Writes Cato’s Michael Cannon:
Amid double-digit unemployment, a record $1.6 trillion federal deficit and a national debt projected to double in 10 years, U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., voted to bring to the floor of the Senate a health care overhaul with so many job-killing tax increases that it’s hard [...]
John R. Graham of the Pacific Research Institute offers a great critique of Nicholas D. Kristof’s recent New York Times column. Kristof relates a distressing story about a John Brodniak, who lost his job due to illness, exhausted his COBRA benefits, and ended up on [...]
Grace-Marie Turner explains reasons why the public will not like the Senate’s so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. A summary of her article in the Washington Examiner:
1. Exploding costs.
2. Losing your current coverage.
3. Job-killing taxes on employers.
4. Budgetary gimmick — tax now, spend later.
5. Increasing future [...]
The Denver Post published my letter to the editor on October 31. (Yes, I just saw it now.)
Re: “The cost of failure on health care for Colorado,” Oct. 28 online-only guest commentary.
Say your neighborhood deli rigged its scales so that customers who paid for a pound of meat [...]
From the Independent (UK):
Poor standards of care at an accident and emergency unit in one of the country’s flagship hospitals may have contributed to the unnecessary deaths of over 400 patients, an official NHS investigation has concluded. Dirty equipment and an absence of leadership contributed to a death rate almost [...]
From a new Cato Institute policy analysis, Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation:
The health care issues commonly considered most important today — controlling costs and covering the uninsured — arguably should be regarded as secondary to innovation, inasmuch as a medical treatment must [...]
Excerpts from Robert Samuelson’s “Health ‘Reform’ That Burdens Our Young” in Newsweek:
One of our long-running political stories is the economic assault on the young by the old. …This makes no sense for the nation, but as politics it makes complete sense. The elderly and near elderly are better organized, [...]
Some choice words from Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of Harvard’s Medical School. Some excerpts from his Wall Street Journal article:
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 [...]
From the Denver Business Journal on Mark Udall:
Udall, D-Colo., said he is “carefully reviewing this legislation,” entitled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But he did say he was “encouraged” that the measure, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled on Wednesday, “is estimated to drive down the [...]
What special interest groups got paid off in the Democrat-sponsored health care “reform” bills? They include unions, the AARP, the American Medical Association, the state of California, and the state of Louisiana. See:
Health Care BS’s Health reform: Who got paid off? and Michelle Malkin’s The Demcare bribe list.
[...]From the Wall Street Journal:
…the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record [...]
HSA-qualified insurance: affordable premiums, patients spend prudently & take responsibility for their own health, and can save for future expenses. But politicians like Harry Reid want to make HSA-qualified insurance plans illegal.
Read about it in the Wall Street Journal: The End of HSAs: Harry Reid wants to kill consumer-driven [...]
Harry Reid’s Senate health bill up for a procedural vote on Saturday, which could allow it to move forward to debate. (Yet Republicans are pushing to read the whole thing, which could take 34 hours!) In any case, be wary of how this bill [...]
Both the House and Senate care bills include a new government-run health plan. (See the Wall Street Journal’s comparison.) In June I wrote the following:
Supporters of the “public insurance option,” that is, government-run insurance that competes with commercial insurers sense opposition: People realize it’s unfair competition. You know, [...]
The Institute for Health Freedom advises you to contact your Senator today about tomorrow’s vote “on a motion to proceed” on Harry Reid’s health care bill (Sat. Nov 21). There are many reasons not to like this bill. The Institute summarizes:
The bill would (among many other provisions):
require nearly every [...]
Dr. Paul Hsieh has a great article in the Washington Examiner about HR 3962 and mandatory health insurance. It begins:
Suppose the mafia came to your town and forced everyone to purchase all their meals at mob-approved restaurants. The mafia would also select the menu items.
If [...]
From the Wall Street Journal:
Democrats are quietly attempting to impose a “global budget” on Medicare, with radical implications for U.S. medicine. …
If Democrats impose such a commission nationwide, it would constitute a radical change in U.S. health care. The reason that physician discretion—not Washington’s cost-minded judgments—is at the core [...]
Jeff Scialabba at the Ayn Rand Institute has written a two-part blog post on how HR 3962 would punish medical innovation. Part one is about the benefits of medical devices and the cost of bringing them to market. It begins:
America is the world leader in medical device innovation, producing [...]
Congress to Healthcare Market: Drop Dead, economics Professor Mark J. Perry summarizes “market-based healthcare solutions have gone largely unnoticed, despite the fact that they have successfully lowered medical costs and improved both access and quality of service.” He describes the success of:
Retail clinics Retail clinic-hospital partnershipsFrom the Institute for Justice:
Every year, 1,000 Americans die because they cannot find a matching bone marrow donor. Minorities are hit especially hard. Common sense suggests that offering modest incentives to attract more bone marrow donors would be worth pursuing, but federal law makes that a felony punishable by [...]
Obama Care - more uninsured, higher premiums, writes economist Martin Feldstein in the Washington Post:
A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not [...]
The Independence Institute has two new videos in its series on Obama’s health care policy proposals (as proposed by Congressional Democrats). These are two testimonials from Canadian patients who suffered while waiting months and years for medical treatment. Is this what awaits patients in the U.S.? After all, [...]
David Harsanyi summarizes it nicely:
You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi’s fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to “provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth [...]
A new Cato briefing paper by economist Aaron Yelowitz. Here’s the summary:
One of the most interesting questions about the health care overhaul now moving through Congress is how it would affect young adults. That legislation would force most or all Americans to purchase health insurance (an “individual mandate”) and would [...]
