Archive for August, 2009
GOVERNMENT RATIONING FOR REAL
I recently posted a blog on why government rationing of health care is utterly unnecessary, not to mention immoral. I’ve also written about how the current House version of health reform, supported by the President and the AMA, will inevitably herd us into a government-run health care system that is more restrictive than even the British single-payer National Health Service.
Now comes Zane F. Pollard, MD, a doctor of many decades practice who has personally experienced the heavy hand of U.S. government rationing on a first-person basis. I checked out Dr. Pollard on HealthGrades and he’s the real deal. In his posting, he relates example after example of government intrusion into medical care that is both an indictment of it and a testament to the determination of American doctors to do the right thing despite it. And if you’re one of those people who tends to be suspicious of anecdotal accounts, check out the doctor comments accompanying his telling story. The clear message is that we simply cannot rely on current government programs, much less proposed ones, to get us out of the health care mess we’re in.
BRILLIANT, MR. PRESIDENT! SIMPLY BRILLIANT.
“We’ll cut hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid…” President Barack Obama’s op-ed on health care reform in the New York Times.
Brilliant! Why didn’t Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, or Bush II think of this?
THERE YOU GO AGAIN, MR. PRESIDENT
“There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like…prostate cancer on the front end.” President Barack Obama’s op-ed on health care reform in the New York Times.
Once again, Mr. President, wrong end. It reminds me of a banker friend who years ago told me about his first annual adult physical: “The doctor told me he was going to give me a digital prostate exam. I said it was simply amazing what they can do with computers these days.”
PRESIDENTIAL TRUTH TRAMPLING
According to President Obama, hordes of helpless American are being “held hostage by health insurance companies that deny them coverage or drop their coverage” when they get sick. That was the central message he took to the road last week in what appears to be an increasingly desperate attempt to save his ponderously unworkable trillion-dollar health reform package. In conjuring up insurers riding roughshod over hordes of Americans, the President also tramples the truth. The fact is that the 91% of all privately insured Americans with employer-based insurance never face denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions (so-called “pre-ex”) or loss of insurance when they get sick (called “rescission”). It’s illegal.
What the President is spending so much political capital castigating is the remaining 9% of the private insurance market—the part that provides essential individual health insurance to people ineligible for employer coverage. Pre-ex and rescission are relevant here because individual insurers must operate differently from employer-based insurers.
A BILLION HERE, A BILLION THERE STILL DOESN’T ADD UP TO $65 TRILLION
“(B)y making Medicare more efficient, we’ll be able to ensure that more tax dollars go directly to caring for seniors instead of enriching insurance companies. This will not only help provide today’s seniors with the benefits they’ve been promised; it will also ensure the long-term health of Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors.” President Barack Obama’s op-ed in the 8/16/9 New York Times.
Let’s see, Medicare’s total unfunded liabilities are somewhere around $65 trillion. The amount the President would like to cut in Medicare Advantage payments to those unjustly enriched insurers is about $11 billion per year. At current long-term Treasury interest rates, the savings would handily cover the interest on the interest on the interest on the debt required to make Medicare whole.
It’s a start, I guess.
THE TUBE’S NOT THAT LONG, MR. PRESIDENT
“(W)e will require insurance companies to cover…colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases…on the front end.” President Barack Obama’s op-ed in the New York Times, 8/16/9.
Uh, I don’t think it’s that end, Mr. President.
HANDICAPPING THE HEALTH REFORM PROPOSALS
In a previous posting, I proposed eight essential goals for American health reform. How do the various reform proposals stack up against these goals? Here’s a summary of my analysis of six of them.
They range from my own American Choice Health Plan, to various congressional approaches from both sides of the aisle, to the AMA’s proposal. If you have a favorite you don’t see here, send me a link to the most comprehensive description you can find and I’ll try to add it. If I’ve mischaracterized any aspects of any of them, please comment below and I’ll make appropriate corrections.
SPEAKER PELOSI’S RANT
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken the gloves off with her tirades against “immoral” health insurance “villains” and the “un-American” citizen protesters who object to her taking over American health care. By my count (and Gallup’s), that adds up to more than 150 million concerned Americans who Ms. Pelosi says should shut up, sit down, and just pay for her unworkable, unaffordable “Affordable Health Choices Act”—and for several more ultra-luxury Gulfstream G-5 executive jets, so she can avoid mixing with her benighted constituents in those awkward airport security lines or being crammed into airline seats too narrow for her ample ego.
The Speaker apparently thinks she’s living in an alternate universe from the rest of us. How else to explain her utter tone-deafness to the voice of the majority of Americans who actually like their health insurance while so few of them believe Congress is doing a good job?
WHO WAS PAUL KRUGMAN?
A health economist acquaintance of mine likes to joke that Paul Krugman is the first economist in history to receive the Nobel Prize posthumously. Since the award is given only to living recipients, his point is that Mr. Krugman’s apparent second incarnation as New York Times columnist and self-professed liberal-with-a-conscience shows no evidence of the intellectual rigor that enrobed him on the Stockholm stage. Even the Times’ own former ombudsman has lamented Mr. Krugman’s “disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”
Mr. Krugman continued to prove this point in a recent Times column that purports to explain “Why Markets Can’t Cure Healthcare.” In it, he leans heavily on a 1963 paper by Kenneth Arrow (another Nobel laureate) entitled, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Mr. Krugman said this paper “demonstrated—decisively, I and many others believe—that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs,” and that markets cannot be the answer to our health care problems.
WILL A PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION LEAD TO SINGLE PAYER?
Never underestimate Congressman Barney Frank. He’s a savvy, hard-fighting strategist who knows when to fight and when to accept seemingly half measures that can end up delivering 100%. Here’s what he told the Single Payer Action Organization four days ago.
