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Why Health Care "Reform" was a Colossal Blunder |
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How do I hate thee, health care “reform”? Let me count the ways:
Fifth way: If it costs too much, it costs too much. Perhaps all this was instituted because health care costs too much. Perhaps it was because the poor need access. Perhaps neither in actuality, but I think I heard both of those justifications. (Not to mention that the federal deficit is too large, although that takes the cake for a glib non-sequitur). Anyway, I want to begin this discussion by observing that rising costs hurt in several ways, and sinking costs help in several ways. If the cost of health care went down, more people could afford it, thus reducing the ranks of those who need help. People would get more care, reducing the incidence of crises (at least, probably. That kind of thing is hard to quantify). And people could more readily afford to help others. Conversely, if health care just plain costs too much, then trying to get someone else to pay for it won't solve anything. How can it help for someone else to pay too much on your behalf? That's just a shell game. The core problem remains. In fact, it gets worse because confiscating wealth leads to less wealth, and fewer "somone elses" to presume upon. So nothing at all will solve our problem unless it addresses the cost of health care. Not the price, the cost. So are there any ready potential remedies for the cost of American health care? Sure. No other society that I know of has our bizarre litigious atmosphere. I've heard numbers, and I think it's true, that about a third of our national health care cost is due to malpractice insurance on the one hand, and defensive medicine on the other. I should think tort reform could reduce this to maybe 5% of the national bill. What an astronomical savings, that could be so readily had. How about mandates? In Washington, you can't buy just the coverage you want. Special interests have jumped all over the fact that health insurance is regulated, and now all policies need to cover everyone's pet item, whether the customer wants it or not. Birth control, natural medicine, blah blah blah. You pay for it because you don't have a choice. If they stopped with the featherbedding, insurance would be cheaper. How about competition? I said earlier that in Washington, at least, there are a lot of choices. If companies weren't prohibited by the government from selling across state lines, there would be more. I don't know how much this would help. Wouldn't hurt. As an aside, do you think this prohibition is in place for our sakes? For our well-being? Welcome to the way big government really works. Anyway, these three suggestions have two things in common. First, there's no disagreement that they would all help reduce the cost of health care to some extent. And second, the health care "reform" that was just passed totally omitted them. In fact, for the most part it made them worse. Now, why would they pass over such obvious improvements? The first item in particular, being the lack of tort reform, is just killing us. Why wouldn't our lawmakers, who are supposed to represent our interests, get that foot off our collective neck? Well, I have two guesses. One is that our lawmakers are almost all lawyers, and they are heavily lobbied by lawyers. The result is that we aren't actually their consituents. They will safeguard this wealth transfer for their real consituents' sake. The second guess is that many of the lawmakers don't really want ad-hoc improvements. What they want is socialized medicine. To them socialized medicine, by definition, is an improvement, and that's all they are after. As Rahm Emanuel pointed out, never waste a good crisis. And if a lot of the problem could be readily defused, there would be less impetus for the government to step in and massively enlarge itself at national expense. So all the people cheering this new law are probably of the same ilk- people who love socialized medicine for socialized medicines' sake. But they and we together are all being taken for a ride now. Like I said in previous entries, new health care is going to cost a lot more than old health care. And as I said above, if it costs too much, which it already does, then that is a core problem that will break us. And make no mistake, it will break us. |