Government Pays More Health Care Than Private Industry

The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has released information showing that government spends more on health care than the private sector. While this should come as no surprise- the vast majority of health care costs are borne in the last months to years of life, after all, and that is what Medicare is for-? Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is taking full advantage of the information to once again show how government is the problem in health care spending.

RightSideNews.com, where I found the above information at, also compares a number of government health care negatives not as well-known as they should be. Take a look at the first link’s comparative information- it’s kind of interesting when contrasting Medicare with the private sector.

P.S. Coburn is also causing problems with Democrats in Congress- many of whom are backing his amendment for all Members of Congress to join a public option if it’s legalized. Kudos to those Democrats who have so far volunteered to join the public option if it passes, and support the Coburn amendment. I disagree with their public option support, but respect their putting their money and health care where their mouths are.

No Ma’am-o-grams.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which is described as:

An independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention that systematically reviews the evidence of effectiveness and develops recommendations for clinical
preventive services.

has released findings discouraging women between the ages of 40-49?years ?from getting annual, or even biennial,?mammograms.? The ‘expert panel’ (which does NOT include a single oncologist) reversed their original recommendation because they figured that the mammograms were just costing too much and saving too little.?

“With its new recommendations, the [task force] is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them,” Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

Get ready folks, this is what we have to look forward to when the government becomes increasingly involved in health “care”.? Interestingly enough, one of the prime arguments about the cost of health care is the fact that there is not enough preventative care for people, or preventative steps?carried out by people, in an effort to keep more drastic and costly ailments from occurring.? This is undoubtedly a step toward government “suggested” rationing, which will become “mandatory” for people who end up signing up for the government run “public” option should we continue down this present course thanks to our legislators.?

-rj

An Actual Solution To Health Care Reform

As a third year medical student keeping a close eye on the progress of the health care reform proposals moving through the Democrat-controlled Congress,? thoughtful analysis leads to one conclusion ? a government takeover of the health care system is not the solution to the catastrophic problems we face.

I am concerned by the justification given by Democrat leaders and liberal newspaper editorial boards for supporting the ?public option.?? The Miami Herald recently opined ?private insurers don’t make a profit by insuring people likely to need coverage? ? which could be distilled to ?sick people cost more.?? The significance here is that insurance companies then charge them more making coverage increasingly unaffordable.? To complete the argument, the ?public option? would solve this problem.? The CBO says otherwise.? The non-partisan referee of this domestic policy heavyweight bout says the public plan would be more costly than the average private plan because it would ?engage in less management of utilization by its enrollees and attract a less healthy pool of enrollees?. In other words, sick people are more expensive independent of who is paying the bill.

To some, the answer to this problem is ?guaranteed issue? ? colloquially known as making it illegal to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions.? This is known to drive up insurance premiums, in one study by 227%, making coverage for the young and healthy cost-prohibitive.? These are the coveted participants referred to obliquely above that allow the spread of social risk.? In the House bill, the penalty associated with foregoing insurance is 2.5% of adjusted gross income.? For a young person making $40,000, this amounts to $1000 ? small fare if purchasing insurance will cost between $6000 and $8000 ? especially if you don?t think you are going to get sick.? What to do now? As is the case with many government interventions into the private sector, we quickly become mired in how to fix the fixes.

The solution is much less complicated.? What Speaker Pelosi failed to do Friday in 1,990 pages of definitions, distinctions, and dictums, I will do in 418 words.

First, go after Medicare and Medicaid fraud.? A CBS 60 minutes investigation estimated the cost of that enterprise to the taxpayers at $60 billion a year.? A GAO study showed that in 2007, $32.7 billion of Medicaid payments were improper – this cost the state of NY alone over $5 billion. How can we justify expanding the role of government in health care before fixing the current iteration?

Second, sever the union of employers and insurance by taxing employer health plans as income and returning it to employees in the form of a tax credit to purchase insurance.? This would empower patients to choose plans that meet their needs while simultaneously making their plan of choice completely portable.

Third, allow the purchase of insurance across state lines to create a robust market of choices with coverage mandates to be decided by a panel of physicians ? not bureaucrats.? This will facilitate creation of plans for the young and healthy based mostly on routine checkups and catastrophic protection alongside ones for the chronically ill centered on meeting evidence-based guidelines to monitor their conditions.? This prescription gives insurance companies something they want in exchange for something we need.

Fourth, institute meaningful tort reform.? The Pacific Research Institute estimates we spend $200 billion annually on defensive medicine.? Compensating those who are truly harmed and punishing the neglectful does not require trial lawyers.? Physicians traditionally spend 4 years in undergraduate school, 4 years in medical school, and between 3-7 years in residency with a fellowship to follow should they decide to further specialize.? Loss of a license equals loss of a career and loss of 10+ years of one?s life spent intensely training.?? In this medical student?s opinion, there exists no harsher punishment.

