In a recent post on how RomneyCare is increasing health insurance costs in Massachusetts (by encouraging healthy residents to purchase coverage only when they need medical care) and how ObamaCare will do the same, I linked to a Boston Globe article where an insurance-company spokeswoman made this odd claim:

We believe…the gaming in the system…is adding as much as $300 million dollars to the health care system in Massachusetts.

It’s hard to know what she meant. Taken literally, this claim is obviously untrue.  The gamers aren’t adding revenue to “the system” — they’re withholding revenue.  Nor are they adding costs, in the sense of additional medical spending.  If anything, overall spending falls because the gamers are less often insured, and therefore consume less medical care.

She might have meant that the premiums the gamers aren’t paying (or the difference between what they pay and the medical care they receive) amounts to $300 million, and that the gamers are imposing that cost on non-gamers in the form of higher premiums. But that doesn’t hold water, either.  The gamers have zero power to impose costs on non-gamers; only the government has that power. All the gamers are doing is responding rationally to the incentives RomneyCare creates and avoiding — lawfully, I might add — a $300 million tax.

So if that was her meaning, this spokeswoman should have said:

RomneyCare is imposing a $300 million tax on insured Massachusetts residents by encouraging other residents to game the system.

Instead, she blamed consumers and argued for laws that make it harder for consumers to avoid RomneyCare’s private-insurer bailout individual mandate.

So now we’ve got President Obama, who signed a law requiring health insurers to pay for more stuff, blaming insurers for rising premiums.  We’ve got pro-RomneyCare politicians doing the same in Massachusetts.  And we’ve got health insurers, who support laws forcing consumers to buy their products, blaming consumers for the cost of those laws.

Remember how RomneyCare and ObamaCare were supposed to promote responsibility?

Under Romney/ObamaCare, Even the Scapegoats Scapegoat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at CongressDaily, Julie Rovner has a great piece on the difficulties involved in generating and using comparative-effectiveness research (read: evidence that can improve the quality and reduce the cost of medical care). Rovner cites a recent New England Journal of Medicine article about the obstacles to conducting CER, and a recent article from Health Affairs that finds consumers tend to trust their doctor’s judgment more than evidence-based treatment guidelines.

In a paper titled, “A Better Way to Generate and Use Comparative-Effectiveness Research,” I explain how a string of government interventions — from state licensing of medical professionals and health insurance, to the tax preference for job-based health insurance, to Medicare and Medicaid — have reduced both patients’ demand for evidence about which medical interventions work best, as well as the market’s ability to supply that evidence.  In that paper, I predict that efforts like the CER funding in the “stimulus” bill and ObamaCare’s “Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute” will fail, just as all such government efforts have failed in the past.

If you want to generate evidence about which medical interventions work best, and have people use that evidence, then you need to liberalize the U.S. health care sector.

You Say You Want Comparative-Effectiveness Research? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

From my health care reform oped in today’s Daily Caller:

President Obama wants to work with Republicans on health care reform. “I am going to be starting from scratch,” he says, “in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote” controlling health care costs and making health insurance more widely available.

As it happens, many of the worst ideas are in the legislation Obama supports. Republicans have embraced some of the best ideas, but also some of the worst.

The best health care reform ideas ideas give consumers the money, let them choose a health plan regulated by a state of their choice, and reduce the federal government’s role in providing medical care to the needy.  The worst ideas?  Creating or expanding government health care programs, mandates, price controls on health insurance, and federal med mal reform.

The Best and Worst Ways to Reform Health Care is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Hoping to revive his increasingly unpopular health care overhaul, President Obama has invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit this Thursday and plans to introduce a new reform blueprint in advance of the summit.  On Sunday, the White House announced that a key feature of that blueprint will be premium caps, a form of government price control that helped kill the Clinton health plan when even New Democrats rejected it.

The New York Times reports on President Obama’s blueprint:

The president’s bill would grant the federal health and human services secretary new authority to review, and to block, premium increases by private insurers, potentially superseding state insurance regulators.

It bears repeating what Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers thinks about price controls:

Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.

For example, as I have written elsewhere, artificially limiting premium growth allows the government to curtail spending while leaving the dirty work of withholding medical care to private insurers: “Premium caps, which Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is currently threatening to impose, force private insurers to manage care more tightly — i.e., to deny coverage for more services.”  No doubt the Obama administration would lay the blame for coverage denials on private insurers and claim that such denials demonstrate the need for a so-called “public option.”

