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05 Nov 09

Florida’s Public Option

www.independent.org/blog - Preview

Florida health property insurance public option socialism Randall Holcombe

Florida has had a public option for years, not for health insurance but for property insurance.
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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- In Florida, the public option has meant a substantial socialization of insurance, subsidization of the public option by those who take a private option, and the creation of a fiscally-unsound public insurance company despite the subsidy. Now, we have an opportunity to do the same thing at the national level with health insurance. The results have not been good in Florida, and everyone in Florida knows it. Why would it be any different at the national level?

29 Oct 09

Politicians Butt In at Bailed-Out GM

online.wsj.com/...SB125677552001414699.html - Preview

General Motors GM auto manufacturers bailout socialism government politics

Thoughts on Health Care Reform

www.thebigquestions.com/...thoughts-on-health-care-reform - Preview

health care health insurance socialism economics Steven Landsburg

26 Oct 09

Public plan mirage

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009102502041.html - Preview

public plan socialism health insurance politics

12 Oct 09

Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

Another NHS horror story.

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article6869646.ece - Preview

health care socialism NHS United Kingdom politics

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother
before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex,
on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her
mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.
Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be
left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for
legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

07 Oct 09

The Lesson of State Health-Care Reforms

online.wsj.com/...3298004574455560453947646.html - Preview

health care health insurance socialism regulation politics Peter Suderman

Like participants in a national science fair, state governments have tested variants on most of the major components of the health-care reform plans currently being considered in Congress. The results have been dramatically increased premiums in the individual market, spiraling public health-care costs, and reduced access to care. In other words: The reforms have failed.

24 Sep 09

Taking Over Everything

www.cato-at-liberty.org/...taking-over-everything - Preview

Barack Obama socialism politics David Boaz

This president and his Ivy League advisers believe that they know how an economy should develop better than hundreds of millions of market participants spending their own money every day. That is what F. A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that smart people can design a real economy on the basis of their abstract ideas.

Coverage Story: Does the cost of uncompensated care justify forcing people to buy health insurance?

www.reason.com/...136261.html - Preview

health insurance mandate socialism externality free rider adverse selection politics

the true annual cost per family is more like $200, with uncompensated care accounting for "less than one percent of private health insurance costs."
What about the young and healthy (or middle-aged and wealthy) person who decides insurance is not worth his money but pays all his medical expenses out of his own pocket? His choice does not impose costs on anyone, but under Obama's plan he would still be punished for it.
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- The real reason Obama insists upon making the young and healthy buy insurance they don't want is not the relatively minor free rider problem but the potentially ruinous adverse selection problem: The most expensive patients are the ones who are most likely to sign up for coverage. To keep the official 10-year price tag of his plan below that magical $1 trillion threshold, he needs to balance sick people who rack up big bills with healthy people who pay for insurance but don't use it. Instead of acknowledging this reality, Obama portrays the healthy uninsured as irresponsible leeches.

14 Sep 09

Obama's Health Care Plan: Put Up And Shut Up

www.forbes.com/...-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html - Preview

health care health insurance socialism politics

If there was anything bipartisan about the speech it was that he embraced every bad big-government idea from both sides. If he prevails, the American public won't get "choice and competition" as he proclaimed, but a one-size-fits-all government-prescribed health care plan that it dare not refuse and dare not challenge.
Obama would encourage unlimited health care consumption by patients while eliminating the last vestige of price consciousness. But the reason America is facing unsustainable health care cost increases is precisely because its third-party system of insurance doesn't encourage prudent consumption by patients.
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- not too many health care underwriters will survive such crippling mandates. Many of them will fold, causing further consolidation in the insurance marketplace--not more competition and choice.
- The one Republican idea that Obama did endorse--caps on medical malpractice awards or tort reform--will actually hurt rather than help patient choice.
- Obama lambasted the critics who claim his reform plan amounts to a government takeover of the health care system. But the plan he laid out Wednesday night will control every aspect of the medical transaction. It will tell patients when, what and how much coverage they must buy; it will tell sellers when, what and how much coverage they must sell. This is not a government takeover of health care?

08 Sep 09

From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Sheldon Richman replies to George Orwell's review of Friedrich Hayek's <em>The Road to Serfdom</em>.

