Archive for the ‘Health, Welfare & Entitlements’ Category
What Will the Reid Bill Cost?
Michael Cannon has some astute analysis of the Senate health care bill below. I posted these thoughts at Politico’s Arena:
According to the Chamber of Commerce polls, strong majorities in every state they polled believe the health care bills will increase the deficit. In this case the public’s cynical instincts are almost certain to be more accurate than the computer models of the CBO. As David Dickson of the Washington Times reviewed yesterday, government health care programs have a history of cost overruns.
And not small overruns, like overdrawing your checking account — massive, order-of-magnitude cost overruns. Is that because politicians intentionally overstate the benefits and underestimate the costs of their proposals? Or just that computer models aren’t very good at predicting how entitlements programs change behavior? Either way, just look at the record: In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion. In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost, just five years after the projection, was $17 billion. Similarly, Medicare’s home care benefit was projected in 1988 to cost $4 billion in 1993, but the actual cost — again, just five years after the projection — was $10 billion.
The government is running a trillion-dollar annual deficit already, and Congress and the president propose to create a new program that promises to cover millions more people with health insurance, drag currently insured people onto government programs, and save billions of dollars in the process. No wonder levels of trust in government are at record lows.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Reid Health Bill Perpetuates the $1.5 Trillion Fraud
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has finally unveiled his massive 2,074-page health care bill. The Congressional Budget Office reports that the insurance-expansion provisions would cost the feds $848 billion over 10 years. To raise those funds, the bill would tax wages, medical devices, prescription drugs, sick people, health insurance premiums (twice), HSAs, FSAs, HRAs, and — why not? — cosmetic surgery. The remainder would supposedly come from $491 billion of Medicare cuts, even though Medicare’s chief actuary says such cuts are “unrealistic” and “doubtful.” But don’t worry. Somehow, this thing’s gonna reduce the deficit.
Of course, that $848 billion only accounts for part of the federal government’s share of the tab. There is other new federal spending. My read is that the CBO estimates $998 billion of total new federal spending — though I’ll be waiting for former CBO director Donald Marron to provide a more authoritative tally.
And then there are costs that Reid and his comrades have pushed off the federal budget. For example, the $25 billion unfunded mandate that Reid would impose on states. Total so far: just over $1 trillion.
But the biggest hidden cost is that of the private-sector mandates. In both the Clinton health plan and the Massachusetts health plan, the private-sector mandates –- the legal requirements that individuals and employers purchase health insurance –- accounted for 60 percent of total costs. That suggests that if the Reid bill’s cost to federal and state governments is $1 trillion, then the total cost is probably $2.5 trillion, and Harry Reid — like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — is hiding $1.5 trillion of the cost of his bill.
Without a cost estimate of the private-sector mandates, Reid has not yet satisfied the request made by eight Democratic senators for a “complete CBO score” of the bill 72 hours prior to floor consideration.
Fortunately, by law, the CBO must eventually score the private-sector mandates. When that happens, the CBO will reveal costs that the bills’ authors are trying to hide. When that happens, the CBO will present the new federal spending on page 1, new state spending maybe on page 10, and the cost of the private-sector mandates on page 20 or something. Democrats will tout the figure on page 1. But the bill’s total cost will the sum of those three figures -– a sum that will reveal the costs that the bill’s authors have been hiding.
The House passed its bill without a complete CBO score. The Senate should not follow suit.
I’ve written previously about this massive fraud here, here, here, and here.
(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
Will America Keep “Bending the Productivity Curve”?
Most international comparisons conclude that America’s health care sector under-performs those of other advanced nations. Aside from other serious flaws, those studies typically ignore each nation’s contribution to medical innovation — the discovery of new knowledge and practices that improve health in all nations. Today, the Cato Institute releases a new study — the most comprehensive study of its kind — that helps fill that void.
In “Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation,” economist Glen Whitman and physician Raymond Raad conclude that the United States far and away outperforms other nations on medical innovation, but that the legislation moving through Congress threatens America’s ability to innovate. From the executive summary:
To date…none of the most influential international comparisons have examined the contributions of various countries to the many advances that have improved the productivity of medicine over time…
In three of the four general categories of innovation examined in this paper — basic science, diagnostics, and therapeutics — the United States has contributed more than any other country…In the last category, business models, we lack the data to say whether the United States has been more or less innovative than other nations; innovation in this area appears weak across nations.
