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Bland CBO Memo, or Smoking Gun?
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Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding. But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation. It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.
If someone sold you a house, or a car, or a mutual fund this way, we would put them in jail.
How to Fix Health Care—Lasik surgery for the medical debate
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The alternative is to base reforms on what works in the other
five-sixths of the U.S. economy, where choice and competition
increase quality and drive down prices over time. -
"How to Fix Health Care" proposes three simple reforms that will
put us on a path to a health-care system that's better, more
affordable, and more accessible. And get this—these market-based
reforms can be implemented without creating new government
programs or raising taxes.
CBO: Senate's Health Care Reform Bill Would Cause Individual-Market Insurance Premiums to Rise
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According to a report released by the Congressional Budget
Office this morning, the average price of insurance
premiums bought on the individual market—that is, premiums not
purchased through employers—would go up by 10 to 13 percent in
2016 if Congress passed health care reform legislation now in the
Senate. This tracks with
state-level reform efforts, which have almost always
coincided with spikes in individual insurance premiums.
Nevertheless, advocates of reform will—and indeed, already are—arguing that the report shows that the bill
will make health care both better and more affordable. How's
that? -
Basically, the argument is that, sure, insurance on the
individual market will be more expensive, but taxpayers will pick
up the tab for the increased costs. - 2 more annotations...
The Consumer Is Not the Customer: Both parties promise to preserve one of the central problems of the health care system
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Three-fifths of Americans, the share with employer-provided
health insurance, are in the same situation. Since someone else
buys insurance for them, using money they would otherwise receive
as wages, they are in no position to shop around and typically do
not know the true cost of their coverage. This disconnect between
payment and consumption is one of the central problems with the
health care system, contributing to insecurity, rapidly
escalating costs, and the general lack of choice and competition.
Yet both Democrats and Republicans insist on preserving it.
Health Care Reform in Massachusetts: Still a Bad Idea
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Health care reform advocates
have taken, in recent weeks, to noting that insurance premiums on
the individual market in Massachusetts—the state where a variant
on proposed national reforms is already in place—have fallen in
recent years. -
In 1996,
Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating
and guaranteed issue - 2 more annotations...
How Much Does A Decade of Health Care Reform Cost? It Depends on What You Mean By "First Decade."
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In other words, according to data provided by the CBO, starting
up the entire reform apparatus is going to cost more like $1.8
trillion over its first real decade of operation.
Health 'Reform' Gets a Failing Grade
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Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.
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whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system.
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Obamacare: Buy now, pay later
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Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits.
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So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.
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What Health Reform Will Do to My Insurance
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I'm a registered Democrat living in New York City, and I buy my own health insurance. But now, having seen the health-care reform bill that passed the House, I'm preparing for life without health insurance.
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I will gain one thing, though—an annual fine for losing my insurance. The exact amount of that fine isn't clear yet, but so far it looks like I'll be paying about the same amount—$2,000 a year—for having no insurance as I do now for having it.
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Health Care: Let the Games Begin
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Health care reform along the lines being contemplated currently faces too many constraints.
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The result is a Rube Goldberg scheme of penalties and inducements, creating a system that is ripe for gaming.
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Unemployment and Health Care
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The debate surrounding the future of health care in the US produces a great deal of uncertainty. Firms who see an even more competitive future in which they will have to be even more cost-conscious might be very hesitant to hire until they have a much clearer sense of what, if anything, will come out of the current debate and what its effects on the costs of hiring will be.
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If the debate should end with the passage of something like what the House passed last weekend, the uncertainty will end but the reality of increased costs on employers might now be fully revealed. If so, we may be stuck with Western European levels of unemployment for a good long time.
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How an Insurance Mandate Could Leave Many Worse Off
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The proposals now before Congress would require just about everyone to buy health insurance or to get it through their employers — which would generally result in lower wages. In other words, millions of people would be compelled to spend lots of money on something they previously did not want, at least not at prevailing prices.
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A subtler problem is what economists call “implicit marginal tax rates.”
The fiscal reality is that not all income groups can receive equal subsidies; as a family earns more, its subsidy would probably decrease, eventually falling to zero. But then we are taking money away from the poor as they climb into higher income categories. This is a disincentive to earn more, and the strength of the disincentive increases with our initial generosity.
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Florida’s Public Option
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Florida has had a public option for years, not for health insurance but for property insurance.
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As the largest private insurer pulls out over a three-year period (that period negotiated with the state), Citizens will get an even larger share of Florida’s property insurance.
Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb. Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.) pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane. When one comes, Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.
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Mandatory Savings? Requiring people to buy medical insurance will fuel health care inflation.
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What industry
wouldn’t welcome a law that forces everyone to buy its product?
But the insurers also argue that a mandate will help
control costs, and the president agrees. Judging from the
experience in Massachusetts, which imposed its own insurance
requirement in 2006, they’re both wrong. -
There are several reasons why mandatory insurance, contrary to
Obama’s promises, has been accompanied by rapidly escalating
costs. First, when you subsidize something, people tend to
consume more of it. - 2 more annotations...
The Tragedy of Health Insurance: How the insurance industry has haplessly abetted the rise of a government-run health care system
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By conferring a regulatory monopoly on each state, the
McCarran-Ferguson Act ends up protecting insurance companies from
interstate competition—residents may not buy policies from
insurers located outside their state. Because health insurers are
insulated against out-of-state competition, state insurance
commissions and legislatures feel free to impose coverage
mandates that
significantly drive up policy premiums. -
The truth is that companies don’t want competition; they want
government guaranteed profits. Mesmerized by the prospect that an
individual insurance mandate would provide them with tens of
millions of new government-subsidized customers, private health
insurers have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into an
inexorable process that will lead to their destruction.
The Welfare State Corrupts Absolutely
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Medical insurance has come to mean getting something for free. The receiver of a service need not ask how it is financed. It’s just taken care of. (Passive voice intentional.)
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What’s that? The government is promising to cap our out-of-pocket expenses, require coverage for preexisting illness and free preventative care, and extend the same deal to absolutely everyone? And this will have no negative consequences whatever, such as limits on what we can buy or enlargement of the budget deficit or higher taxes for the middle class — but it will actually save money? Oh thank you, government!
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