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George Orwell F. A. Hayek socialism politics Sheldon Richman

“[A] return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” It’s hard to believe that someone so familiar with Stalinism could have written that. Even without knowing much economics, could he really have thought that what goes on in market-oriented societies, even during depressions, could be worse than the famine Stalin inflicted on the Ukrainians, the show trials and executions, or the labor camps in Siberia?
I think that part of the problem for Orwell is that a truly free market is not among the possible options. For him and many others, the choice is between a system run for employers and one run for workers. (The preferable alternative is not obvious.) In this view, the former is capitalism, sometimes dressed up as “the free market,” and the latter is socialism.

27 Aug 09

The Case for Real Health Care Competition: ObamaCare will restrict choice, not expand it

www.reason.com/...135727.html - Preview

competition profit health care health insurance socialism politics John Stossel

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market—actually, the consumer—holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed.
"Competition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at," Hayek wrote.

Well-meaning politicians have created untold misery by assuming they and their experts know enough already.
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- In place of the variety of products that competition would generate, we would be forced "choose" among virtually identical insurance plans. Government would define these plans down to the last detail. Every one would have at least the same "basic" coverage, including physical exams, maternity benefits, well-baby care, alcoholism treatment, and mental-health services. Consumers could not buy a cheap, high-deductible catastrophic policy. Every insurance company would have to use an identical government-designed pricing structure. Prices would be the same for sick and healthy.

24 Aug 09

Obama’s Health-Insurance Cartel

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health care health insurance socialism Hayek competition profit economics Sheldon Richman

We’ll use HR 3200 as our guide.
No insurance policy would be deemed qualified unless it satisfied the conditions imposed by the government. This is important because under the bill, every individual would be mandated to have a “qualified” health plan. A sub-standard plan that nevertheless satisfied a particular consumer — such as low-cost high-deductible catastrophic coverage — would be forbidden.
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- The point of this tedious recitation is to convey to the reader how precisely the government would define private insurers’ business practices and products. To varying degrees state governments already define these things; this is part of the corporate-state bargain in which companies get cartel rents through protection against new competition in return for complying with various regulations that they take a hand in writing. But this would be the first time that the national government would dictate what minimum health coverage would include and other company practices. For that reason, such a law would effectively create a national health-insurance cartel. Big Insurance, which has been working with the Obama administration behind the scenes, has no problem with any of this.
- The immediate question that should arise about the public option is why — if it must support itself through premiums — the government needs to set it up in the first place. What’s the point of having one more entity selling the same thing private insurers must sell under the same pricing constraints?
- Based on experience — the Postal Service, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the federal flood-insurance program, among others — we can expect that the public option will be bailed out by Congress when it runs into trouble.
- Obama’s plan shows no appreciation for competition’s discovery role. He and his experts claim already to know — or will later decide — what insurance products should be offered and what business practices should be used. The bill would permit no variation — that is, no competition. There would be none of the free market’s entrepreneurial trial and error, in which firms offer competitive products, and consumers render verdicts on them.
- The tipoff that Obama can’t really be interested in competition is his disparagement of profit.
- Obama shows no sign of grasping the communications role performed by profit and loss in a market.

Debate over health care reform rages over different beliefs

www.gazette.com/...reform-60468-don-america.html - Preview

health care health insurance force socialism politics

Why is the idea of national religion so repugnant to liberals, but national health care is just fine?
Why must health care reform be something that society does together through force of law in the social contract, like national defense? Unlike national defense, health care is not a public good.
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- I believe making people do things should be a last resort, not the first.
- Instead of a system that grants health care as an entitlement, I want a system that makes health care get better and cheaper every day. That requires less government involvement, less regulation, more markets, more competition, and more health care freedom. Ultimately, that’s the best way to solve our health care “crisis.”
  
  If you disagree, that’s fine, but why can’t we handle our disagreement on health care like we handle disagreements on religion? You practice your faith, I’ll practice mine.
- I know what I believe. I know there are others who agree. I just wish Democrats respected our beliefs enough to let us practice them.

20 Aug 09

ObamaCare's Inevitable Logic: The president may be talented, but he can't repeal the laws of supply and demand.

www.reason.com/...135549.html - Preview

health care health insurance socialism politics John Stossel

If government pays for more people's health care and wants to control costs, it must limit what we buy.
So it is not a leap to foresee government limiting health care, especially to people nearing the end of life. Medical "ethicists" have long lamented that too much money is spent futilely in the last several months of life. Are we supposed to believe that the social engineers haven't read their writings?

17 Aug 09

Ideas On Liberty

www.thefreemanonline.org/...profit-not-just-a-motive - Preview

profit Hayek socialism economics politics Steven Horowitz

Before blaming the profit motive for the problems in the industry, critics might want to look at the ways in which existing government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the interpretation of tort laws, and regulations such as those that limit who can practice what sorts of medicine might lead firms and professionals to engage in behavior that is profitable but unbeneficial to consumers. Labeling the profit motive as the source of the problem enables the critics to ignore the really difficult questions about how institutions, policies, and laws affect the profit-seeking incentives of producers and how that profit-seeking behavior translates into outcomes. Placing the blame on the profit motive without qualification simply overlooks the Smithian question of whether better institutions would enable the profit motive to generate better results and whether current policies or regulations are the source of the problem because they guide the profit motive in ways that produce the very problems the critics identify.
If blaming the profit motive entails giving government a bigger role in solving problems, what assurance can critics of the profit motive provide that political officials will be any less self-interested and that their self-interest will produce any better results?
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- What critics of the profit motive almost never ask is how, in the absence of prices, profits, and other market institutions, producers will be able to know what to produce and how to produce it. The profit motive is a crucial part of a broader system that enables producers and consumers to share knowledge in ways that other systems do not.

How American Health Care Killed My Father

www.theatlantic.com/...health-care - Preview

health care health insurance United States regulation socialism politics

Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations?
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.
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- I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.
- Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform.
- To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.
- Medical care, of course, is merely one component of our overall health. Nutrition, exercise, education, emotional security, our natural environment, and public safety may now be more important than care in producing further advances in longevity and quality of life.
- How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans “have no health care,” when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself?
- But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is.
- Modern group health insurance was introduced in 1929, and employer-based insurance began to blossom during World War II, when wage freezes prompted employers to expand other benefits as a way of attracting workers. Still, as late as 1954, only a minority of Americans had health insurance. That’s when Congress passed a law making employer contributions to employee health plans tax-deductible without making the resulting benefits taxable to employees. This seemingly minor tax benefit not only encouraged the spread of catastrophic insurance, but had the accidental effect of making employer-funded health insurance the most affordable option (after taxes) for financing pretty much any type of health care.
- We all believe we need comprehensive health insurance because the cost of care—even routine care—appears too high to bear on our own. But the use of insurance to fund virtually all care is itself a major cause of health care’s high expense.
- In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else—by ourselves.
- Society’s excess cost from health insurance’s administrative expense pales next to the damage caused by “moral hazard”—the tendency we all have to change our behavior, becoming spendthrifts and otherwise taking less care with our decisions, when someone else is covering the costs.
- Medicare spends almost twice as much per patient in Dallas, where there are more doctors and care facilities per resident, as it does in Salem, Oregon, where supply is tighter. Why? Because doctors (particularly specialists) in surplus areas order more tests and treatments per capita, and keep their practices busy. Many studies have shown that the patients in areas like Dallas do not benefit in any measurable way from all this extra care.
- When Medicare cut reimbursement rates in 2005 on chemotherapy and anemia drugs, for instance, it saved almost 20 percent of the previously billed costs. But Medicare’s total cancer-treatment costs actually rose almost immediately. As The New York Times reported, some physicians believed their colleagues simply performed more treatments, particularly higher-profit ones.
- The average insured American and the average uninsured American spend very similar amounts of their own money on health care each year—$654 and $583, respectively. But they spend wildly different amounts of other people’s money—$3,809 and $1,103, respectively. Sometimes the uninsured do not get highly beneficial treatments because they cannot afford them at today’s prices—something any reform must address. But likewise, insured patients often get only marginally beneficial (or even outright unnecessary) care at mind-boggling cost.
- health-care demand has no natural limit.
- For almost all our health-care needs, the current system allows us as consumers to ask providers, “What’s my share?” instead of “How much does this cost?”—a question we ask before buying any other good or service. And the subtle difference between those two questions is costing us all a fortune.
- Somebody else always seems to be paying for at least part of our health care. But that’s just an illusion. At $2.4 trillion and growing, our nation’s health-care bill is too big to be paid by anyone other than all of us.
- You may think your employer is paying for your health care, but in fact your company’s share of the insurance premium comes out of your potential wage increase. Where else could it come from?
- Every proposal for health-care reform has featured some element of cost control to “balance” the inflationary impact of expanding access. Yet it goes without saying that in the big picture, all government efforts to control costs have failed.
- Even the simplest business faces constant variation in its costs for labor, facilities, and capital; to compete, management must react quickly, efficiently, and, most often, prospectively. By contrast, government bureaucracies set regulations and reimbursement rates through carefully evaluated and broadly applied rules.
- As a result, strange distortions crop up constantly in health care. For example, although the population is rapidly aging, we have few geriatricians—physicians who address the cluster of common patient issues related to aging, often crossing traditional specialty lines. Why? Because under Medicare’s current reimbursement system (which generally pays more to physicians who do lots of tests and procedures), geriatricians typically don’t make much money.
- The Medicare tax contributions and premiums that today’s beneficiaries have paid into the system don’t come close to fully funding their care, which today’s workers subsidize.
- Whatever their histories, nearly all developed countries are now struggling with rapidly rising health-care costs, including those with single-payer systems.
- In competitive markets, high profits serve an important social purpose: encouraging capital to flow to the production of a service not adequately supplied. But as long as our government shovels ever-greater resources into health care with one hand, while with the other restricting competition that would ensure those resources are used efficiently, sustained high profits will be the rule.
- Health care is an exceptionally heavily regulated industry.
- And whatever their purpose, almost all of these regulations can be shaped over time by the powerful institutions that dominate the health-care landscape, and that are often looking to protect themselves from competition.
- Hospitals have sought to use the laws and regulations originally designed to serve patients to preserve their business model. Their argument is the same one that’s been made before by regulated railroads, electric utilities, airlines, Ma Bell, and banks: new competitors, they say, are using their cost advantages to skim off the best customers; without those customers, the incumbents will no longer be able to subsidize essential services that no one can profitably provide to the public.
- Might we be better off reforming hospitals, and allowing many of them to be eliminated by competition from specialty clinics? As a society, couldn’t we just pay directly for the services required by the poor? We don’t know how many hospitals would even survive if they were not so favored under the law; anyone who has lost a loved one to a preventable hospital death will wonder how many should.
- Why has adoption of clinical information technology been so slow? Companies invest in IT to reduce their costs, reduce mistakes (itself a form of cost-saving), and improve customer service. Better information technology would have improved my father’s experience in the ICU—and possibly his chances of survival.
  
