Health Care Reform | The Daily Capitalist

Health Care Reform: Things They Forgot To Tell Us About

Here are a few items of fallout from the health care reform bill just signed into law:

Many companies are taking big write-downs on earnings as a result of having to take charges against subsidiaries that subsidized retiree drug costs. They got a tax break for doing this but the bill takes the tax break away. [...]

A Comment On Health Care Reform: Winning Hearts And Minds

I received this comment on my article lamenting the passage of the health care bill, “Health Care in America: We Now Join Europe.” The person who wrote it has been following this blog for a while and he has added good commentary in the past. I don’t mean to pick on him, but it [...]

See What They Have Done: The Myths of the Health Care Legislation

This is from Cato’s Michael Cannon who is their resident expert on health care.

Myth: This legislation won’t cut Medicare.

Reductions in Medicare outlays finance about half of the legislation’s $1 trillion in new entitlement spending. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office verifies that the legislation would reduce Medicare benefits. President Obama’s top Medicare actuary [...]

Health Care in America: We Now Join Europe

America has now joined Europe as just another quasi-socialist state with the passage of the health care bill. Our new system is similar to France’s. No one believes the Democrat’s promises about cost containment or the true cost of this legislation. The result will be higher costs for everyone, higher taxes for almost anyone [...]

Dear Senator Feinstein …

I wrote my legislators opposing health care “reform.” Here is my letter:

Dear Senator Feinstein:

I oppose the proposed health care legislation because I do not believe it is real “reform.” I do not believe it will deliver the best health care to the most people at the lowest cost.

I believe that our [...]

Government Health Care Kills, Part II

I republished the “Government Health Care Kills” article on ZeroHedge where I also publish (same stuff as here at The Daily Capitalist). It had about 3,000 reads and 120 comments. The comments were mostly negative, especially from Canadian and UK readers who defended their systems and denigrated the U.S. health care system. Many comments were in the nature of a screed. Here is a response I made to their comments that you may find interesting.

The proper way to analyze the delivery of health care is to understand how and why our system is flawed. I would argue that the free market delivers any product or service better and more efficiently than any government system. I think most of you would agree in general with that statement, but you don’t see it applying to health care.

The U.S. health care system is highly regulated. We have no real free market health care system. As a result the delivery of health care is highly distorted by the government and the result has been an expensive and often burdensome system. This has been going on since 1965 with the passage of Medicare. The rigged tax code, the prevention of competition, the lack of control by consumers of their health care dollars, meddlesome regulation, and the burden of Medicare costs being borne by non-Medicare privately insured consumers, have lead to our current mess.

Yet I don’t see similar problems in the delivery of other goods and services, say food for example, because the government does not regulate and control it. Yet food is more necessary to sustaining life than health care.

With all of these flaws, almost all (but not all) innovations, new tools and drugs come from the U.S. That is only because of the profit system that can bring big rewards to innovators and entrepreneurs.

I have studied the health care systems of other countries that have some form of government universal health care and they are all losing money, resort to rationing (cutbacks in services), and have a shrinking population base with which to support an aging population. From Cato: … Continue reading Government Health Care Kills, Part II

CBO Says White House Underestimates Deficits

They probably misplaced a decimal point.

CBO Says White House Underestimates Deficits

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Friday that based on the Obama administration’s budget proposal, deficits over the next decade would be $1.2 trillion higher than the White House estimated.

A preliminary analysis of the president’s budget by the CBO forecasts a [...]

Government-Run Health Care Kills Thousands

Liberals and Progressives have religious faith in government-run health care systems. I am sure, if left to their own ends, they would much rather prefer we adopt a single-payer system similar to the systems in the UK and Canada. Political necessity only permits a foot-in-the-door policy that mandates health care insurance for everyone. While these systems aren’t as inefficient as the top-down single-payer systems (such as Medicare), the current bills passed in the House and Senate impose the heavy hand of the State into almost every dark corner of the health care system in America.

