First: Congratulations to President Obama and the Democratic leadership. You won dirty against bipartisan opposition from both Congress and the majority of Americans. You’ve definitely polarized the country even more, and quite possibly bankrupted us, too. But hey, you won. Bubbly for everyone.
Simply, you have nationalized health care by proxy. Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington and our lives! These giant corporations will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when health care costs rise — and they will — Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame, and out from this ObamaCare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.
The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.
That’s always what Obama had in mind. During the now-legendary health care summit, Obama, who loves to talk about “risk pools,” “competition,” “consumer choice” and the like, let it slip that he actually doesn’t believe in insurance as commonly understood. The notion that Americans should buy the health care “equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car” seemed preposterous to him. “I’m buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation,” he explained. “Otherwise, I’m just paying out of pocket. I don’t go to the doctor. I don’t get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don’t go bankrupt.” Apparently, people are just too stupid to go to the doctor — or maintain their homes — if they have to pay much of anything out of pocket.
The endgame was to get the young and healthy to buy more expensive insurance than they need or want. “Expanding the risk pool” and “spreading out the risk” by mandating — i.e., forcing — young people to buy insurance is just market-based spin for socialist ends. A risk pool is an actuarial device where a lot of people pay a small sum to cover themselves against a “rainy day” problem that will affect only a few people. Such “peace of mind” health insurance is gone. What we have now is health assurance. With health assurance, there are no “risk pools” really, only payment plans.
Under the new law, all the exits from the system are blocked. You can’t opt out or buy cheap, high-deductible Acme Car-type insurance, even if that’s what you need. Ultimately, even that coercion won’t be enough to make the whole thing work because the “cost curve” will not be bending.
Profit-hungry insurance companies were never the problem. (According to American Enterprise Institute economist Andrew Biggs, industry profit margins are around 3 percent, and the entire industry recorded profits of just $13 billion last year, close to a rounding error in Medicare fraud estimates.) Rather, health care costs have been skyrocketing because consumers treat health insurance like an expense account. Putting almost everyone into one “risk pool” doesn’t change that dynamic; it universalizes it. And eventually, the only way to cut costs will be to ration care.
In September, Obama got into a semantic argument with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who noted that requiring all Americans to pay premiums for a government-guaranteed service sounds an awful lot like a tax. “No. That’s not true, George,” Obama said. “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is … that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you.”
Stephanopoulos invoked a dictionary definition of a tax: “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.” Obama laughed off the idea that a dictionary might outrank him as the final arbiter of a word’s meaning: “George, the fact that you looked up … the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.”
OK, put aside your dictionaries. The legislation allocates $10 billion to pay for 16,500 IRS agents who will collect and enforce mandatory “premiums.” Does that sound like the private sector at work to you?
Posts Tagged ‘Healthcare’
The Reality of Obamacare
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Cartoon of the Day
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
BBC: What’s the Matter With Americans?
Sunday, January 31st, 2010Sunday, January 31, 2010
BBC: What’s the Matter With Americans?
The BBC has a snobby and biased piece up basically whinning that, in rejecting Obamacare, Americans are voting “against their interests.”
The piece spends a great deal of time telling the reader that American health care is soooo expensive (without explaining why) and that Americans must be crazy not to want rationing. Well, that’s my take on it, anyway.
But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.
In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%…
Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.
Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?
Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?
It would have been nice if the BBC had actually talked to those who oppose Obamacare, rather than just generalizing about them, insinuating that they’re stupid or “just angry” if they don’t think a government run system is in their best interests.
Protein Wisdom notes that ” in other countries, people demonstrate for the government to do more things for them. Only Americans would turn out in the streets for huge demos, demanding that the government leave them the hell alone.” Those silly Americans!
More analysis here.