  But my father was not the customer; Medicare was.
- Keeping prices opaque is one way medical institutions seek to avoid competition and thereby keep prices up. And they get away with it in part because so few consumers pay directly for their own care—insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid are basically the whole game. But without transparency on prices—and the related data on measurable outcomes—efforts to give the consumer more control over health care have failed, and always will.
- One of the most widely held pieces of conventional wisdom about health care is that new technology is relentlessly driving up costs. Yet over the past 20 years, I’ve bought several generations of microwave ovens, personal computers, DVD players, GPS devices, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs. I bank mostly at ATMs, check out my own goods at self-serve supermarket scanners, and attend company meetings by videoconference. Technology has transformed much of our daily lives, in almost all cases by adding quantity, speed, and quality while lowering costs. So why is health care different?
- Most MRIs in this country are reimbursed by insurance or Medicare, and operate in the limited-competition, nontransparent world of insurance pricing. I don’t even know the price of many of the diagnostic services I’ve needed over the years—usually I’ve just gone to whatever provider my physician recommended, without asking
- By contrast, consider LASIK surgery.
- The surgery is seldom covered by insurance, and exists in the competitive economy typical of most other industries. So people who get LASIK surgery—or for that matter most cosmetic surgeries, dental procedures, or other mostly uninsured treatments—act like consumers. If you do an Internet search today, you can find LASIK procedures quoted as low as $499 per eye—a decline of roughly 80 percent since the procedure was introduced. You’ll also find sites where doctors advertise their own higher-priced surgeries (which more typically cost about $2,000 per eye) and warn against the dangers of discount LASIK. Many ads specify the quality of equipment being used and the performance record of the doctor, in addition to price. In other words, there’s been an active, competitive market for LASIK surgery of the same sort we’re used to seeing for most goods and services.
- The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of “comprehensive” reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher.
- the administration has suggested a cost to taxpayers of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. That, of course, will mean another $1 trillion or more not spent on other things—environment, education, nutrition, recreation. And if the history of previous attempts to expand the health safety net are any guide, that estimate will prove low.
- The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system.
- All of the health-care interest groups—hospitals, insurance companies, professional groups, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers, even advocates for the poor—have a major stake in the current system. Overturning it would favor only the 300 million of us who use the system and—whether we realize it or not—pay for it.
- Like its predecessors, the Obama administration treats additional government funding as a solution to unaffordable health care, rather than its cause. The current reform will likely expand our government’s already massive role in health-care decision-making—all just to continue the illusion that someone else is paying for our care.

Debating the President’s Portsmouth pitch

Keith Hennessey fisks the president's pitch for more government involvement in health insurance.

keithhennessey.com/...he-presidents-portsmouth-pitch - Preview

health insurance health care Barack Obama socialism politics

These bills would give government officials, or people chosen by the government, authority to determine benefit packages, copayments and deductibles, relative premiums, as well as health plan expenses and profits. They would, in effect, turn health insurance into a utility, run by private companies, but with policies and rates set by the government.
Resources are constrained, and so someone has to make the cost-benefit decision, either by creating a rule or making decisions on a case-by-case basis. Many of those decisions are now made by insurers and employers. The House and Senate bills would move some of those decisions into the government. Changing the locus of the decision does not relax the resource constraint. It just changes who has power and control.
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- It’s hard to square this with his earlier statement that “This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance.”
- The President could have correctly said, “Preventive care saves lives. It increases spending, but I think it’s worth it.” He was incorrect when he said “It also saves money – and we need to save money in this health care system.”
- If legislation “cuts” Medicare spending and turns right around and re-spends those funds to create a new rapidly growing health care entitlement, then the underlying deficit problem is unresolved. The legislation being developed in both the House and the Senate just barely meets this condition.
  
  The President’s budget director argues that other reforms in legislation will “bend the cost curve down.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office disagrees, and says the House bill will increase long-term budget deficits relative to current law.
- Medicare is fiscally unsustainable. The President already said that earlier in the discussion. So Medicare is not a successful model for a new system, because we can’t afford it.
- Ultimately, the health policy debate comes down to the question: Who should make the cost/benefit decision? The pending legislation would move some of those decisions from insurers to the government.
- I would like more of these decisions to be pushed away from insurers to individuals and families, rather than to people chosen by the government to make those tradeoffs for us.
- As a matter of personal policy preference, I can live with the government mandating guaranteed renewal (until and unless someone shows me an effective market-based solution).
  - Wish granted. See "What to Do About Pre-existing Conditions," by John H. Cochrane. - on 2009-08-17
  Add Sticky Note
- Guaranteed issue with community rating is more problematic, as was discussed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal editorial. If you allow people to buy insurance after they get sick, then many people will “free ride,” pay no premiums, and buy insurance only when they need the care. Imagine if you could buy fire insurance for your home while your home is on fire. Who would buy fire insurance in advance and pay the premiums?
  - I wonder if there's a name for this situation . . . oh yes, it's called "adverse selection." Some leftist critics of the health care status quo have blamed adverse selection for rising costs. It's funny that the president is advocating changes that exacerbate it. - on 2009-08-17
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- The only way to mitigate this is to force everyone to buy insurance — an individual mandate.
- Guaranteed issue + community rating + individual mandate = hidden income/wealth redistribution from the generally healthy to the generally sick.
- Most people are relatively healthy, and these policies would raise premiums for all people, including a lot of relatively healthy poor/middle class people.

14 Aug 09

No, there are no "death panels" in the big-government health insurance reform bills being considered. However, no bill can repeal the fact that medical resources are scarce. If the government is going to subsidize the consumption of health care, they must either a) allow the price of health care to rise (Proponents say this is out of the question), or b) ration.

sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/...end-of-life-rigmarole.html - Preview

health care health insurance rationing socialism Sheldon Richman

The problem is not that the bill calls for death panels--it doesn't. The problem is that the expansion of medical coverage by government decree and taxpayer subsidy, along with a determination to keep prices from rising, logically requires rationing of medical services. How else can you expand demand without raising costs? Through government efficiency? Get real. (Price controls would lead to shortages and then rationing.)

12 Aug 09

The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

The founder of Whole Foods outlines a bottom-up, market-oriented approach to reforming health care.

online.wsj.com/...4251404574342170072865070.html - Preview

health care health insurance reform socialism John Mackey

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.
Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
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- Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
- Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
- Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
- Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
- Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
- Enact Medicare reform.
  - This needs to be more specific. - on 2009-08-12
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- Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
- how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
  
  Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.
- Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

05 Aug 09

Lobbying: A Booming Business in a Politicized Economy

www.cato-at-liberty.org/...iness-in-a-politicized-economy - Preview

lobbying socialism government politics David Boaz

Marketplace’s Ronni Radbill noted then, “In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say…. With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time.”
If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then all these spending and regulatory bills may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we’re taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers.

Just as important, businesses will devote their time, money, and brainpower to influencing decisions made in Washington rather than to developing better products and delivering them to consumers.
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- Do we really want the best brains at companies from General Motors and General Electric (this quarter’s biggest lobbyist) to Google and Goldman Sachs focused on working Washington rather than serving consumers?

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