Finally, reform the Medicare physician payment formula.? The SGR is an archaic method to determine reimbursement that underpays doctors and forces them to take on less Medicare patients and more of the privately insured in order to cover costs.? The current legislation under consideration in both houses of Congress imposes a 25% across-the-board pay cut to Medicare?s physicians ? Svengali accounting at best and because it will never happen, also blatantly dishonest.? 13 Democrats joined all 40 Republicans voting down the ?doctor fix? bill in the Senate two weeks ago largely because it was seen an attempt to hide the true cost of health care reform.? The adjustment will cost $250 billion over a decade but is a necessary addition to comprehensive legislation to ensure that our senior citizens continue receiving high-quality care.

This five-point plan at Ms. Pelosi?s price of $2.2 million per word only costs only $1 billion.? Please make the check payable to Nicholas Rohrhoff.

From hearing the gentleman repairing my family’s refrigerator the summer before medical school mention how many more he has to repair in order to afford his coronary bypass surgery to sitting in a classroom of 150 extraordinary colleagues called to serve their fellow citizens in the noblest of professions;? From seeing my father?s corporate job disappear in the financial meltdown along with my family?s insurance policy to having a colleague at the University of Florida ask me if we, as future physicians, are going to need second careers in order to secure our financial futures ? I?ve drawn an undeniable conclusion: people are policy.

Health care reform is the domestic issue that will define my generation.? How we decide to take care of each other will be our legacy. ?Unleashing the remarkable ability of the American patient as consumer to bring down costs and increase quality (with appropriate consumer protections and subsidies for those in need) and incentivizing physicians to provide high-quality care and push the envelope of medical innovation is the answer.? As Candidate Obama said, ?We are the ones we?ve been waiting for.?? We are the real public option.

-nicholas rohrhoff is a third year medical student at the University of Miami?s Miller School of Medicine

Obama Pulling Job Loss Heart Strings

In the last year we’ve blown $2 Trillion.? Most of us have nothing to show for it.? Job loss in September was higher than expected.? The Obama administration wants to spend more of our money.? And now they have turned to pulling on the heart strings of the double-digit figure portion of America that is without a steady income.

Saturday, Obama called the unemployment figures “sobering”.? He then took a chance to add that if we fix health care somehow this problem will be fixed.

Don’t forget that at this point, 4 Billion Americans are out of work, according to Pelosi math.

Obama proclaimed that health care reform is a,

critical step in rebuilding our economy so that our entrepreneurs can pursue the American Dream again, and our small businesses can grow and expand and create new jobs again.

I have doubts about this.? Consider the additional tax burden that will come with health care reform that will be placed on small business.? One has to consider the argument that health care reform may increase the unemployment rate drastically.

Why?? Small business in America is considered to be any business that has less than 50 employees.? On the high side of small business, for companies that must maintain health care for their employees to remain competitive and claim talent, the additional tax burden may actually be smaller than the amount spent on purchasing health care for the employees.

But very small businesses of 10 employees or less most likely do not purchase health care for their employees.? Especially those businesses, like independent pharmacies for example, where the majority of employees are part time.? For these businesses, the tax burden will be high.? And the result will be that the employer will be forced to let some employees go in order to handle the additional tax burden.? Because the majority of our countries citizens are primarily employed by small business, the bottom line to health care reform could be an increase in unemployment rather than what Obama would like us to believe.

It’s interesting that all of Obama’s tax heavy plans that strip money from our pockets will turn the job market around.? At some point, you have to start realizing that someone is crying wolf.

-nick

9-12 DC Rally

Joe Wilson Will Not Be Silenced

?Listen? Stop Calling me a Crypto-Nazi??

I have always found it interesting that we like to believe in the unparalleled importance of the historical window of time and space we currently occupy.? Apparently, for many people progress is two-fold: it is the manifest movement of the zeitgeist forward, meaning for the better.? Secondly, as technology becomes more sophisticated (ie. ?better? as many people would have you think) so do the problems faced by people.? I like to think that this idea is articulated best by Biggie Smalls, when Puff Daddy (at the time), Ma$e and Notorious BIG performed the song Mo Money Mo Problems.? Since we do not have ?mo? Money? we have to settle with the belief that we have more problems because we general tend to have ?mo?? of everything else (including elapsed time).? What kills me is when people make comments like ?I just think it?s so hard for kids today,? because having to take buses across town to co-mingle races was not hard.? In the political spectrum, people tend to quip that ?political attacks have gotten to personal and ugly;? because meeting a man for the purpose of dueling and shooting a former Secretary of the Treasury dead just wasn?t personal enough (see Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton).? We have a tendency for generational narcissism.?

