Medical Care: Part V

This is the fifth in a series of intermittent posts about American medical care and the government's attempts to meddle in it. The first four can be found in my archives from August, September, and November of 2009.

Given my prior posts, it would be logical to expect me to spend today ranting about the unseemly actions taken last night by 219 elected Democrats.

But there would be no point, because I knew it was going to happen. Only the hopelessly naïve could have expected anything else to be possible. So I will limit myself to commenting on two things about last night.

For one, I feel compelled to mention that in its present form, Obamacare breaks virtually every promise The Exalted One made to drum up support for it. He said it would drive insurance premiums down, yet it is sure to drive them up. He said the overall cost curve for health care would be driven down, yet it is inarguably driven up. He said Obamacare would lower the deficit, yet it will obviously increase it, and do so in dramatic fashion. And going all the way back to his presidential campaign, Obama said he would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year, yet both of those claims are now proved false.

And the other thing about last night? Well, I am remembering the days when Bush was president and Obama was a senator, and Bush was advocating for Social Security reform. When polls showed that the public did not agree with Bush on the issue, Obama publicly said that Bush should stop seeking reform because “the people have spoken.” But after Obama came to the Oval Office and started advocating for his vision of health care reform, and the people spoke not only in polls but also in elections to show their disagreement with him, he responded by thumbing his nose and imposing something the public manifestly does not want.

The above information speaks for itself.

I am angry, but I am not discouraged because I know last night was just one battle in a philosophical war that will last a long time. Many states are planning to fight Obamacare in the courts. November is coming and we have a chance to hit the Democrats with an electoral bloodbath like none they have ever seen. And because Obama & Co.’s radical impulses have made the difference between conservatism and liberalism so vivid, it is already easier to persuade the undecided than it was during the fuzzy days of Bill Clinton’s triangulation.

If you need to be bucked up, go here or here. We can win this war…and as long as we fight back with confidence, and don’t play into the Left’s hands by getting gloomy and despondent over last night’s vote, we will win it.

Addendum #1, 3/23/10. The more I've thought about it, the more I have to point this out: not only did every Republican representative vote against the bill, so did more than 13 percent of the Democrat representatives, and the percentage of Americans who oppose it is higher than the percentage of Americans who are Republicans. In other words, opposition to Obamacare is bipartisan, support of it is not.

Addendum #2, 3/23/10. As expected, 13 states jointly filed suit today, challenging the bill's constitutionality. You can read the suit here. More than 20 other states are said to be considering similar legal action.

Medical Care: Part IV

This is the fourth in a series of posts about American medical care and the government’s attempts to meddle in it. Posts about other topics may appear between them. The first three posts can be read here, here, and here.

Enacting tort reform.

Removing the maze of government mandates that require medical insurers to cover all sorts of non-critical and elective procedures, even if their customers want an option to purchase catastrophic-only coverage.

Allowing medical insurance to be purchased across state lines (or in other words, opening the insurance market rather than closing it).

These are steps government can take that would, without doubt, drive down the prices American consumers must now pay to secure medical care. They would accomplish that goal without any negative side effects to care, and without government intruding into the personal affairs of the entire population under the ruse of helping the small percentage that is truly unable to obtain care.

And notably, these steps could be taken quickly because Republicans would support them. In fact, Republicans have been championing them for some time but are always rebuffed by the liberal elites who rule the roost.

If Obama & Co. were really interested in improving medical care or access to it, they could have already started that snowball rolling down the hill by proposing these steps and passing them with bipartisan support. They could already be claiming credit for taking action to "help working families," and Obama could be saying that the bipartisan support proves he is what he claimed to be during the campaign: a uniter not a divider, a pragmatic centrist interested only in results, all that jazz. Any grander steps could be pursued after the fact, and Obama could claim that he shares General Patton's belief that "a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow."

But these commonsense, winning measures (plus several others which fit that description) are being ignored at best, and brushed aside at worst.

It is telling that Obama & Co. continue to ignore the obvious steps while deploying blitzkrieg tactics to push for ones that are, to say the least, dubious. What it tells us is that Obama & Co.'s goal is not to improve your health or your life, but to control them. History shows that if we allow them to succeed, we do so at our own peril -- and more importantly, at our descendants' peril.

