Medicare for Everyone?
According to The Hill, House Democrats are considering re-branding their new government-run health insurance program. A “public option” evidently isn’t catchy enough. Now they’re thinking, “Medicare Part E” as in, Medicare for Everyone.
By all means, model a new government program after Medicare, which:
- Drags down the quality of care for all patients, both publicly and privately insured
- Literally kills people by fueling the epidemic of deaths due to medical errors (as many as 100,000 annually)
- Is responsible for the fragmented delivery system about which the Left complains
- Has required one tax increase every four years, still has an unfunded liability approaching $90 trillion, and will therefore be the driving force behind income-tax rates essentially doubling by mid-century
- Has been expanded well beyond its original mission
- Didn’t save a single life in (at least) its first 10 years of operation
- Coerces people to choose it over private insurance
- Restricts enrollees’ freedom to spend their own money on medical care
- Is easily (and persuasively) parodied as a tool of the devil
Pleeeeease don’t throw me into that briar patch.
Universal Coverage Means ‘Willing to Let You Die Sooner’
I cannot disagree with Uwe Reinhardt’s response to my previous post at National Journal‘s Health Care Experts blog. But his response bears clarification and emphasis.
Improving “population health” generally means “helping people live longer.”
To paraphrase, Reinhardt then writes:
If helping people live longer were our objective in health reform, we could do better than universal coverage. But health reform is not (solely or primarily) about helping people live longer. It is (also or primarily) about other things, like relieving the anxiety of the uninsured.
I applaud Reinhardt for acknowledging a reality that most advocates of universal coverage avoid: that universal coverage is not solely or primarily about improving health.
Will Reinhardt go further and acknowledge that, since universal coverage is largely about some other X-factor(s), that necessarily means that advocates of universal coverage are willing to let some people die sooner in order to serve that X-factor?
(Cross-posted at National Journal‘s Health Care Experts blog.)
Parsing Pelosi: House Health Takeover Would Cost around $2.25 Trillion
Just like the Senate Finance Committee’s government takeover, the House of Representatives’ government takeover hides more than half of its cost by pushing those costs off the government’s budget and onto the private sector.
So when Speaker Pelosi says the House bill would cost under $900 billion, what she actually means is that it would cost around $2.25 trillion.
Nice Insurance Company. Shame If Anything Were to Happen to It.
Just days after the health-insurance lobby released a report criticizing the Senate Finance Committee’s health care overhaul (for not expanding government enough!), Democrats and President Barack Obama lashed out at health insurers, threatening to revoke what the Government Accountability Office calls the insurers’ “very limited exemption from the federal antitrust laws.”
Democrats say they’re motivated by the need to increase competition in health insurance markets. Right.
According to Business Week:
David Hyman, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Illinois College of Law and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute…considers it unlikely that repeal would fundamentally change the nature of the market. While it might increase competition in some markets, he says, it could actually decrease it in others, such as those where small insurers survive because they have access to larger providers’ data. Changes to the act could therefore hurt smaller companies more than larger ones, he says.
Because the act doesn’t outlaw the existence of a dominant provider but simply prohibits collusion, says Hyman, a repeal would fall short of breaking up existing market monopolies that are blamed for artificially inflating prices. The current move against [the] McCarran-Ferguson [Act], he says, “has more to do with the politics of pushing back against the insurance industry’s opposition to health reform than it does with increasing competition in health-insurance markets.”
Combined with what The New York Times described as the Obama administration’s “ham-handed” attempt to censor insurers who communicated with seniors about the effects of the president’s health plan — the Times editorialized: “the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to stretch facts to the breaking point to make a weak case that the insurers were doing anything improper” — it’s hard to argue that this is anything but Democrats threatening to use the power of the state to punish dissidents.
When Republicans were in power, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now that Democrats are in power, obedience is the highest form of patriotism.
Why Does Health Care Need Reform?
Is it because health care is special? Or is it because we have treated health care as though it were special?
David Goldhill is the CEO of the Game Show Network and author of “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic.
In this Cato video, Goldhill explains why a consumer-driven health care sector would never produce the often horrific problems we see in American medicine, and why the legislation moving through Congress fails to address those problems.
See Goldhill’s complete remarks here.
Monday Links
- Under new policy guidelines from the Obama administration, federal drug agents won’t pursue medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they follow state laws. Cato scholars have long called for drug policy reform, and have examined other drug decriminalization program that have shown tangible, positive results.
- Ignored by the media: Antarctic ice melt lowest ever measured.
- Obama visiting China in November to discuss expanding military agreements. Here’s what’s at stake.
- Video: Why American health care kills.
- Podcast: “Coerced into Medicare“
Should Congress Even Try to Achieve Universal Coverage?
If the goal is to improve health, then the answer is clearly no.
Ironically, even though universal coverage is presumably about helping the sick, the Democrats’ pursuit of universal coverage demonstrates not how much, but how little they care about their neighbors’ health.
Economists Helen Levy and David Meltzer explain, in a book published by the Urban Institute, “There is no evidence at this time that money aimed at improving health would be better spent on expanding insurance coverage than on…other possibilities,” such as clinics, hypertension screening, nutrition campaigns, or even education. In the Annual Review of Public Health, they explain further:
The central question of how health insurance affects health, for whom it matters, and how much, remains largely unanswered at the level of detail needed to inform policy decisions…Understanding the magnitude of health benefits associated with insurance is not just an academic exercise…it is crucial to ensuring that the benefits of a given amount of public spending on health are maximized.
If Democrats were serious about improving health, they would first gather evidence about which of those strategies produces the most health per dollar spent. (As I recommend elsewhere, the $1.1 billion Congress allocated for comparative-effectiveness research should just about do the trick.) Democrats would then fund the most cost-effective strategies, which may or may not include broader insurance coverage.
But the fact that Democrats are pursuing universal coverage without any such evidence necessarily means that they are willing to sacrifice potentially greater health improvements to achieve…whatever else they hope universal coverage will achieve.
Universal coverage is not about improving public health. It is about subordinating health to some X-factor that supporters value even more.
Which leads to an even more intriguing question: what is that X-factor?
Financial security? (If so, would universal coverage achieve that? Or are there better strategies?) Political power? Dependence on government? Industry subsidies? The appearance of compassion?
I’d like to see that question put to the group.
(Cross-posted at National Journal’s Health Care Experts Blog.)
ACORN and Health Care
Last week, editors at Politico posed two questions to an online panel to which I contribute: “ACORN: Underplayed or overblown?” and “Will the Dems ever get their act together on healthcare?”
The two are intimately connected by a simple proposition: “Most people want more housing and health care than they can afford.” Of course, for “housing” or “health care” one could substitute whatever one wishes: food, clothing, cars, education, entertainment, vacations, you name it. Economists call this the problem of scarcity, and it’s the beginning of economics.
In a free society, most individuals, families, and firms will deal with that problem through such homely measures as creating and husbanding wealth, planning for the future, and living within their means. Some, however, will be indifferent to such discipline and will demand more than they can afford. Enter thus ACORN and the Dems — the party of government. ACORN, like our president, is in the “community organizing” business — a euphemism for putting (some) people in a position to better demand things from government. Some of those demands are perfectly legitimate: reduce crime; fix the potholes. But others, the demands ACORN specializes in, are not thus “common.” They can be satisfied, in a world of scarcity, only by taking from some and giving to others.
And that’s what the housing and health care debates today are largely about. And it’s why on both, the Dems are having difficulty getting their act together, because however much they turn a blind eye toward scarcity or pretend that they all agree, the truth is that they represent discrete constituencies, with discrete conflicting interests. That’s what happens when we’re all thrown into the common pot. What once was decided by individuals, reflecting their own particular interests, is now decided by government — and it’s a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Filling the Airwaves with Deception and Dishonesty
In his weekly radio address, President Obama says private health insurance companies are “filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads.”
Gee, I wonder if the insurers’ deceptions and dishonesty will reach even half the number of people that President Obama’s did during his address to Congress.
(Cross-posted at National Journal‘s Health)
House Democrats Choose Dishonesty
I’m not a fan of the House Democrats’ proposed takeover of the health care sector. (If there’s one thing that legislation is not, it’s “reform.”) But at least House Democrats were honest enough to include the cost of the $245 billion bump in Medicare physician payments in their legislation, unlike some committee chairmen I could mention.
Unfortunately, House Democrats have since decided that dishonesty is the better strategy. They, like Senate Democrats, now plan to strip that additional Medicare spending out of health “reform” and enact it separately. (Democrats are already trying to exempt that spending from pay-as-you-go rules, making it easier for them to expand our record federal deficits.) Why enact it separately? Because excising that spending from the “reform” legislation reduces the cost of health “reform”!
But why stop there? Heck, enact all the new spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would plummet! Enact the new Medicaid spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would fall by $438 billion! Do it with the subsidies to private health insurance companies, and the cost of “reform” would plunge by $773 billion! All that would be left of “reform” would be tax increases and Medicare payment cuts. Health “reform” would dramatically reduce federal deficits! Huzzah!
Except it wouldn’t, because at the end of the day Congress would be spending the same amount of money.
The only good news may be this. If this dishonest budget gimmick succeeds, then Congress will have “fixed” Medicare’s physician payments. Absent that “must pass” legislation, the Democrats health care takeover would lose momentum, and would have to stand on its own merit. That would be good for the Republic, though not for the legislation.
(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)
In Canada You Need Wait-List Insurance!
Governments love to promise benefits. But politicians prefer not to have to raise the funds necessary to provide the promised services. The result for nationalized medical systems is political rationing … and long waiting lists. The Mackinac Institute, located in Michigan, has produced a series of videos on Canadians speaking about how their system works. The British Columbia Automobile Association even developed medical access, or wait list, insurance, before abandoning the program under pressure.
Thursday Links
- Don’t let the sticker price fool you: The Baucus bill would increase the deficit and cost more than $2 trillion over 10 years.
- There’s no getting around it. There will be cuts in Medicare.
- The Supreme Court hears Alvarez v. Smith, which will affect the constitutional property rights of many people around the country.
- Cato’s David Rittgers debates troop build up in Afghanistan.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