The latest personal smear being employed in today?s debate regarding Health Care is calling someone a ?Nazi? or comparing another to Hitler or the likes.? I say this in jest, because any Conservative knows that this technique has been used against Conservatives for years and years.? Just to throw in a personal anecdote: I was once caught up in a friendly debate with the ?College Democrats? table at my respective University, when my opposition to some of the ideas espoused by the young lady I was engaging warranted me being called a ?Klansmen? (to which I told her I was unaware they had changed their membership guidelines to allow Catholics in now) and then I was called anti-Semitic a mere five minutes later.? No name calling exchange is quite as infamous as the 1968 exchange between Messrs William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal.? A cult classic.

Now we are seeing both sides using the old Nazi name-calling with a tenacious fervor.? Both sides are invoking the images of a regime none of them know much more about than what they have seen in the movies or read in books (I would likely place my bets on the former).? Interestingly enough, nobody dares bring what Nazism entailed; the slaughter of 12 million people.? It?s like we don?t have the gonads to actually say what we mean, leaving those in the audience to deduce this on their own.? Nazis equal Holocaust.? Obama equals a Nazi.? Therefore, Obama will lead to the Holocaust.? What is the point of invoking the memory of one of the most heinous regimes known to mankind if you are not going to invoke the outcome of that regime and what made them so Notorious?? Because your comparison is disingenuous and loathsome; any intellectual nincompoop can call another person a Nazi, and each time that happens, the memory of those who actually knew the Nazis diminishes little by little.? David Frum has a decent article which expresses this sentiment at NewMajority.?

Unfortunately for Conservatives, there is a populist uprising that is including many average Americans as well as ?below-average? Americans.? I don?t say this from the point of view as though I am ?better? than them or an elitist.? I mean this as Americans who know little about their own country, history, or even politics.? The good thing: they are getting involved in politics.? This is the point of a liberal democracy, no?? The bad thing: they are getting involved in politics, and they are tending to be the more boisterous and in the end, the ones on the news.? Funny how short-lived our memory span is however, when not but years before people had signs of President Bush as Hitler, and Republicans as Nazis, and accused us of killing babies for oil and the likes.? Obviously that is proper discourse when utilized by the fringe left because we expect that from them; perhaps we should be proud of the fact that the Right is held to a higher standard, even by the left.? I believe that we should do a better job living up to that standard.? I do not think that the people protesting should stop, they are doing their country a service, they ARE making a difference in politics and their regime, they should be damn proud!? Using the terms ?Nazi? and ?Hitler? loosely is disingenuous and abominable in the end (Leo Strauss use to refer to reducto ad Hitlerum), but it is selfish of us to pretend like we are bearing witness to a hostile politics like none that has ever been seen before.

-rj

White House Asks You To Turn In Your Neighbors

The White House has put up a page on their web site today asking you to turn in any person, email, website, etc where you have seen, heard, read anything that the White House is calling “disinformation” on their health care socialism reform plan.

Here’s a clip from the site:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.? These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.? Since we can?t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we?re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

If you see something that seems fishy?? “Fishy” as in something that is an opposing view point to that of the Socialism Administration?

Why does this sound like communist KGB agents keeping tabs on what every day citizens are doing?? If the White House wants to put up this site, and do their best to counter “misinformation” or even prevent the spread of genuine truth concerning the bill, that’s fine.? Their goal is to get the bill passed.? They have to do what ever they can to do so.? But asking individuals to begin turning others in to the administration so that they can monitor those activities or try to shut those opposing voices down is unethical and the epitome of citizens fears of big brother.? This action is the basis for individuals concerns with the Patriot Act, something that Obama voted for twice but publicly denounces as civil rights violations perpetrated by George Bush.? Which is oddly enough becoming a ringing point in every speech.? At some point in your presidency Mr. Obama, you have to take responsibility for the current affairs of the country.

Obama: My Healthcare plan would bring “greater inefficiencies”

How the Public Plan Crowds Out the Market

Public-plan proponents have feigned ignorance of how such an option would crowd out the public market.? The answer is simple: a public plan would be a political, not a market, entity.? Its justification is premised on a belief that the insurance market is not competitive and that insurers price oligopolistically, retaining excessive profits.? Even if this were true, the public plan would have no way of knowing when it had priced away its more efficient market competitors’ oligopolistic profits.? It would not know that it had destroyed these “inefficient” profits until it had lowered its premium prices to a level too low for private insurers to match.? Or, as a flowchart:

It is inevitable that the government will stack the deck in favor of its own offering.? Even if it is not openly subsidized, the public plan will almost certainly be able to outsource expensive administrative duties to government bureaucracies with their own operating budgets.? It will likely have powers to impose its prices on providers that its private competitors will not.? And it is absurd to think that the government would simply allow its plan to disappear if it failed to operate within its budget.? The public plan’s political structure and mandate to drive down prices blindly guarantees that a bailout will be needed sooner rather than later.

-wallace

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