Medical Care: Part III

This is the third in a series of posts about American medical care and the government’s attempts to meddle in it. Posts about other topics may appear between them. The first two posts can be read here and here.

Wednesday September 9^th came. And The Exalted One spoke. And as he spoke, he praised himself, and he lauded the medical care reforms he insists must be passed now -- now! -- even though they are not to take effect for four years. And everything he said was such rubbish that I feel like trotting out that old line about not wanting to dignify something by responding to it.

But when the things he says are so outlandish, not responding to them is difficult.

Barack Obama said the reforms will not add “a dime” to the federal deficit, even though every independent analysis you can find shows that claim to be false. (In my September 12^th piece I mistakenly wrote that he said he won’t raise the deficit a “penny,” but at his inflationary pace, what’s the difference?)

He said the reforms will reduce costs -- even as they forbid actuarial pricing, and expand the items covered by insurance, and add millions more people to the rolls. I would be embarrassed to tell such an obvious whopper to a roomful of kindergartners, yet our president does not flinch while telling it to a nation full of adults.

The MSM roundly criticized Joe Wilson for yelling “you lie!” when Obama said that health care legislation would not cover illegal aliens. But Wilson was right. Language that might bar illegals from coverage does exist, but that language is not clear and it applies to only one part of the plan. The rest of the plan is silent on the issue, and when Republicans introduced language that would unambiguously bar illegals from coverage, Democrats voted it down.

Then there is Obama’s most fork-tongued fabrication of all: His lawyerly remark that the reform “will not require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.” Of course none of the proposed legislation says “you must cancel your current plan.” But like I mentioned in Part II, it does contain financial incentives for employers to cancel their group medical plans and dump their employees into the so-called public option. It should send shivers down every spine in America that Obama can be so brazenly dishonest about a topic that is so important and so personal to all of us.

Barack Obama insults the intelligence of the American people every time he opens his mouth. He does it so shamelessly that the only reasonable conclusion for the people to draw is that he looks down on them with sneering contempt. He should be ignored, for nothing he says ever proves true and his actions never match his words.

There are many things that can be done to positively affect the affordability and accessibility of medical care in America, but, by and large, those things involve limiting government and removing the handprints it has already left on our medical marketplace. In other words, those things represent the philosophical opposite of what Obama is trying to do. I intend to spend the next post in this series focusing on some of those things, since I have spent the first three making the point that neither Obama nor Obamacare are worthy of our trust.

Medical Care: Part II

This is the second in a series of posts about American medical care and the government’s attempts to meddle in it. Posts about other topics may appear between them.

My first post in this series pointed out that among the people who want to do away with the way medical care is delivered in America, most of them cite Canada and the U.K. as models we should follow. Then, it recited some important facts about medical care in this nation versus medical care in those nations, showing that things are better here. Finally, it closed by asking why we should abandon our system and follow theirs.

But few Americans really want to “abandon our system.” Polls repeatedly show that 75 to 80 percent of us are happy with our coverage and our care. What most people do want is to find a way to accommodate those who are faced with hardships that genuinely prevent them from receiving medical services.

But the percentage of our population which falls into that category is small, and finding a way to accommodate them does not require that we eradicate the entire apparatus by which our care is delivered.

Obama has breezily claimed that 47 million Americans are uninsured, but nobody who analyzes the census estimates concurs with him. Sure, for 2007 (the most recent year for which census estimates exist) the stated number of uninsured was 45.7 million. However, after you back out the number of non-citizens -- and the number of people who already qualified for existing public care -- and the number of high earners who chose not to buy insurance because they could afford to pay for whatever treatment they needed -- and the number of people who were temporarily uninsured because they were between jobs, or were simply waiting to meet their new employer’s waiting period before they could be eligible for benefits -- the number plummets to anywhere from 8 to 15 million, depending on who’s doing the estimating.

And that is a relatively small number that should be easy to deal with. There are many things (to be discussed in a future post) that Obama & Co. could do to help those people without jeopardizing the care everyone else receives. However, those things are not even being discussed because the government’s goal is not to help people, but to control them.

On many occasions, Obama has said that under the proposed legislation you can keep your current plan if you like it and keep your current doctor if you like him. This is not true. The House bill would assess a fine, equal to anywhere from 2 to 8 percent of payroll, on employers who do not provide medical insurance to their workers. What Obama & Co. choose not to tell you is that for most employers, the amount of money they are already paying for medical insurance is much higher than that -- usually around 15 percent of payroll. Therefore, the fine will actually incent businesses to drop their insurance. In a competitive environment, what business owner would not choose to pay 2 to 8 percent to the government over paying 15 percent to an insurer.

Worse, when you look at page 16 of the bill, you will find that after your employer drops your insurance, the so-called public option will be the only one available to you because purchasing private insurance will then be illegal.

Further, the bill forbids anyone who does keep their private insurance after the legislation goes into effect from ever making any changes to it...so if you (or your employer) want to do anything like change your deductible or your prescription co-pay, or opt out of maternity coverage, you must either 1) forget the idea, or 2) lose your coverage and be forced into the public system since new private insurance will not be legal.

If the president and his minions were honest, they would stop referring to their plan as a public “option” and call it what it is: a dictate from on high that has everything to do with seizing power and nothing to do with saving lives.

Information used in this post was obtained from Investor’s Business Daily, the Chicago Tribune, the Lewin Group, and the Schnitt Show.

Medical Care: Part I

This is the first in a series of posts about American medical care and the government’s attempts to meddle in it. Posts about other topics may appear between them.

Poll after poll is showing that the American people are not buying what Obama & Co. are peddling under the guise of “health care reform.” Reports say that calls to congressional offices are running 15-to-1 against the pending pieces of legislation collectively known as Obamacare. Doctors are coming out in full force to oppose it. When it comes to the legislations’ faults and the president’s misrepresentations of them, even the MSM is being forthright (well, more than usual) in covering some of them.

In this environment, I have not felt as compelled to write about Obamacare as I did a few weeks ago. But at the same time, I know the fight is far from over, and I know it is foolish to trust people called “Blue Dog Democrats” or “moderate Republicans” to follow their consciences when it comes time to vote. And I know that many people are still susceptible to magic phrases like “universal health care” and “single-payer system.” So, into the water I wade.

When it comes to critiquing the legislation, the main problem is that there is so much to criticize it takes forever to figure out where to start and what angle to take. Therefore, the most logical thing to do is go back to the beginning and ask: Is involving the federal government in our medical care necessary in the first place, and if so, why? Which is important, because so far no answer has been established to either part of that question.

Sure, we hear that health insurance is expensive, but we never hear actual numbers. We also hear that many Americans don’t have health insurance, but the numbers we hear are usually false. Does anybody honestly believe that government is more capable than the free market when it comes to delivering care in an effective and timely manner? And that it can reduce costs in the process? Even diehard leftists know this is not possible.

Almost always, the folks who want to do away with our medical marketplace and replace it with a “system” believe we should do things the way they are done in Canada and Europe. And the European country they most often cite is the U.K. So don’t you think we should compare what we have to what people in those places have before we start remaking ourselves in their image? Here are some things to consider:

The overall cancer survival rate, which is widely considered the most important measure of medical care quality, is 16% higher here than it is in Canada.

When it comes to Europe, a study published by the BBC shows the overall cancer survival rate in the U.S. is higher by an average of 25% than it is in every one of the 20 European countries studied -- and the U.K.’s rate was the fourth worst of those 20.

Along the same lines, 40% of cancer patients in the U.K. never even get to see an oncologist.

In Canada, 27% of the people who need surgery wait more than four months before receiving it. In the U.K., that figure is 36%. In the U.S., it is just 5%.

In both Canada and the U.K., the number of MRI machines per person is four times fewer than it is here. In Canada, the number of CT scans per person is half what it is here, and in the U.K. it is four times fewer than here.

The average wait time for an MRI in Canada, just to find out what is wrong with you, is 10 weeks. When it comes to the U.K., I could not find a clear answer as to the wait time; however, that country’s Department of Health has stated that the average wait for the 15 most common diagnostic tests (of which MRI is one) is seven weeks.

Though I have not seen an official statistic on wait times in the U.S., I know from examining people’s medical records (which I do every day in my occupation) and from my own and others’ personal experiences that the wait is typically days, not weeks.

So before we go further, I ask: Why should we abandon our system and follow theirs?

In addition to the BBC and U.K. Department of Health, information used in this post was obtained from www.healthcare-economist.com, the Tampa Tribune, and the writings of Thomas Sowell.