Healthcare Debate – Part 1 – The Myth of Inferior US Healthcare
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009I have been reading a lot of articles on healthcare lately, which have brought up many interesting points. One big theme is that the US healthcare system is inferior, in terms of care, compared to many of world’s other industrialized countries. Almost every article I have read, or news report I have seen, bases this on life expectancy numbers and infant mortality. I believe these are good indicators of the general health of a country, and to an extent, are highly correlated to the quality of a healthcare system. However, by their nature those numbers are not direct indications of that quality. Let me explain further…
UK is good example. The UK life expectancy is about 78.7 years and the US is 78.1 years. (see ref. 1) This figure does not represent the quality of healthcare within the country. Why? Because there are other factors besides healthcare that affect life expectancy. The definition of life expectancy is how long, on average, a person born now is expected to live within a country. This measurement takes all causes of death into account. It’s known that the US has a high violent crime rate (reasons for that in a future post) leading to death. In comparison to the UK the US rate is three times higher or 43 deaths per million compared to 14 per million.(see ref. 2) Along the same lines, deaths from car accidents are twice as great, or 130 per million versus the 60 per million in the UK. (see ref. 3) Just these two combined for the entire population reduces the US life expectancy by ½ to 1% (about 8000 additional deaths per million over the average life time, roughly). As you can see this would close the gap with the UK just by adjusting for two common items. Here’s another item we need to adjust for, but the numbers are much harder to quantify. 30% of American’s are obese, as opposed to 23% of Brits. (see ref. 4) That means 7% more of the US population is living a very unhealthy lifestyle. So with just three factors considered the US already appears to have a higher adjusted life expectancy as compared to the UK, and this works with most other industrialized countries.
Another line of evidence to support this assertion is apparent if you look at sub-populations of the US. Japanese Americans live approximately 84.5 years while the average in their home land is only 82.1!!! (see ref. 5) Japan is listed as having one of the top life expectancies in the world.(see ref. 1) So what would happen if we looked at British Americans, well that’s too specific, but if we look at Whites in general their life expectancy as of 2006 was about 78.5 without adjustments.
The infant mortality rate is a harder item to quantify and review. But there are two possible explanations for this. One the US has a more liberal method of counting “live” births which increase the number infant deaths. This is a small number and does not fully explain the difference. Another more plausible explanation has to do with increased use of fertility drugs and the drop in the average gestational period for a baby in the US to below 40 weeks. (see ref. 6) So it may end up being that our increased access to advance fertility technology has actually helped to increase our infant mortality rate.
Finally, not the last line of evidence to look at but certainly another compelling one, is cancer survival rates. The US has better survival rates than the UK and all of Europe in almost every category. (see ref. 7) US patients get the latest technology provided by our very large biotechnology industry.
This is just a quick look at some of the common items used to perpetuate the myth of an inferior US healthcare system. We didn’t even go into things like wait times in other countries, or government councils created to determine the value of a year of life, or CT scans per patient. We may be fat and reckless, but that should not taint our healthcare profession. It can honestly be said that the US provides excellent care to those who have insurance, and arguably the best in the world. BUT! There are still serious problems with our system, enormous problems, evidenced by the uninsured and the general cost per citizen. These are the items that need to be evaluated and not clouded by inaccurate statements about the quality of the care.
Next: Part 2 The Bad Economics of Heath Care in the US
(1) CIA World Fact Book 2009
(2) http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity
(3) http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
(4) http://www.safecarguide.com/exp/statistics/statistics.htm
(5) http://www.omhrc.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=53
(6) http://abcnews.go.com/Health/GlobalHealth/story?id=1266515
(7) http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1012&context=psc_working_papers
(7) http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-vs-europe-life-expectancy-and-cancer.html
(7) http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/5-yr-cancer-survival-rates-us-dominates.html
(7) http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/life-expectancy-higher-in-us-than-uk-at.html
Canada Wait Times
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/story.html?id=1709117
General US demographic Data
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus08.pdf#001
Daniel Hannan on Healthcare
Saturday, August 15th, 2009First off I don’t like Hannity very much (kind of a jerk) but I like this exchange with Daniel Hannan. I think the principles discussed where right on the money.
