Since the Cap & Trade bill is getting hammered from quite a few angles throughout the halls of Congress, recent news has started pushing the much fated plan for Health Care.
They do this, by first admitting the need to increase the insured, the move to hyping the number of uninsured individuals, and finally discuss plans on how to insure them.
For serious thought – Cato and others have noted that the system itself is creating our current problems and by expanding the current system, we will only expand those problems(here):
A free-market approach would move away from employer-provided insurance and increase competition among both insurers and health providers.
Going further of course, they try to give some reasons the system operates as it does:
There are two key components to any free-market healthcare reform. First, we need to move away from a system dominated by employer-provided health insurance and instead make health insurance personal and portable, controlled by the individual rather than government or an employer.
Employment-based insurance hides much of the true cost of healthcare to consumers, thereby encouraging overconsumption. It also limits consumer choice, because employers get the final say in what type of insurance a worker will receive. It means that people who don’t receive insurance through work are put at a significant and costly disadvantage. And, of course, it means that if you lose your job, you are likely to end up uninsured.
Changing from employer-provided to individually purchased insurance requires changing the tax treatment of health insurance. The current system excludes the value of employer-provided insurance from a worker’s taxable income. However, a worker purchasing health insurance on his own must do so with after-tax dollars. This provides a significant financial reward for those who have employer-provided insurance. That should be reversed….
Not to be locked out, John Stossel just wrote a piece over at Reason giving the reader very colorful examples of how the current insurance system has actually done more harm to having efficient and cost effective medical care than any other piece of legislation on health care (here)
…Insurance, whether private or a government Ponzi scheme like Medicare, means third parties pay the bills. When someone else pays, costs always go up.
Imagine if you had grocery insurance. You wouldn’t care how much food cost. Why shop around? If someone else were paying 80 percent, you’d buy the most expensive cuts of meat. Prices would skyrocket.
That’s what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don’t know. Often nobody even gives a damn. Patients rarely ask, “Is that MRI really necessary? Is there a cheaper place?” We consume without thinking.
By contrast, in areas of medicine where most patients pay their own way, service gets better, while prices fall.
Take plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery: Because patients shop around and compare prices, doctors work hard to win their business. They often give customers their cell-phone numbers. Service keeps increasing, but prices don’t. “In every other field of medicine, the price is going up faster than consumer prices in general,” says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis. “But the price of Lasik surgery, on average, has gone down by 30 percent.”
And honestly, I encourage everyone to read what they can, because this is the very beginning. Through an extensive societal system, we limit the number of doctors graduating each year. We, by law, force doctors to do certain procedures lesser trained individuals might be able to do for my less money. If you recall, 10 years ago, a fully registered nurse (RN) had to draw blood. Now, it’s a 6 week course and they’re called phlebotomy techs.
So yes, Mr. Obama: I and millions think our health care is pretty good, but could use some changes. We just don’t think the government has proven to be more inefficient in any endeavor when compared to a private company has in that same endeavor (excluding government allowed monopolies).
The only real question – is why are we looking for several trillion dollars, which will be pushed into all these different feel good remedies, most of which will show no measurable improvement?
And therein lies the selectorate theory, which basically reads that heads of states and other major players got to their positions of power through a winning coalition of others and those are the people they will be the first to covet.
As for those people that didn’t vote for Mr. Obama, and are therefore not in the winning coalition, well, they’ll get hurt. It’s just too bad that my daughter someday will feel the pain from not being apart of that winning coalition, even though she was completely unable to vote.
October 14, 2009
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
Categories: Economics, Environmentalism, International, Legislation
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Tags: Cap and Trade, Climate Change, Economics, Environmentalism, International, Legislation, oil, OPEC, saudi arabia, self-entitlement, Sharia, Welfare
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