As the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Kendall explained in a 1994 paper, the Clinton health plan contained similar price controls.  Kendall explains why they would be a disaster:

In spite of the late hour in the health care debate, Congress has not yet decided how to restrain runaway health care costs. The essential choices are a top- down strategy of government limits on health care spending enforced by price controls or a bottom-up strategy of consumer choice and market competition. History clarifies that choice: Previous government efforts to regulate prices in peacetime have invariably failed. Moreover, government attempts to control prices in the health care sector would undermine concurrent efforts to restructure the marketplace…

The idea of controlling costs by government fiat is seductively simple. But it rests on a conceit as persistent as it is damaging: that government bureaucracies can allocate resources more wisely and efficiently than millions of consumers and providers pursuing their interests in the marketplace. The alternative — one rooted in America’s progressive tradition of individual responsibility and free enterprise — is to improve the market’s ground rules in order to decentralize decision-making, spur innovation, reward efficiency, and respect personal choice.

As centrally planned economies crumble around the world, many in the United States seem bent on erecting a command and control economy in health care. This policy briefing examines the reasons why government price regulation would fail to constrain health care costs and create many adverse side effects…

Ultimately, government price regulation will always fail because it does not change the underlying economic forces driving up prices. If we are serious about slowing the growth of health care costs, we have to change the ways we consume and provide medical care. Price controls evade the hard but essential work of structural reform in health care markets: They are a quintessentially political response to an economic problem. The alternative is to allow well-functioning markets to set prices and allocate resources, while ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care coverage. The market-oriented approach leaves decisions to cost-conscious consumers and health care providers rather than bureaucrats.

Any of that sound familiar?  It’s worth reading the whole thing.

This is not hope.  This is not change.  (Much less a game-changer.)  It is, to pinch a phrase, a return to “the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis.”

Obama’s ‘Best’ Idea? Rationing Care via Clinton-esque Price Controls is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

John Kay’s column in yesterday’s Financial Times criticizes government guarantees to banks because they involve hidden but large costs. According to Kay:

• Such guarantees distort competition: sheltered banks outperform rivals not because of greater efficiency, but because capital becomes cheaper to obtain.
• Sheltered banks gain too-big-to-fail status, which creates barriers to entry for smaller, more efficient banks.
• Relief from business risk leads to more risk taking, AKA moral hazard.
• Cheaper private risk management incentives are reduced within and outside the bank.

Other kinds of government guarantees, such as social insurance, also involve large hidden costs. Social Security and Medicare’s guarantee of a paid holiday with medical care for the rest of retirees’ lives generates the same types of costs:

• Labor competition is reduced because the programs induce early worker retirements, which leads to higher wage costs, on average, and lower national output.
• Workers who believe they will receive Social Security and Medicare will engage in lower personal saving, which means less capital formation and lower economic efficiency.
• Retirement income guarantees induce riskier personal savings portfolios, AKA moral hazard.
• Guaranteed retirement income means poorer financial knowledge and poorer risk management.

And now, retiree political power is too big to fail as well!

How come when Kay writes about market distortions from government guarantees for banks, he gets published; but when I do the same about government guarantees for people, I get the cold shoulder from editorial page editors?

The Cost of Government Guarantees is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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

‘Letting the Sick Die on the Street’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner reveals how the monopolies that states enjoy over licensing doctors, nurses, and other clinicians reduce access to care for low-income Americans:

Stan Brock just wants to help. The former co-star of “Wild Kingdom” wants to deliver free medical, dental and vision care to the poor. Whereas most politicians talk about “bending the cost curve” in health care, Brock simply wants to break it – to provide care free of charge, at the hands of unpaid volunteer doctors and dentists using donated equipment.

Brock’s group, Remote Area Medical, wants to bring its services to Washington, and soon. He wants his volunteer eye doctors to grind new glasses on the spot for those having trouble seeing.

He wants his dentists to pull rotten teeth and perform root canals in badly neglected mouths. He wants to give checkups and HIV tests to the uninsured and the underinsured. No questions asked.

The only question is whether the bureaucrats will let him do it.

That sounds like hyperbole.  It’s not.  Read the whole thing (it’s short) and you’ll learn how in-state clinicians shamelessly use monopolistic licensing laws to protect themselves from competition — even at the cost of denying medical care to poor people.

Yesterday, Cato released a study where I advocate breaking up the state’s licensing monopolies and making state-issued licenses portable.  Such a law would completely solve Remote Area Medical’s problem.

