Groceries and household supplies themselves are not high profit margin, averaging 5% to 10% net, with a best of breed player like P&G getting 14%. Grocery chain personnel make minimum wage, so you can't exactly reduce that.
In contrast, up and down the value chain, health care is larded with opportunities for savings. Hospital profit margins aren't great, but they pay medical personnel big salaries, to the point that foreigners from around the world (including other Western countries) move stateside to get a piece of the action. Medical equipment is high margin, with minnows like Resmed and Varian making 22% and 13% net respectively. Then there's drugs, where Eli Lilly and Pfizer both routinely post net margins over 20%.
Bottom line is that there's plenty of opportunity to reduce healthcare margins without running into the results of Venezuela's attempt to get blood from a stone in groceries. The trade-off will be increased wait times and a much slower rate of innovation.