In general, Americans tend to receive more new treatments and pay more for them — a fact that is usually regarded as a fault of the American system. That interpretation, if not entirely wrong, is at least incomplete. Rapid adoption and extensive use of new treatments and technologies create an incentive to develop those techniques in the first place. When the United States subsidizes medical innovation, the whole world benefits. That is a virtue of the American system that is not reflected in comparative life expectancy and mortality statistics.
Policymakers should consider the impact of reform proposals on innovation. For example, proposals that increase spending on diagnostics and therapeutics could encourage such innovation. Expanding price controls, government health care programs, and health insurance regulation, on the other hand, could hinder America’s ability to innovate.
Raad will discuss the study this Friday at noon at a policy forum at the Cato Institute.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate
Ezra Klein defends an individual healthcare mandate against charges that it’s unconstitutional, and what’s striking to me is that the argument seems awfully wobbly even if you’re on board with a lot of the post–New Deal jurisprudence about the scope of federal power. Sez Ez:
The summary is that you can look at the individual mandate as a tax, which is constitutional, or as a regulation forcing private actors to engage in a certain transaction, much like the minimum wage, which is also constitutional. I’ve also heard scholars mention auto insurance, which is an obvious analogue, and the Americans With Disabilities Act, which proved that the government can order businesses to install ramps, despite the fact that the constitution doesn’t explicitly give the federal government jurisdiction over entryways.
This doesn’t seem like the right level of analysis. Some taxes and regulations are within the ambit of federal powers; that doesn’t mean anything capable of being so described is. Some things not explicitly and specifically mentioned in Article I are nevertheless necessarily implicit in the enumerated powers; that doesn’t mean anything is. Auto insurance seems like a poor analogue because it’s a condition of access to government-maintained roadways. Ezra also mentions Massachusetts’ individual mandate, which seems rather beside the point in a discussion of the scope of Congress’ Article I powers. But bracket that. Even if you think the federal commerce power legitimately extends to legislation like the ADA, there’s intuitively a world of difference between saying that a commercial enterprise providing services to the public must provide them in such-and-such a fashion and insisting that private persons have to engage in a specified type of transaction just by dint of being alive. I don’t think the best reading of the Commerce Clause encompasses either, but it’s not that hard to conceive a reading that extends to the former but not the latter. I stress this just because I don’t think you have to be a libertarian or have a very restrictive view of the legitimate scope of federal power to believe there’s a genuine question here. The real form of the argument here looks an awful lot like: “Look, we’ve stretched commerce…between the several states so absurdly already, why are we even pretending it might be found to exclude anything?”
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties
The High Cost of European Union Bureaucracy
The clever folks at the Taxpayers Alliance in the United Kingdom have a new video documenting some of the wasteful European Union programs that are imposing a heavy burden on average people.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
Federal Assumption of Medicaid Costs
From the standpoint of Americans who prefer less government, one of the worst developments of the 20th century was the federal subsidization of state and local spending. The result has been bigger government at all levels. Medicaid represents the largest portion of federal money to the states. The states administer their own Medicaid programs, but the federal government picks up 50 to 83 percent of the tab depending on a state’s income. The estimated price tag of the federal share for fiscal year 2009 is $260 billion.
One result of the federal government paying for half or more is that it encourages the states to expand enrollment and benefits. It also makes it politically difficult to cut state Medicaid spending because of the accompanying loss of federal dollars.
A 2007 analysis on the exorbitant future costs of Medicaid by Jagadeesh Gokhale illustrates how the program’s price tag has skyrocketed since its creation in 1965 (see chart here). Over the decades, the states expanded their programs whenever the economy was growing and the tax revenues were flowing. When the economy went into recession and the revenue dried up, the states generally didn’t scale-back benefits and sometimes they asked for bailouts from the federal government. The 2009 stimulus package provided an estimated $87 billion in federal Medicaid money for the states.