If you want a taste of what more politically-controlled medicine would look like, check out this story from MSNBC about how Wall Street executives have access while others wait.
The Wall Street Journal also reports:
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged health officials around the [...]
From the Washington Examimer:
That American citizens should be fined or even put in federal prison for refusing to purchase government-approved health insurance is as un-American as any idea we can imagine. But such a mandate is the very heart of the bill written behind closed doors by House Speaker [...]
Section 211-213 of HR 3962 basically says that insurance companies must offer coverage (guaranteed issue) and charge the same premium (community rating) to everyone regardless of their medical history. The November 8 Daily Camera (Boulder, CO) printed my brief opposition to such political controls:
Should government force [...]
From John Fund in the Wall Street Journal:
Back in September, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters she was “absolutely” committed to having the final language of any health care bill posted on the Internet for 72 hours before a vote on the House floor.
Well, the bill isn’t finished, with [...]
Pajamas Media was kind enough to publish my article about the Democrats’ “Bizarro” health care reform. Here’s the first few paragraphs:
Expect less, pay more. It’s not the slogan for some “Bizarro World” Target store in a [...]
So explains Paul Hsieh MD in “ObamaCare: A National Version of RomneyCare”
From Grace-Marie Turner:
For example, the bill requires employers to pay at least 72.5 percent of insurance premiums for an individual and 65 percent for families. Data from a 2009 Kaiser Family Foundation survey suggest that at least 30 percent of firms with fewer than 200 employees that now offer [...]
Surely you have an opinion on health care policy. Make your voice heard on November 5. Here’s a letter from Patients First:
As millions of Americans head to the polls today, it’s worthwhile to reflect on what our representatives in Washington are planning for the future of our health care [...]
Writes Grace-Marie Turner in the Wall Street Journal:
Massachusetts is a problematic model on which to base federal health-care reform because the state relies heavily on Medicaid. Washington in 2008 agreed to provide the state with $10.6 billion over three years as part of its Medicaid waiver request, which allows the [...]
The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest made a clever and to-the-point video showing how a “public option” would play out:
(Via FIRM, State House Call)
[...]Economist David R. Henderson will be speaking at Metro State College in Denver on Monday in a Pikes Peak Economics Club event.
Title: What Health Economists Know that Obama Does Not Want You to Know
Location: Auraria Campus at the Tivoli Room 640
Time: 10 AM - noon.
Event details [...]
This is the title of the new pamphlet by David Gratzer, MD, author of The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care. It’s a brief and powerful summary of what’s wrong with Democrat politicians’ proposals to “reform” health care with more political [...]
John Goodman makes an excellent point about what happens when government forced insurers to charge the same price to everyone, regardless of their risk: they seek to avoid the sick and attract the healthy:
…think about everything you would like to get from an insurance company. Here are a few [...]
The Wall Street Journal reported last week:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, stepping deeper into the health-care debate, put his weight Thursday behind a proposal that would create a new government-run insurance plan while giving states the option not to participate.
Roger Pilon of Cato asks the pertinent question:
Will residents [...]
The Sunday Denver Post ran a front-page article about how insurance companies charge women under 40 higher premiums than men. It also notes that men in their 50s payer higher premiums than women. In any case, Colorado Insurance Commissioner Marcy Morrison considers the price difference to be a penalty:
Women [...]
The Wall Street Journal has a good summary of how government programs always exceed their spending estimates. Here’s a chart:
The article concludes:
The lesson here is that spending on nearly all federal benefit programs grows relentlessly once they are established. This history won’t stop Democrats [...]
At times I find it difficult to distinguish between a politician and a user, someone who habitually treats others as if they were instruments or tools for their own ends. Their policies imply that other people exist merely for the sake of paying for their great ideas. Such politicians or [...]
James C. Capretta has a fine description of what economists call the “death spiral” that results from requiring insurers to issue policies to everyone (guaranteed issue) at prices that do not reflect their health risks (community rating). It’s happened in states, and it can happen nation-wide:
Insurance death spirals [...]
Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute makes the case to “capturing the moral high ground” in the health care debate: Why Only Private Health Care is Moral. He gave this talk at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. on September 19, 2009.
Part 1:
My notes on part [...]
The following video is based on a new novel called Universal Coverage, by Daniel Putkowski. That is, it’s not real. However, medical tourism on a cruise ship is an interesting possible consequence of increased government control over our medical care and insurance. It’s sort of the medical version of [...]
If you internet service provider violated the contract you made with them by canceled your policy (say you’re hogging bandwidth) is that a reason for government to create a tax-funded “public internet service provider”? Of course not. The ISP in this case has violated its contractual agreement to a customer, [...]
the Cato Institute points out three “irrefutable facts” about the Baucus health care bill:
The real cost of the bill is in excess of $2 trillion. The bill contains an enormous middle-class tax hike. The bill creates a national ID program.Read the whole post: [...]
Here’s a chance to make your voice heard. From the Denver Post:
The Denver Post and 9News have gathered most of Colorado’s congressional delegation — including both senators — so you can hear what they have to say about health reform and ask questions.
“Your Health, Your Congress, Your Voice” will [...]
Here is yet another example of how mandatory insurance can make your insurance policy illegal. Writes Wendy Williams in the Wall Street Journal:
…Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our [...]
Critics of non-government insurance complain that such companies deny claims, and imply that this would never happen with government-run insurance such as Medicare. In a previous post I pointed out that in Massachusetts, Medicaid denies a higher percentage of claims than non-government insurers.
According to the American Medical Association’s [...]