This Cato study by economist Shirley Svorny reveals how clinician licensing laws do more harm than good.

(Cross-posted at Cato@Liberty Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)

To Make Health Care Affordable, Don’t Add Regulations — Repeal Them is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Medicare for Everyone? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I was glad to see James Pinkerton engage my criticism of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) endorsement of federal price controls for health insurance.  I was even more pleased to see that Pinkerton has his own blog devoted to developing a Serious Medicine Strategy.

If I understand Pinkerton, his argument is essentially: it’s all well and good for some unelectable wonk in the “citadel of libertarian thinking” to “uphold ivory-tower free-market purity” by opposing price controls.  But Republicans need “art-of-the-possible solutions” to win elections, and 90 percent of the public support those price controls.  “Everyone has a right to his or her principled position,” Pinkerton writes, “but the majority has rights, too.”

Two problems.

First, Pinkerton suggests that libertarians oppose price controls for reasons that only matter to libertarians, and therefore may be safely ignored.  Problem is, price controls hurt people.  Were Pinkerton to explore the merits of Jindal’s proposal, he would soon conclude that imposing price controls on health insurance taxes the healthy, reduces everyone’s health insurance choices, and creates even greater incentives for insurers to shortchange the sick.  (Turns out that what Larry Summers said about price controls applies to health insurance, too.)  As John Cochrane explains, those price controls also block innovative products that would provide more financial security and better medical care to the sick.

But Pinkerton’s advice for Republicans is, essentially: “Do what’s popular now, even if it hurts people and voters end up blaming Republicans for it later.”  How is that a good strategy?

Second is this idea that “the majority has rights.”  Majorities don’t have rights.  Individuals have rights.  For example, you have the right to negotiate the terms of your health insurance contract with the individuals at this or that insurance company.  Majorities may attain power, but that’s the opposite of rights.  (See the Bill of Rights.)

Finally, a couple of important odds and ends.  Pinkerton suggests it is “un-libertarian” to be “pro-life,” or to “support the police, the military, and other upholders of public order,” or to “support government restrictions on…euthanasia.”  Writing from the “citadel of libertarian thinking,” I can assure him he is wrong.  Might I suggest Pinkerton read the relevant chapters from The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism?  (The health care chapter is a page-turner!)  Also, I did not “denounce Jindal” any more than Pinkerton denounced me.  I criticized his ideas, and I respect the man.

(Cross-posted at Politico‘s Health Care Arena.)

Hurting the Sick Is Not Good Politics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As we all know, the American health care system is less than perfect.  An inefficient amalgam of government spending, federal tax incentives, employer-based insurance, and private providers, the U.S. system costs us more than it should for the services provided.  Nevertheless, medicine in America remains far more directed by and for patients, in contrast to nationalized systems, which are usually organized by and for bureaucrats.

The results sometimes are horrific.  Indeed, the best way to understand the consequences of Britain’s National Health Service is simply to read stories in British newspapers.  Consider this one in the Daily Mail about  the lack of adequate dental care:

Like so many young women, Amy King always took great pride in her appearance.

Standing in front of the mirror to check her make-up before a night out, the 21-year-old would always try a smile – friends told her they loved the way it lit up her face.

Eight weeks ago, all that changed. The student from Plymouth was admitted to hospital where, in a single operation, she had every tooth in her mouth removed.

Obviously, not all foreign systems do so little for their patients.  France, Germany, and Switzerland all provide care differently, and in all of these nations people receive better treatment than in Britain.  But no where is turning health care over to government the best way to ensure quality yet affordable medical care.  Instead, control over health care should be placed back in the hands of those who have the most at stake:  patients.

The Wonders of Socialized Dentistry is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I count both Ramesh Ponnuru and Ezra Klein as friends.  (I’m so post-partisan.)  Why, oh why must they force me to choose between them??

Ponnuru had an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times where he reaffirmed his membership in the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.  Klein responded in a way that’s sure to satisfy his base, but I think he left the reality-based community wanting.  Are you ready for the fisk?

Klein suggests that if “80+ percent of Americans . . . think the system needs fundamental changes or a complete rebuild,” then 80+ percent of Americans must support universal coverage.  Hmmm, bit of a stretch.  In fact, I can recall one poll where nearly one-third of likely Democratic primary voters rejected universal coverage.

