health care — VOICES for REASON

Nicholas Kristof gives us his best case for passing ObamaCare:

Critics doubt that the Senate and House bills would succeed in containing health care costs very much, and they may be right. It’s hard to know. But the existing system is a runaway roller coaster. Isn’t it prudent to try brake pedals even if we’re not sure how well they’ll work?

You’ve got to love likening a sprawling new government program to further bureaucratize, politicize and intervene in American health care to putting on the brakes.

No, Kristof, I don’t think it’s particularly prudent to expand government’s control over health care based on nothing but the blind hope it will work; I don’t think it’s prudent to approach any problem without understanding the nature of that problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Commentators on both the right and the left have griped about the many conditions in the Senate and House health-care bills that were added to win the support of special interest groups or specific congressmen. The right, for example, has decried the dealing as “cash for cloture,” while the left has assailed the individual mandate as an insurance industry coup.

And indeed, the bills are ripe with provisions that benefit some at the expense of others. Among those in the Senate bill alone (see this article for a more complete list):

• $300 million to Louisiana for the vote of Mary Landrieu
• $100 million to a Connecticut hospital to help the sinking poll numbers of Christopher Dodd
• A permanent expansion of federal Medicare payments to Nebraska (estimated value, $100 million) for the vote of Ben Nelson
• An excise tax exemption for longshoremen in exchange for the support of their union
• A 10 percent tax on tanning salons—added at the behest of the American Medical Association in place of a proposed a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery
• The exemption of Florida senior citizens from Medicare cuts for the vote of Bill Nelson
• $600 million in Medicaid benefits to Vermont for the vote of Patrick Leahy

Where does the money for these favors come from? From the only place it can—the pockets of U.S. citizens who have created that wealth in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Conservatives—and, more broadly, many on the right—are horrified that ObamaCare is getting close to becoming a reality, and rightly so. Indeed, many have been horrified for months, as ominous proposal after ominous proposal has been put forward. Take the recent flirtation with a “Medicare buy-in.” Medicare has, by some estimates, $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities—and over half the Senate was willing to extend this fiscal train-wreck to cover everyone from 55 to 65. Or take the House and Senate requirement forcing insurers to sell policies to individuals with preexisting conditions for the same price as everyone else. This is like forcing a company to sell fire insurance to someone whose house has just burned down. Why would a young, healthy person buy health insurance and pay premiums for years when he can just buy it the first time he gets sick—with a $750 slap on the wrist (the penalty for not buying “mandatory” insurance)?

Such proposals make it easy to demonize liberals as the health-care villains. But conservatives must share in the blame for the likely passage of ObamaCare.

Read the rest of this entry »

For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.

In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday I discussed the life-serving benefits made possible by the thriving, but fragile, medical technology industry in the United States. Literally millions of lives have been bettered and extended by the products this industry has created, such as defibrillators and advanced surgical tools. For an idea of how amazing the technology in this field is, consider that Paralympian amputees are now argued to have an advantage over non-handicapped, Olympian athletes. It’s not a pipe dream that advances in this industry might one day soon be able to restore sight to the blind, or complex motion to the paralyzed.

Not a pipe dream, that is, unless any of the health-care reforms in Congress come to pass.

Read the rest of this entry »

America is the world leader in medical device innovation, producing more new medical devices annually than any other nation. Its medical technology industry is responsible for nearly two million jobs and is one bright spot in a health-care system with many flaws. Yet, as I’ll discuss here and in my next post, if the health-care reforms presently advancing through Congress are enacted, the medical technology industry as we know it may be severely cut down.

Let’s begin with the good.

What exactly does the medical technology industry do? It designs and manufactures products ranging from stethoscopes to artificial knees to drug delivery systems to imaging machines. These devices better the lives of everyone who steps into a doctor’s office or hospital. They facilitate the delivery of medical care; they reduce the need for surgery and cut recovery time; they make living with chronic diseases manageable; they keep people from dying prematurely.

Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama has been bemoaning rising health insurance premiums ever since he started pushing ObamaCare. Yet newly released studies show that ObamaCare will likely drive up premiums—sometimes as high as double or triple their present rate. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the insurance company Wellpoint, Inc. just published detailed studies of the potential impact of ObamaCare on insurance premiums in the fourteen states where it offers plans. Their conclusion? Premiums for most customers, especially the young and healthy, would skyrocket: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the ugliest spectacles in the push for ObamaCare has been the demonization of the health insurance industry. Nancy Pelosi went so far as to call them “villains”. Obama has been a bit more circumspect, suggesting only that they are not honest.

There are plenty of real problems with health insurance today. Many are frustrated by the ever-increasing cost of health insurance, the seemingly impossible task of figuring out what their insurance covers, the fear of losing their job and with it their insurance. But as my colleague Jeff Scialabba has been pointing out, these sorts of problems are the result of government interference in the health insurance market. The less-regulated life insurance market, for example, does not have spiraling costs, miles of bureaucratic red tape, or a pervasive employer-sponsored system tying people to their jobs.

But there is another category of charges leveled at health insurance companies that is not legitimate. These complaints brand insurance companies as evil because they engage in an array of discriminatory behaviors, which ObamaCare promises to end. The Baucus bill (PDF here), for instance, contains guaranteed issue and modified community rating provisions. This means that insurance companies will be forced to insure everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and must charge everyone in the same age range identical premiums. The idea is that treating different consumers differently is unfair.

But in actual fact, it is eliminating health insurance discrimination that is unfair. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader of this blog was kind enough to send me a photocopy of a New York Times article on health care reform . . . published on May 10, 1962. It was reporting on a controversy surrounding the precursor to Medicare, the King-Anderson bill, then being debated in Congress.

The proposed law had sparked what the Times called a “revolt” among more than two hundred New Jersey doctors who signed a resolution opposing the bill. Observers noted a “movement that is spreading among New Jersey doctors in threatening to refuse to treat medical patients under the provisions of the King-Anderson bill.” The movement’s leader, Dr. J. Bruce Henriksen, was quoted as saying: “As far as I’m concerned as an individual, of course, I won’t practice under socialized medicine. I’ll quit. I’ll refuse to see all patients. Maybe they’ll put me in jail.”

Someone then asked former President Harry Truman what he thought about the New Jersey doctors’ revolt. Replied Truman: “I think they ought to be hit over the head with a club.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I discussed in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this post how many of the problems in our health care system are the result of the dominance of third-party comprehensive insurance—a dominance which has arisen from decades of government interventions favoring this kind of insurance. But as these interventions are not new, neither are the problems we are presently facing. On the contrary, our government has been attempting to solve our health care problems for as long as it has been creating them—and time and again these “solutions” have left our health care system worse off.

In recent decades, for instance, state governments have increasingly looked at insurance mandates as a means of expanding coverage to groups that have difficulty obtaining it. Broadly, mandates are requirements—backed by government force—that insurers cover specific medical expenses (e.g., chiropractors, treatment for lyme disease) or patient populations (e.g., continuing coverage for laid-off employees). Mandates are an extremely myopic political tool: they force insurers into a money-losing endeavor, who respond by increasing insurance premiums or decreasing coverage in another area—creating another problem for politicians to solve by passing more mandates.

Read the rest of this entry »