If the economy remains stagnant over the next few years and state tax revenues fail to rebound, further pressure will mount on the federal government to continue bailing out state Medicaid programs. The nightmare scenario would be for the federal government to assume the full costs of Medicaid under state pressure.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget director, Michael Genest, recently raised the idea:
Genest, who is retiring at the end of the year, warned that California’s budget problems will persist even after the state works its way through this recession. He singled out Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid health-care program for the poor, as unaffordable for the state. If the program’s costs continue to climb 8 percent a year, the state will have little money left for anything other than schools and debt service by 2040, he said.
The health-care reform proposals now before Congress could further strain state budgets because they would expand Medicaid, Genest said.
Genest said Congress should overhaul Medicaid, now funded jointly by state and federal governments but run by the states. The federal government should cover more of the costs, give states more flexibility or even make a drastic switch and let federal officials take over Medicaid completely, he said.
“If you want to imagine a crisis, as a thought experiment, imagine all 50 states writing a letter to the federal government saying, ‘We’re no longer providing Medicaid.’ That would get Congress’ attention. And that’s about the only real leverage we have,” Genest said.
Current health care legislation in Congress threatens to increase state Medicaid spending. In the House passed bill, the federal government would pick up 100 percent of Medicaid’s expansion until 2015 when it would drop to 91 percent. However, the future is unpredictable and it’s not hard to imagine a future Congress keeping it at 100 percent federal funding.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the House bill also contains a provision that could be intended to create a justification for greater federal assumption of state Medicaid spending:
H.R. 3962 would require GAO to study federal matching payments made to state Medicaid programs to make recommendations on the FMAP formula to Congress. By February 15, 2011, GAO would be required to submit a report based on this study assessing the effect on the federal government, states, providers, and beneficiaries of making the following changes to the FMAP formula: (1) removing the 50% floor or 83% ceiling, or both and (2) revising the current FMAP formula to better reflect state fiscal capacity, state efforts to finance health and long-term care services, and to better adjust for national or regional economic downturns.
See this essay on the need for a return to fiscal federalism.
Update: The Washington Post reports this morning that the House health care reform bill contains an additional $23.5 billion Medicaid bailout for the states. The provision would extend by an additional six months (through 2011) the stimulus legislation’s “temporary” increase in the federal government’s share of total Medicaid spending.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
ObamaCare’s ‘Sweetheart Deal’ for PhRMA
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn reports that back in March, IMS Health projected slightly negative revenue growth for the pharmaceutical industry but recently changed that projection to 3.5-percent annual growth from 2008 through 2013.
“What changed?” Cohn asks. “A major factor, according to IMS, was the emerging details of health care reform . . . Put it all together, and you have more demand for name-brand drugs . . . enough to boost revenue significantly.” And:
“If this bill is implemented,” the report concludes on page 138, “an increase in prices on new drugs can be expected.”
How could this be happening? Oh yeah:
That brings us back to the deal that the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, which represents those companies, made with the White House and Senate Finance Committee . . .
The industry agreed to embrace health care reform and, later on, launched a massive advertising campaign to promote the cause. In exchange, the White House and Senate Finance–which had been asking various industries to pledge concessions that would help pay for the cost of coverage expansions–promised not to seek more than $80 in reduced payments to drug makers.
To an industry as big and profitable as the drug makers, giving up $80 billion over ten years wouldn’t seem like much of a sacrifice–a point critics started making right away. But if IMS is right, the drug industry wouldn’t even be giving up $80 billion, in any meaningful sense of the term. If anything, it’d be making more money. Maybe quite a lot of it.
Which is what I predicted, both here and here.
Cohn concludes, “the drug industry has enormous leverage in Congress.” But Cohn still supports the president’s health care takeover. Or is it PhRMA’s health care takeover?
Filed under: General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Obamacare Will Be a Budget Buster
Does anyone think that a huge new entitlement program will lead to lower budget deficits? Sounds implausible, yet proponents of government-run healthcare claim this is the case according to the official estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.
To use a technical phrase, this is hogwash. This new 6-1/2 minute video, narrated by yours truly, gives 12 reasons why Obamacare will lead to higher deficits – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid are much more costly than originally projected.
By the way, this video doesn’t even touch on the mandate issue, which Michael Cannon explains is not being counted in order to make the cost of government-run healthcare less shocking.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Abortion Funding and Health Care
President Obama’s approach to health care reform — forcing taxpayers to subsidize health insurance for tens of millions of Americans — cannot not change the status quo on abortion.
Either those taxpayer dollars will fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will curtail access to private abortion coverage. There is no middle ground.
Thus both sides’ fears are justified. Both sides of the abortion debate are learning why government should not subsidize health care. Tip of the hat to President Obama for creating this teachable moment.
Meanwhile, Catholics should be outraged at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (to which my grandfather served as counsel). Yes, the USCCB helped prevent taxpayer funding of abortions in the House bill. But at the same time, those naughty bishops have abandoned the Church’s doctrine of subsidiarity by endorsing the rest of the Democrats’ plan to centralize power in Washington.
As it happens, Caesar is the main source of funding for Catholic hospitals. That may explain why the bishops are so eager to render unto, ahem, Him.
Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Health Care: Not Close to Over
The fat lady hasn’t even started to warm up yet.
The narrow 220-215 victory in the House on Saturday night was a step forward on the road to a government takeover of the health care system. But as close and dramatic as that vote was, that was the easy part. The Senate must still pass its version of reform—which will not be the bill that just passed the House. Nancy Pelosi was, after all, able to lose the votes of 39 moderate Democrats. Harry Reid cannot afford to lose even one. A conference committee must reconcile the two vastly different versions. And then, Pelosi must hold together her 3 vote margin of victory (if it gets that far). Yet several House Democrats who voted for the bill on Saturday said they did so only to “advance the process.” Their vote is far from guaranteed on final passage. And, House liberals are almost certain to be disappointed by the more moderate bill that may emerge from the conference.
Among the more contentious issues:
Individual Mandate: This should’ve been low-hanging fruit. Democrats agreed on a mandate early in the process. But it became increasingly plain that a mandate would hit those with insurance as well as the uninsured — forcing people who are happy with their plan to switch to a different, possibly more expensive plan. With this mandate now being seen as a middle-class tax hike, qualms have developed. The House bill contains a strict mandate, with penalties of 2.5 percent of income backed up by up to five years in jail. The Senate Finance Committee, on the other hand, watered down the mandate’s penalties and delayed the mandates implementation.
Employer Mandate: The House bill also contains an employer mandate, a requirement that all but the smallest employers provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty tax of up to 8 percent of payroll. The Senate, looking at unemployment rates over 10 percent, seems unlikely to include an employer mandate.
The Public Option: The House included, if not a “robust” public option, at least a semi-robust one. But moderate Democrats in the Senate are clearly not on board. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) says that he will join a Republican filibuster if the public option is included. Harry Reid is trying various permutations: a trigger, an opt-in, an opt-out. But as of now there is not 60 votes for any variation.
The Sheer Cost: Fiscal hawks like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) say they will not support a bill that adds to the deficit or spends too much. But the house bill cost a minimum of $1.2 trillion.
Taxes: The House plan to add a surtax on incomes of $500,000 or more a year has no support in the Senate. At the same time, the Senate plan to slap a 40 percent excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans is unacceptable to key Democratic constituencies like labor unions.
Abortion: Conservative Democrats insisted on a strict prohibition on the use of government funds for abortion. The bill could not have passed without the inclusion of that provision. House liberal swallowed hard and voted for the bill, despite what they called “a poison pill” anyway with the expectation that it will be removed later. If the final bill includes the prohibition at least a couple liberals could defect. If it doesn’t, conservative Democrats won’t be on board.
Immigration: The Senate Finance Committee included a provision barring illegal immigrants from purchasing insurance through the government-run Exchange. The House Hispanic Caucus says that if that provision is in the final bill, they will vote against it.
As if these disagreements among Democrats wasn’t bad enough, public opinion is now turning against the bill.
President Obama has called for a bill to be on his desk before Christmas—the latest in a series of deadline that are so far unmet. It is hard to see how Congress can meet this one either. The Senate has not yet received CBO scoring of its bill and is not prepared to even begin debate until next week at the earliest. That debate will last 3-4 weeks minimum, assuming there are 60 votes for cloture. That means, the bill cant’ go to conference committee until mid-December, even if everything breaks the way Harry Reid wants. Privately, Democrats are now suggesting late January, before the State of the Union address, is the best they can do.
The fat lady can go back to sleep—this isn’t over yet.
The Pelosi Bill’s High Water Mark
Democrats are having difficulty corralling 218 votes for the Pelosi bill because Americans do not want government to be as big and as powerful as the House leadership does. Pro-life Democrats do not want a government so big that it can force taxpayers to fund abortions. Pro-choice Democrats do not want a government so big that it uses subsidies to restrict access to abortion coverage. Other Democrats don’t want a government so big that it turns the United States into a welfare magnet.
The American people don’t want the Democrats’ approach to health care generally. The more time the public has to digest ObamaCare, the more they dislike it:
And the Pelosi bill is the most expensive and extreme version of ObamaCare. Opposition will climb higher when the public learns the bill costs some $1.5 trillion more than Democrats claim.
Even a majority vote would not necessarily indicate majority support for the Pelosi bill. Rep. Jim Cooper (TN) and other Democrats are voting aye only because they want to keep the process moving – i.e., because this isn’t the vote that counts.
Win or lose, tonight’s vote will be the high water mark for the Pelosi bill.
(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
Filed under: General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
This Cannot Last
This morning, Politico Arena asks:
Will the House pass healthcare this weekend — or not
My response:
In his post below, my colleague Michael Cannon links to his devastating analysis of the way House Democrats have buried the true cost of their healthcare scheme. This is legerdemain of the first order, but it is business as usual here in Washington. Here we have a Congress that cannot fix Medicare, which will go broke even before Social Security does, a Congress that still hasn’t met the October 1 budget deadline for the ninth year in a row, and it wants to fundamentally reorder healthcare in America with a scheme that no one understands and no one knows how to fund. Any private business that ran its affairs that way would long have been out of business.
Given this record of insanity, therefore, it is impossible to say whether the House this weekend will pass this 1,990-page monstrosity of a bill — whether enough sanity will come to enough members to kill the bill. One datum does loom large, however: Speaker Pelosi can afford to lose no more than 40 members of her caucus. Combine that, after Tuesday’s election results, with another datum — there are 49 House Democrats who sit in districts that John McCain carried — and one has to ask whether the insanity we see before us reaches to political suicide.
Yet whatever happens tomorrow, or in the Senate down the road, this cannot go on, simply because the money isn’t there to allow it to go on. On Tuesday at the polls and yesterday with the huge demonstration in front of the Capitol we are seeing what Charles Krauthammer this morning rightly calls the demolition of “the great realignment myth of 2008.” America is not a suicidal nation. The Founders and Framers gave us institutions that have endured for over two centuries and are the envy of the world. Whatever happens tomorrow, the seeds of sanity are in the American soil and soon will be springing forth.
Disguised Health Care Costs: The $1.5 Trillion Fraud
If House Democrats hold a vote on their health-care overhaul this weekend, they might as well vote to abolish the Congressional Budget Office too.
It would be no more audacious (and much more honest) than the way they have gamed the CBO’s rules to hide $1.5 trillion of the cost of their legislation — which has to be the biggest fiscal obfuscation in the history of American politics.
C/P Politico
New Study: Young People Will Pay More Under Obamacare
A new study by Cato Adjunct Scholar Aaron Yelowitz concludes that the cost of President Obama’s health care plan would fall inordinately upon younger Americans, meaning they are in essence being asked to subsidize the care of their elders:
President Obama won the presidency with 66 percent of the vote among 18-to-29 year-olds. That’s a larger share than any presidential candidate has won in decades. Yet his health care overhaul could impose its greatest burdens on young adults, says Yelowitz.
Health care proposals moving through Congress would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would impose price controls on health insurance (“community rating”) that would limit insurers’ ability to offer lower premiums to low-risk enrollees.
Those provisions would drive premiums down for 55-year-olds but would drive them up for 25-year-olds—who are then implicitly subsidizing older adults. According to the Urban Institute, many young people could see their premiums double, whereas premiums for older adults could be cut in half.
Cato Health Care Expert Michael Cannon to Debate Rep. DeLauro (D-CT) Online at 2pm EST Today
Cato director of health policy studies Michael F. Cannon will participate in a live online chat today at the New Haven Register. The event starts at 2pm EST and will last for an hour.
We encourage you to submit questions once the event has started. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) will participate in the chat alongside Cannon.
Don’t Copy Europe’s Mistakes
In this new video, Eline van den Broek of the Netherlands needs only about four minutes to explain why government-run healthcare in Europe is a mistake and why the problems in the U.S. healthcare system are the result of too much government, not too little.
The only thing I don’t like about this video is that I fear people may no longer want to watch the ones I narrate.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; International Economics and Development; Tax and Budget Policy
‘Letting the Sick Die on the Street’
Blogger Matt Yglesias has described my CNN op-ed on health care as follows:
Meanwhile, in Harvard economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey Miron’s dystopia, if your parents wind up with no money through bad luck or poor decision-making and then you get sick you’ll just die on the street for lack of money.
Did I really say such an outrageous thing? Well, I did not use exactly those words (as Matt makes clear), but yes, that is the logical implication of my position.
And I stand by it. Here’s why.
First, my assessment is that even with no government health insurance, hardly anyone would die on the street for lack of health care. The poor would use their income transfers to buy some health care or insurance. The poor would receive private charity. And health care would be far less expensive due to elimination of the distortions caused by government health insurance.
Second, my position is that government provision of health insurance is enormously inefficient: it means worse health care for everyone, and it wastes resources that can be put to other uses. So the negative of having a few people suffer without government health insurance must be balanced against the good of having better medical care for all and against the good that can be accomplished with those saved resources.
That good might be lower taxes for everyone, or more government spending on education, or greater public health spending to combat HIV in poor countries. Whatever the alternate uses turn out to be, one cannot escape the fact that a tradeoff exists between protecting the poor and other goals.
C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z
The Constitutional Right to Save Lives
Our friends at IJ have filed an exciting new lawsuit, one that, if successful, could save the lives of more than 1,000 people a year: people who die needlessly of assorted blood diseases (including leukemia) because the federal government criminalizes the offering of even modest compensation for bone marrow donation.
That is, the National Organ Transplant Act — which outlawed the sale of kidneys and other organs — for some reason included bone marrow.
NOTA’s criminal ban is unconstitutional because it arbitrarily treats bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells – such as blood or sperm — for which compensated donation is legal. (That makes no sense because bone marrow, unlike kidneys, replenishes itself in just a few weeks, leaving the donor whole. )
The ban also fails constitutional muster because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.
As Chip Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice, said in a press release announcing the case: “Bad things happen when the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority. In this case, people actually die. The Institute for Justice intends to stop that and to restore constitutional constraints that prohibit arbitrary limits on individual liberty.”
IJ brought this suit on behalf of adults with deadly blood diseases, the parents of sick children, a California nonprofit, and a world-renowned medical doctor who specializes in bone marrow research. You can find more information here. Perhaps more interestingly, IJ senior attorney Jeff Rowes is guest-blogging about the case all week at the Volokh Conspiracy. Here’s his first post.
Filed under: Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties
Health Care Bill Improves Lawyers’ Financial Health
The great thing for legislators about a nearly 2000 page bill — such as, oh, the House’s latest health care salvo — is that very few people bother to read the whole thing. So it’s easy to bury little gifts to favored supporters. Or big ones.
For example, check out section 2531 — that’s pages 1431-33 for those following along at home — which has gone largely unnoticed in the major news cycle. These three pages of the bill reward states that refrain from setting (or repeal) any caps on medical malpractice rewards — and the accompanying lawyers’ fees! – by requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide them a bribe an “incentive payment.”
As Hans von Spakovsky notes at NRO’s Corner, this “alternative medical liability law” aims to eviscerate cost-saving measures that protect doctors from frivolous lawsuits that increase the cost of health care to the consumer. So this has nothing to do with providing better or cheaper care, covering the uninsured, or even eliminating waste and fraud. Instead, it’s a pure sop to one of the Congressional Democrats’ key constituencies: trial lawyers.
For more information on free market health care reform alternatives, please visit Cato’s Health Care website here.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Law and Civil Liberties
The Myth of ‘Market Failure’ in Health Care
One argument in favor of a government overhaul of the health care system is that the free market had its chance, and failed when it comes to providing the best possible care. But as David Goldhill discovered while researching for the September cover article in The Atlantic, the United States has anything but a free-market health care system.
He explains his findings below:
For real market-based reform, see Cato’s new Policy Analysis, “Yes, Mr. President: A Free Market Can Fix Health Care.“
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