Klein suggests that giving consumers the freedom to avoid unwanted state health insurance regulations would mean that Arizonans wouldn’t get coverage for colorectal cancer screening, and that there would be no mammogram coverage in Idaho.  Mmm, that’s good crazy.  I refer my right honorable friend to the episode where The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn made a similar claim about mandates for prostate and cervical cancer screening.  I looked up the services covered by the plans made available to the Cohn family by the University of Michigan.  It turned out that six out of the seven available plans cover both prostate and cervical cancer screening — even though Michigan requires insurers to cover neither.  (I offered to wager Cohn a fancy dinner that his family has coverage for both, but I never heard back from him.  Foolish, really, to let me know where he gets his insurance. Klein would never give me such an opening . . . or would he?) What Ponnuru proposes is to let Arizonans and Idahoans and everyone else choose what their health plan covers.   Imagine that: people rationing medical care according to their preferences, rather than the preferences of employers, interest groups, bureaucrats, health policy wonks…  Why Klein clings to such regulations despite zero evidence that they actually increase access to the targeted services is beyond me.

Klein criticizes Ponnuru for proposing to replace the current tax preference for job-based coverage with a tax credit available to everyone, much like John McCain proposed during his (latest) presidential campaign.  Ponnuru cites a study estimating that tax credits would reduce the number of uninsured by 20 million.  Klein counter-cites one study estimating that tax credits would have zero net effect on the number of uninsured, and a second study estimating that those who transition from job-based coverage to the “individual” or “non-group” market would pay an additional $2,000 per year for an identical policy.   Klein’s criticisms sound persuasive — provided you know precious little about the topic.  For one thing, the two studies Klein cites are actually the same study.  Pity, really.  Had Klein found a second study to support his position, perhaps it would not have been quite so flawed as the one he did find.  Here’s what I wrote back in September about that study’s flaws:

Thomas Buchmueller et al. estimate that replacing the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with Sen. John McCain’s proposed health insurance tax credit would have zero effect on the uninsured. Yet their estimates neither incorporate nor even acknowledge factors that would tend to increase coverage. First, workers who lose ESI would see their wages rise significantly as labor markets force employers to “cash out” those workers.

That effect would help all workers afford health insurance — but particularly older and sicker workers, because they would get cashed-out more.

Second, the authors estimate that non-group enrollment would double, yet they ignore that administrative costs would fall in a thicker non-group market.

So that $2,000 mark-up really wouldn’t be $2,000.  Even if some mark-up remained, workers could reduce their premiums by purchasing less coverage.  Not all that crazy a concept, considering that the tax treatment of job-based insurance encourages people to buy too much coverage.

Then there’s this effect, which would further reduce premiums for healthy workers:

Third, the authors acknowledge that employment-based insurance forces the healthy to subsidize the sick, yet they ignore that the non-group market would reduce premiums for a majority of workers by allowing them to avoid that hidden tax.

The study’s authors also ignored the premium-lowering effects of McCain’s proposal to allow people to avoid unwanted regulatory costs (e.g., mandated benefits):

Fourth, though the Congressional Budget Office estimates that state health insurance regulations increase premiums an average of 13 percent, the authors ignore that McCain’s proposal to let consumers shop nationwide for insurance would further reduce premiums by allowing consumers to avoid that hidden tax as well.

A few random clarifications.  Klein fears living “in a space where insurers could still discriminate based on pre-existing conditions.”  That’s Church-of-Universal-Coverage-speak for, “I want price controls on health insurance.”  Government can outlaw the practice of charging higher premiums to the sick, but it cannot outlaw the reasons behind those higher premiums.  So when government prohibits insurers from competing on price, insurers respond to those underlying reasons by competing to avoid the sick.  Yes, yes, it’s that pious preference for price-controlled premiums that unleashes the beast of adverse selection — and prevents the market from developing innovative insurance products that help sick people pay those higher premiums. Klein fears a world “where millions of Americans will still lack access to health insurance,” because to the devout, access to insurance matters more than access to health care.  Klein fears that when people move from ESI to the individual market, risk pools will get smaller and insurers will get stronger.  Yet risk pools would get bigger, and insurers weaker relative to consumers.  Klein believes we can “ensure that all Americans have health coverage, [and] that their coverage is comprehensive,” and that we can do all that without rationing “access to health services.”  How?  Just “bring down costs in the system.”  Riiiight.

To cap things off, Klein claims that Ponnuru and I think the U.S. health care sector as it exists is “fine.”  I really can’t blame him for arguing with straw men.

