America’s 45 million uninsured are often touted as the main reason that the government needs to introduce a public health insurance option and overhaul the health care system.
There is considerable doubt that there really are 45 million chronically uninsured Americans. In Michigan, although Gov. Jennifer Granholm says that there are 1.1 million, some (like former Rep. Bruce Caswell) have estimated that the number is more like 200,000. Nationally, it’s been found that many are not American citizens, some already qualify for Medicaid but don’t apply, and some simply have other priorities.
NICE, or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, is a British authority that is in charge of making sure that the country’s national health care system uses “best practices” to “root out under-performing doctors and useless treatments, spreading best practices everywhere.”
What are the differences between health care in Massachusetts, a state that has implemented many of the President’s proposed health care reforms, and Georgia, a considerably less regulated state?
Much like the health care systems in other countries with socialized health insurance markets, costs are higher and wait times are longer in a more regulated state.
John Goodman, one of the best writers on health care policy, wrote an interesting piece on the social cost of health care reform.
As Gregory Mankiw explained in a recent New York Times editorial, if we want to shift costs, we do not need monopsonistic buying power. We could simply impose a tax on all the providers and use the proceeds to subsidize the health care purchases of patients. Good for patients and bad for doctors, perhaps. But since the gains and losses cancel out, the benefits for society as a whole are nil.
More myths debunked last week in this column by George Newman in the Wall Street Journal. My favorite excerpts:
In other words, you can keep your current plan if it (and the company offering it) is still around. This is not a trivial qualification. Proponents have clearly learned from the HillaryCare debacle in the 1990s that radical transformation does not sell. What we have instead is what came to be dubbed “salami tactics” in postwar Eastern Europe where Communist leaders took away freedoms one at a time to minimize resistance and obscure the ultimate goal. If nothing else, a century of vain attempts to break the Post Office monopoly should teach us how welcoming Congress is to competition to one of its high-cost, inefficient wards.
Shikha Dalmia had a brilliant column in Forbes last week, reprinted at Reason this week, on “Obama’s top five lies” about health care:
You can read why you ought to regard these claims as dubious by reading her full column.
The Acton Powerblog has a quick write-up of last week’s Health Care Roundtable.
John Stossel has an article posted at Reason about “free” health care. He says it’s not free at all.
Obama insists he is not “trying to bring about government-run healthcare.”
“But government management does the same thing,” says Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute. “To reduce costs they’ll have to ration—deny—care.”
The Health Care Round Table that took place yesterday in Grand Rapids brought out about 90 participants interested in the future of America’s health system. RightMichigan’s Nick De Leeuw, who attended the event, has an excellent write-up here.
Dominic Siciliano, one of the speakers, told those present at the meeting about his two-year-old daughter, who was receiving a chemotherapy treatment at the time he was speaking.
An Op-Ed by Judith White Bridger in the Lansing State Journal inadvertently shows one way that universal health coverage could severely inflate America’s health care spending:
According to the AARP Web site, insurance premiums and deductibles for my age and location for the same 4 1/2 years are estimated at between $22,500 and $36,000, when a trip to a local Redi-Care cost about $95, and an accompanying antibiotic prescription can be filled at Meijer for free.
Fix Health Care Policy has posted a video of an interview with Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman regarding his feelings on the public option health care plan. Lieberman explains why he’s not really in favor of the public option — which he believes is too expensive given the nation’s existing debt, could lead to a doctor shortage and will shift costs to privately insured individuals — nor does he think that it’s politically feasible.
The Lansing State Journal reports on proposals to tax health care benefits provided by employers.
That benefit has been provided tax-free to employees. But that could change.
The exclusion of employer-provided health care from taxable wages is the nation’s biggest tax benefit. The hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue is being eyed as one way to help pay for extending health care coverage.
From Mark Steyn in the National Review Online:
Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.
9 & 10 News reports more health care cuts as Michigan legislators try to get their budgets in order. Another reminder of what happens when patients aren’t the ones deciding which services are worth keeping around.
Carpe Diem’s Mark Perry featured this video, from Reason.tv’s archives, about how to decrease the number of uninsured in America.
The premise? If you want health insurance, buy it. Many of America’s uninsured remain that way by choice, rather than because they can’t afford coverage.
Michigan state legislators are pushing forward on their own proposed reforms for health care in the state. States should be encouraged to initiate their own reform efforts and reject one-size-fits-all federal reforms, but the enthusiasm that Teamster lobbyist William Black expressed in the Lansing State Journal for state Rep. Marc Corriveau’s proposed reforms is misplaced. Mr. Black did a fair job of characterizing these changes. Here’s his bullet points:
A great video from the Independence Institute on the costs of mandatory insurance in places like Massachusetts — costs that could be spread to the whole country with a federal insurance mandate. Check it out:
John Calfee has a great column in the WSJ today tackling some of the major myths regarding a public “option” for health insurance — what he calls “Fannie Mae health care.”
The first three arguments are bogus. The fourth argument is only half-bogus — but the half that isn’t reveals a great danger: If a public plan is inserted into private insurance markets, the American health-care system could rapidly evolve into a single-payer system, which would have devastating effects on R&D for new medical technology.
Investors Business Daily reports that Sen. Max Baucus claims he has found $600 billion in cuts that can be made to spending on proposed health care reforms after the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis revealed last week that President Obama’s reforms were projected to overshoot his original cost estimate of $1 trillion by just that much.
A report by UpNorthLive reminds us where the government’s priorities lie when health care services are one of their many commitments: not with providing the most or best care, but with curbing costs.
Fred Keeslar with the Grand Traverse County Health Department says their wellness center at the TBA ISD Career Tech center is one of the programs that would feel the pinch if the state trims funding. Keeslar says the program “last year served over a thousand children that went through that school, and many of them received 2 to 4 services from the department.” Keeslar says the students are often uninsured teenagers in need of medical care, “the kind of services range from physicals to injuries, to illness to health promotions such as smoking cessation depression through mental health services.”
Robert Reich’s column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, "Why We Need a Public Health-Care Plan," misses important facts in its arguments for implementing a “public option” in health insurance and addressing the arguments against it.
Reich makes three major assertions in an attempt to dissuade us from listening to critics of keeping the government out of the health insurance business.
President Obama has said that his health care reforms will cost the nation $1 trillion. But what does $1 trillion get you?
Most assume that for $1 trillion, the United States will achieve universal coverage, and every man, woman and child in America will be covered. To many, this might be worth the cost. But that’s not what’s on the table so far.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had some coverage on existing Supreme Court of the United States case law, privacy rights and their implications for government health care.
The Supreme Court created and guarantees the right to privacy, which is justified by the Fourteenth Amendment: "… these matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.” That is, the courts guarantee Americans a right to personal autonomy over their lives and prohibit the government from infringing on that right.
One of the major downsides of Canada’s socialized health care system is that you might die while waiting for care. Lindsay McCreith is the plaintiff in a case challenging Canada’s government monopoly on health care provision and insurance with the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
The Wall Street Journal published an outstanding essay by Abraham Verghese on the costs of preventative health care.
If you’ve paid attention to President Obama’s promise to reduce health costs and find the savings that will fund his health care reforms through actions like switching America’s focus toward preventative medicine, take note that while an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure, it sure doesn’t cost less. From Verghese’s article:
