Shifting the Blame for America’s Health Care Woes
I must be losing my touch. I’ve let nearly two months pass without responding to Ezra Klein’s defense of RomneyCare, ObamaCare, and other centrally planned health care systems. (For those who want to get up to speed: his original post, my reply, and his response.) So here goes.
Klein notes that he and I had each used flawed measures of RomneyCare’s impact on health insurance premiums in Massachusetts. Fair enough. But Klein ignores the study I cited by John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, and Dan Kessler, which estimates that RomneyCare increased premiums in Massachusetts by 6 percent. The CHK study has limitations, but it is the best estimate available. I hope Klein addresses it.
Klein’s fallback position is that even if RomneyCare increases premiums, that’s not an indictment of the law because cost-control was not one of its goals. Never mind that Mitt Romney boasted, “the costs of health care will be reduced.” Klein knows political rhetoric when he sees it. Yet he oddly sees no parallels between the phony-baloney promises of cost-control used to sell RomneyCare and the phony-baloney promises of cost-control used to sell ObamaCare — despite ample assistance from people like Medicare’s chief actuary and Alain Enthoven (“the American people are being deceived“).
Then Klein throws down his trump card:
[E]ven a cursory read of the evidence would show that whatever the drawbacks of central planning, it covers people at an extremely low cost. Romney Care’s cost problem is a result of pasting a coverage-oriented quick fix atop our insane health-care system. Compare its costs to the British system, the French system, the German system, or any other system, and whatever your conclusions, you won’t walk away unimpressed by the ability of centralized systems to cover whole populations for much less money than we spend.
Oy, where to begin? First, Klein violates Cannon’s First Rule of Economic Literacy: he writes that centrally planned systems cost less, when what he means is that they spend less.
Second, the phrase “whatever the drawbacks of central planning” is some serious hand-waving. Those “drawbacks” include (among other things): the Medicare program’s suppression of comparative-effectiveness research, error-reduction efforts, care coordination, and other delivery innovations; Canada’s human-rights violating Medicare system; and the suppression of untold innovations in health insurance and medical treatment by government price controls. Other than a few drawbacks, Mrs. Lincoln…
The Faux Compassion of Club Sarkozy
Shortly after President Obama signed his health care law, French president Nicolas Sarkozy offered this backhanded compliment to the United States: “Welcome to the club of countries that does not dump its sick people.”
In this month’s Diplomat magazine (U.K.), I explain pourquoi c’est fou:
Every member of Sarkozy’s “club” has its stories of sick people who have been “dumped,” in one manner or another, despite laws that officially preclude such things from ever happening. In 2005, Canada’s Supreme Court wrote of its country’s Medicare system: “Access to a waiting list is not access to healthcare…[T]here is unchallenged evidence that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.” The British, meanwhile, often seem more content to let the National Health Service shortchange its patients than to let an American lecture them about how often it happens.
The checkered history of government guarantees is why so many Americans — a majority, in fact — oppose President Obama’s new law, which they believe will move the United States even further from Sarkozy’s ideal world than it is now.
Presidents Obama and Sarkozy may prefer the false compassion of a government guarantee. I’ll take the real thing.
Repeal the bill.
Wednesday Links
- Convicted pedophile in the United Kingdom given taxpayer-funded Viagra through the National Health Service.
- Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer filing a lawsuit to legally carry firearms in Washington D.C.
- How it all came crashing down: The causes of the financial crisis.
- A few things you should know to better understand the elections in Afghanistan.
- Podcast: How some on the right-wing are doing everything they can to defend torture. Let’s just call them “enhanced justification techniques.”
The Wonders of Socialized Dentistry
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.
Third-World Accommodations
In the 2003 film The Barbarian Invasions, a patient’s wealthy son offers a handsome bribe to the administrator of a decrepit, chaotic, state-run hospital in Montreal that is (mis)treating his dying father. “This is silly,” the startled administrator exclaims. “We’re not in the Third World.”
Britain’s health-care system is perhaps slightly less state-dominated than Canada’s. Yet today comes the following report:
The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient’s relative to “a Third World” health centre…
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.
Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital’s accident and emergency department, the report found.
Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.
“What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives,” said the 47-year-old. “We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.
“There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.
“It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace.”
The politicians quoted in the story promised, again, that, you know, they would improve things.
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