Comments on: THE BAUCUS HEALTH REFORM BILL WON’T CUT THE NATION’S HEALTH CARE COSTS http://www.hydeonhealthcare.com/baucus-health-reform-bill-costs.html Stephen S. S. Hyde On Health Care Reform Topics Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:39:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Stephen Hyde http://www.hydeonhealthcare.com/baucus-health-reform-bill-costs.html/comment-page-1#comment-208 Stephen Hyde Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:52:13 +0000 http://www.hydeonhealthcare.com/?p=730#comment-208 Steve's reply: Actually, I don't believe that "the market" will take care of everything. If it could, then it would have done so prior to 1965, thus eliminating any need to enact Medicare and Medicaid in that year. In fact, medical care is unique among our necessities of life (the others being food, clothing, housing, and transportation)in that it suffers from a fundamental market failure: there is no way that any naturally-arising market will ever provide everyone with the health insurance they need to obtain medically necessary, otherwise unaffordable medical care. However, it is a market failure that the federal government could have corrected with relatively straightforward regulatory and safety net programs at any time during the past 80 years or so. Tragically, it never did that, nor does it propose to do it today. Instead, the government has ignored market-worthy solutions in favor of direct market interventions in attempting to address the needs of those left behind by the market's failure: i.e., the elderly and disabled (with Medicare), the poor (with Medicaid & SCHIP), and now the uninsured (with proposed employer mandates and a health insurance exchange). All these government solutions are proving themselves unsustainable. So is the employer-based private insurance system. While I believe you overstate the nature and magnitude of specific problems with competition in medical care, the lack of effective competition is a very real phenomenon that is a predictable outcome of our current system. I strongly support fundamental health insurance reform that will provide sustainable, portable, affordable health insurance to everyone who wants it, along with wide consumer choice of insurers and providers and strong incentives for healthy living. It is just such a program I describe as The American Choice Health Plan in my book, "Cured! The Insider's Handbook For Health Care Reform." Many thanks(!) for your passionate, thoughtful comments. Steve’s reply:
Actually, I don’t believe that “the market” will take care of everything. If it could, then it would have done so prior to 1965, thus eliminating any need to enact Medicare and Medicaid in that year. In fact, medical care is unique among our necessities of life (the others being food, clothing, housing, and transportation)in that it suffers from a fundamental market failure: there is no way that any naturally-arising market will ever provide everyone with the health insurance they need to obtain medically necessary, otherwise unaffordable medical care.

However, it is a market failure that the federal government could have corrected with relatively straightforward regulatory and safety net programs at any time during the past 80 years or so. Tragically, it never did that, nor does it propose to do it today.

Instead, the government has ignored market-worthy solutions in favor of direct market interventions in attempting to address the needs of those left behind by the market’s failure: i.e., the elderly and disabled (with Medicare), the poor (with Medicaid & SCHIP), and now the uninsured (with proposed employer mandates and a health insurance exchange). All these government solutions are proving themselves unsustainable. So is the employer-based private insurance system. While I believe you overstate the nature and magnitude of specific problems with competition in medical care, the lack of effective competition is a very real phenomenon that is a predictable outcome of our current system.

I strongly support fundamental health insurance reform that will provide sustainable, portable, affordable health insurance to everyone who wants it, along with wide consumer choice of insurers and providers and strong incentives for healthy living. It is just such a program I describe as The American Choice Health Plan in my book, “Cured! The Insider’s Handbook For Health Care Reform.”

Many thanks(!) for your passionate, thoughtful comments.

]]> By: j http://www.hydeonhealthcare.com/baucus-health-reform-bill-costs.html/comment-page-1#comment-207 j Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:13:19 +0000 http://www.hydeonhealthcare.com/?p=730#comment-207 While you raise some good points and some points for study and debate, you sound like a typical fiscal conservative who thinks "the market" will take care of everything. There is no "dynamic market" or "market discipline." Do you mean the market discipline that creates absoulutely no real competition so that the big pharma and insurance companies and health networks are oligopolies with no accountability to anyone? What about anti-trust, price fixing, lobbying for favorable rules and laws, setting market rates by collusion and all of the other "non-markety" activities that large powerful players can do in the "the market?" What about the public subsidies given to big Pharma and health care providers, what about generous governmental contracts with large profits given to private insurers through Medicare? What about the fact that if we allowed some REAL competition and some reasonable regulatory accountability in exchange for all this government subsidy, insurance premiums would not simply go up and be "passed on to the rest of us." Through ACTUAL competition, health costs/premiums would decrease (Economics 101: more competition equals decreased prices). Real competition would allow the "market" to work better because it would allow the huge, inflated, unreasonable profits of these companies to simply deflate to a reasonable level, and this would compensate for increased costs. Fiscal conservatives always claim that "rising costs" will HAVE to be passed on to consumers. They do not have to be, it is a choice. We simply must provide more actual competition and APPROPRIATE regulation so large greedy companies can not simply set the profit level they desire and CREATE the "market" to give it to them, no matter what they have to do to consumers to achieve it. They could simply accept a more reasonable profit, but they have the power to reject that option now, so they can and do simply pass any increasing costs on to consumers. Some of that increasing cost is cost they create themselves by their inept business decisions (for example bad investments), and they then ask consumers to bail them out, not only through premiums, but bail outs- AIG comes to mind. While you raise some good points and some points for study and debate, you sound like a typical fiscal conservative who thinks “the market” will take care of everything. There is no “dynamic market” or “market discipline.” Do you mean the market discipline that creates absoulutely no real competition so that the big pharma and insurance companies and health networks are oligopolies with no accountability to anyone? What about anti-trust, price fixing, lobbying for favorable rules and laws, setting market rates by collusion and all of the other “non-markety” activities that large powerful players can do in the “the market?” What about the public subsidies given to big Pharma and health care providers, what about generous governmental contracts with large profits given to private insurers through Medicare? What about the fact that if we allowed some REAL competition and some reasonable regulatory accountability in exchange for all this government subsidy, insurance premiums would not simply go up and be “passed on to the rest of us.” Through ACTUAL competition, health costs/premiums would decrease (Economics 101: more competition equals decreased prices). Real competition would allow the “market” to work better because it would allow the huge, inflated, unreasonable profits of these companies to simply deflate to a reasonable level, and this would compensate for increased costs. Fiscal conservatives always claim that “rising costs” will HAVE to be passed on to consumers. They do not have to be, it is a choice. We simply must provide more actual competition and APPROPRIATE regulation so large greedy companies can not simply set the profit level they desire and CREATE the “market” to give it to them, no matter what they have to do to consumers to achieve it. They could simply accept a more reasonable profit, but they have the power to reject that option now, so they can and do simply pass any increasing costs on to consumers. Some of that increasing cost is cost they create themselves by their inept business decisions (for example bad investments), and they then ask consumers to bail them out, not only through premiums, but bail outs- AIG comes to mind.

]]>