These government fundamentalists march to the canon and cry of the efficiency of government-run systems and mock for-profit systems for being inefficient and wasteful. Yet there is no area of economic activity that the government operates efficiently precisely because of the lack of discipline present in for-profit ventures. The USPS just announced they lost $238 million in 2009. Fedex and UPS were profitable.

The shibboleth of the inefficiency of capitalism has so often been proven wrong by economists on all sides of the spectrum that one can only conclude that these free market deniers are worse than ignorant: they choose power over efficiency. And that is what Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom.” After all, it was the Marxists and Socialists who proved by their failures that the free market works.

It is useless to appeal to reason to these fundamentalists. Their quest for power is an end in itself and they won’t relent.

What to do?

My suggestion is that we should use scare tactics and create an environment of fear and doubt about government health care plans. This is fair since Liberals and Progressives have been spreading falsehoods about the free market system for a hundred years. We have an advantage: we don’t have to lie. The truth is scary enough.

Here are two frightening and disgusting articles that demonstrate what I am talking about. Don’t tell me it couldn’t happen here.

You might find this first article disturbing.

1,200 Needless Deaths

By Fay Schlesinger, Andy Dolan and Tim Shipman

Last updated at 1:45 PM on 25th February 2010

Up to 1,200 patients died unnecessarily because of appalling care

Labour’s obsession with targets and box ticking blamed for scandal

Patients were ‘routinely neglected’ at hospital

Report calls for FOURTH investigation into scandal

Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.

Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.

But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction. … Continue reading Government-Run Health Care Kills Thousands

The President's Health Care Proposal

I just read the 11 page summary of the President’s Proposal on health care reform put out by the White House. Fellow Americans, you have no idea of the financial havoc this plan, or the House or Senate plans, will cause to the health care system specifically or to the economy in general.

The rules and regulations are so invasive that we will be forever mired in endless bureaucratic control of this most important segment of our lives. These plans, while they say they give us choice, are as much “top down” as if the government were running the health care system as in the Canadian or UK systems.

The visions I had were from the movie “Brazil” where huge rows of gray offices provided meaningless jobs for bureaucrats who never understood in the least what their part in the evil system was.

Everything in the Proposal is a lie and so counter-intuitive to the Laws of Economics that one can only assume blatant ignorance of economics or a perverse desire to centralize the role of the state in our affairs regardless of the consequences. I think it is both.

Here is the White House’s summary of this Proposal:

It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history, reducing premium costs for tens of millions of families and small business owners who are priced out of coverage today. This helps over 31 million Americans afford health care who do not get it today – and makes coverage more affordable for many more.

It sets up a new competitive health insurance market giving tens of millions of Americans the exact same insurance choices that members of Congress will have.

It brings greater accountability to health care by laying out commonsense rules of the road to keep premiums down and prevent insurance industry abuses and denial of care.

It will end discrimination against Americans with pre-existing conditions.

It puts our budget and economy on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years – and about $1 trillion over the second decade – by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse.

I don’t have to remind you that in every program the federal government has ever implemented costs have been grossly underestimated intentionally by lying, or by incompetence, or both. Recently disclosed FOIA disclosures reveal that Lyndon Johnson lied about the costs of Medicare because he knew that he couldn’t get the bill through if the true costs were known. Even so the costs have risen geometrically above the worst estimates back then.

I don’t believe that the Obama Administration is just well meaning but misguided. … Continue reading The President’s Health Care Proposal

European Health Care is Not the Way to Go

By Jeff Harding.

Great video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity with a European free market advocate’s perspective on the EC’s various health care plans. Highly recommended.

Hat tip to Cafe [...]

Heather Graham On Health Care Policy

By Jeff Harding.

I confess to being an e-mail subscriber to MoveOn.org. Yes, it’s for all the reasons you suspect: spying on the enemy. There maybe some issue somewhere that I would agree with them, but I can’t really remember. So, I’ll just say that I’m against everything they and George Soros stand [...]

What’s Another Name For “Health Care Coalition?”

By Jeff Harding

Dr. Obama

I assume everyone has read about the deals made in Washington between the Obama Administration and Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Hospitals. In May, 2009 the White House hosted a “stakeholders” meeting with representatives from hospitals, the insurance industry, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, labor and physicians to discuss major steps being taken “to lower health care costs across the board.”

According to the Obama Administration: “In short, the coalition has agreed to reduce the annual health care spending growth rate by 1.5 percentage points for the next 10 years, a change that could result in savings of roughly $2,500 for American families.”

The Administration claims it will save $2 trillion in ten years.

I ask anyone in the audience to tell me when a major government program cost the same or even a little more than the cost the government had forecast.

The Cato Institute disclosed the terms of these deals and found them to be beneficial to industry in order to incentivize them to support the Administration’s health proposal:

Big Pharma:

The Announcement:

‘Today, the President announced a landmark agreement with pharmaceutical companies, who pledged $80 billion in prescription drug discounts over the next 10 years.’ The pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA agreed to give 50 percent discounts to seniors in Medicare’s ‘doughnut hole,’ where enrollees now pay 100 percent of their drug costs. President Obama hailed the agreement as a ‘significant breakthrough,’ while PhRMA spun it as their $80 billion contribution toward health care reform.

The Deal:

Under the agreement, the full price of each drug would continue to count toward seniors’ catastrophic deductible. As a result, even more seniors would exceed that deductible, after which taxpayers would pay 95 percent of their drug costs. Obama also agreed to oppose stricter price controls for government purchases. PhRMA members agreed to cut their prices for seniors only because Obama agreed that taxpayers would buy more drugs at higher prices.

Big Hospitals:

The Announcement:

[T]he Vice President explained, “hospitals are committing to contributing $155 billion in Medicare and Medicaid savings … to cover health care cost reform over the next 10 years.”

The Deal:

The Obama administration essentially issued those groups an insurance policy. To guarantee that the groups would get at least $155 billion back from the government in the form of newly insured customers, the administration agreed that the new subsidies would start flowing immediately, while the pay cuts would take effect over time. That means the pay cuts may never take effect at all: physicians have been blocking their own scheduled pay cuts for nearly a decade.

The administration further bribed the hospital groups with unspecified protections from competing physician-owned hospitals as well as protections for the same inefficient hospitals Obama has criticized.

… Continue reading What’s Another Name For “Health Care Coalition?”

Obamacare

By Jeff Harding

Fair warning: this is one of those ad hominem attacks on President Obama, just so you’ll know.

I question the motives of a politician who says things like government-run national health care will bring good medical care to everyone, that it’s a cost savings measure, it’s a budget balancing program, and that it will not require an increase in taxes on the middle class.

On July 7, 2009, President Obama said:

I am pleased by the progress we’re making on health care reform and still believe, as I’ve said before, that one of the best ways to bring down costs, provide more choices, and assure quality is a public option that will force the insurance companies to compete and keep them honest,” the president said in the statement. “I look forward to a final product that achieves these very important goals.

President Obama knows these statements are lies.

Why is it that no one in the government can come up with an idea for delivering health care to people other than through a government-run plan? Just on the face of it you would have to question their premise. If they can’t run the post office, Medicare, or anything else efficiently, what makes anyone think they can run the 16% of the economy that is health care?

Yet they continue to press for some form of government-run national health care. To be fair, they have quite a bit of support from their voters who are frustrated with the current “free market” system.

What everyone wants is a system that gives them good health care, insurance coverage at a fair price, choice as to doctors, access to the best technology, and the knowledge that they won’t go broke because of medical bills. Sounds fair.

What is the best way to deliver that to consumers? Or, to put it the way President Obama would, “what works?”

To come up with the best system possible, why don’t we first take a critical look at the systems around the world that are run or sponsored by governments. Do some research and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Of course the reason the Administration doesn’t want to do that is because all these public health care systems have problems containing costs, have some form of care rationing, and are raising taxes to cover budget shortfalls.

It is clear from a survey of current systems around the world that the programs that offer the best chance of achieving our goals are the ones that have the least amount of government control. The systems that have the most top-down government control are the ones that least meet these goals. … Continue reading Obamacare