In the end, Klein’s case against Ponnuru boils down to the same absurdity I found in Buchmueller and colleagues’ case against McCain:

The McCain plan would eliminate forced subsidies: of the sick by the healthy (via ESI and community rating) and of particular providers by unwilling consumers (mandates for chiropractic coverage, etc.). Buchmueller et al. would have us believe that if we stop robbing Peter to pay Paul, not even Peter would benefit. A more balanced critique might have been more persuasive.

Klein spends a lot more time thinking about health policy than Ponnuru does. But you’d never know it.

Health Policy Death Match: Klein vs. Ponnuru is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times reports that key congressional Democrats have agreed on the basic provisions for a health care reform bill.  And while many details remain to be negotiated, the broad outline provides a dog’s breakfast of bad ideas that will lead to higher taxes, fewer choices, and poorer quality care.

Among the items that are expected to be included in the final bill:

• An Individual Mandate. Every American will be required to buy an insurance policy that meets certain government requirements.  Even individuals who are currently insured — and happy with their insurance — will have to switch to insurance that meets the government’s definition of acceptable insurance, even if that insurance is more expensive or contains benefits that they do not want or need.  Get ready for the lobbying frenzy as every special interest group in Washington, both providers and disease constituencies, demand to be included.

• An Employer Mandate. At a time of rising unemployment, the government will raise the cost of hiring workers by requiring all employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay a fee (tax) to subsidize government coverage.

• A Government-Run Plan, competing with private insurance.  Because such a plan is subsidized by taxpayers, it will have an unfair advantage, allowing it to squeeze out private insurance.  In addition, because government insurance plans traditionally under-reimburse providers, such costs are shifted to private insurance plans, driving up their premiums and making them even less competitive. The actuarial firm Lewin Associates estimates that, depending on how premiums, benefits, reimbursement rates, and subsidies were structured, as many as 118.5 million would shift from private to public coverage.   That would mean a nearly 60 percent reduction in the number of Americans with private insurance.  It is unlikely that any significant private insurance market could continue to exist under such circumstances, putting us on the road to a single-payer system.

• Massive New Subsidies. This includes not just subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance, but expansions of government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare.

• Government Playing Doctor.   Democrats agree that one goal of their reform plan is to push for “less use of aggressive treatments that raise costs but do not result in better outcomes.”  While no mechanism has yet been spelled out, it seems likely that the plan will use government-sponsored comparative effectiveness research to impose cost-effectiveness guidelines on medical care, initially in government programs, but eventually extending such restrictions to private insurance.

Given the problems facing our health care system-high costs, uneven quality, millions of Americans without health insurance–it seems that things couldn’t get any worse.   But a bill based on these ideas, will almost certainly make things much, much worse.

Or maybe it’s all just a massive April Fool’s joke.

Democrats Agree on Health Plan Outline: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An Illinois physician is arguing that actress Natasha Richardson might have survived her skiing accident if it had occurred in the United States rather than Canada. Explains Dr. Cory Franklin:

Canadian health care de-emphasizes widespread dissemination of technology like CT scanners and quick access to specialists like neurosurgeons. While all the facts of Richardson’s medical care haven’t been released, enough is known to pose questions with profound implications.

In the U.S. Richardson likely could have been both diagnosed locally and flown to emergency care in a nearby city.  Adds Franklin:

What would have happened at a US ski resort? It obviously depends on the location and facts, but according to a colleague who has worked at two major Colorado ski resorts, the same distance from Denver as Mt. Tremblant is from Montreal, things would likely have proceeded differently.

Assuming Richardson initially declined medical care here as well, once she did present to caregivers that she was suffering from a possible head trauma, she would’ve been immediately transported by air, weather permitting, and arrived in Denver in less than an hour.

If this weren’t possible, in both resorts she would’ve been seen within 15 minutes at a local facility with CT scanning and someone who could perform temporary drainage until transfer to a neurosurgeon was possible.

If she were conscious at 4 p.m., she’d most likely have been diagnosed and treated about that time, receiving care unavailable in the local Canadian hospital. She might’ve still died or suffered brain damage but her chances of surviving would have been much greater in the United States.

American medicine is often criticized for being too specialty-oriented, with hospitals “duplicating” too many services like CT scanners. This argument has merit, but those criticisms ignore cases where it is better to have resources and not need them than to need resources and not have them.

Obviously, Americans also die needlessly from substandard care on occasion.  But where government controls the entire health care system, politics is likely to trump consumers from beginning to end.  And that is evidently the case in Canada, where pets typically have speedier access than humans to many of the technological advances that Americans take for granted.  Policymakers must not forget the needs of patients as they rush to “reform” the U.S. health care system.

(H/t to Matthew Vadum.)

Deadly Canadian Care is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Opponents of nationalize health care rightly warn about the negative impact of politicizing medical care, but it’s never easy to prove that someone who otherwise would have lived died as a result.  Yet Canadians are asking whether that may be the case with actress Natasha Richardson.  Reports the News & Observer (hat tip to Matthew Vadum at the American Spectator blog):

Questions are arising over whether a medical helicopter might have been able to save actress Natasha Richardson.

The province of Quebec lacks a medical helicopter system, common in the United States and other parts of Canada, to airlift stricken patients to major trauma centers. Montreal’s top head trauma doctor said Friday that may have played a role in Richardson’s death.

Richardson, 45, died Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York after falling Monday on a ski slope at the Mont Tremblant resort in Quebec.

“It’s impossible for me to comment specifically about her case, but what I could say is … driving to Mont Tremblant from the city [Montreal] is a 2 1/2-hour trip, and the closest trauma center is in the city. Our system isn’t set up for traumas and doesn’t match what’s available in other Canadian cities, let alone in the States,” said Tarek Razek, director of trauma services for the McGill University Health Centre, which represents six of Montreal’s hospitals.

While Richardson’s initial refusal of medical treatment cost her two hours, she also had to be driven to two hospitals. She didn’t arrive at a specialized hospital in Montreal until about four hours after the second 911 call from her hotel room at the resort, according to a timeline published by Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Because of the pervasiveness of both third party payment and government regulation, the American medical system spends more than it should.  But it remains far more oriented towards meeting patient needs than does government-dominated health care.  As policymakers debate various “reform” measures, they should keep Natasha Richardson’s tragic fate in mind.

Deadly Canadian Health Care is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Obama Holds White House Health Care Summit

President Obama hosted almost 150 elected officials, doctors, patients, business owners, and insurers on Thursday for a White House forum on health care reform. The Washington Post reports Obama “reiterated his intention to press for legislation this year that dramatically expands insurance coverage, improves health care quality and reins in skyrocketing medical costs.”

Cato senior fellow Michael D. Tanner responds:

The Obama administration and its allies mainly seek greater government control over one-seventh of the U.S. economy and some of our most important, personal, and private decisions. They favor individual and employer mandates, increased insurance regulation, middle-class subsidies, and a government-run system in competition with private insurance. On the other side are those who seek free market reforms and more consumer-centered health care.

These differences are profound and important. They cannot and should not be papered over by easy talk of bipartisanship.

In a new article, Tanner explains why universal health care is not the best option for Americans seeking a better system:

If there is a lesson which U.S. policymakers can take from national health care systems around the world, it is not to follow the road to government-run national health care, but to increase consumer incentives and control.

To find out how the free market system can increase health care security, read University of Chicago professor John H. Cochrane’s new policy analysis, which explains how markets can “provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition.”

Battle Over Washington DC School Choice Program Continues

Congressional Democrats are considering cutting the funding for a pilot education program that sends low-income children in Washington, D.C., to private schools through vouchers. The program serves as an example of how helpful school choice programs can be to children who are born into families that cannot afford to send them to good schools.

Adam Schaeffer, policy analyst at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, says even the mainstream media is on the side of school choice this time.

In a recent study, Andrew J. Coulson, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, demonstrates the superiority of market-based education over monopolies.

For comprehensive research on the effectiveness of charter schools, private schools, and voucher programs, read Herbert J. Walberg’s book, School Choice: The Findings.

Cato Celebrates Women’s History Month

The Cato Institute pays homage to three women during Women’s History Month who unabashedly defended individualism and free-market capitalism early in the 1940s — an age that widely considered American capitalism dead and socialism the future.

In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand published three groundbreaking books, The God of the Machine, The Discovery of Freedom and The Fountainhead, that laid the foundations of the modern libertarian movement.

On Rand’s centennial, Cato executive vice president David Boaz highlighted the many contributions she made to liberty:

Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rand’s work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed — reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness — are spreading across the world.

Week in Review: A Health Care Summit, School Choice and Ayn Rand is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog