Reality and Health Care

Plenty of folk believe that what is on the health menu in Washington will save them money. Why, just the other day I nearly had my heart torn out by an enraged nursery worker who saw me and my kind as standing between her and lower health bills.

This individual and so many others just like her - they are not cranks, they read the newspaper from time to time; they are however innocent of most forms of scholarship; worse, they are sadly and completely naive.

Reality is that Obama’s plan will raise medical costs, for all of us. Period. What part of higher medical costs is it that our nursery-worker friend and others don’t get?

Of course we can bang away in this blog; it’s something else when Warren Buffett gets it. "Unfortunately, we came up with a bill that really doesn’t attack the cost situation that much and we have to have a fundamental change," he laments. Heck, the president’s own Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported that the Senate bill would hike national health expenditures $234bln by 2019.

That is, BO’s plan(s) only make our present, horribly high costs higher. Why are our costs so high? Because, as Thomas Sowell points out, "When the ‘single payer’ was the patient, people were more selective in what they spent their money on. You went to the doctor when you had a broken leg but not..every time you had the sniffles or a skin rash." The obvious which comes up for all of us - Medicare, an example often used by our friends from the left of slick and efficient delivery. In fact it is grossly inefficient, for the simple reason that when someone else is paying care gets overused.

It’s easy. As the Heritage Foundation noted, "Our current system is out of control for the same reason most Americans over-eat at buffets: when you don’t have to pay for each plate of food, you usually eat more." We might add that it is our pricing, not delivery system which is out of control. And so it is. Out of pocket expenses by patients have fallen from 52% in 1965 to 15% in 2005. It’s the third party gov’t and insurance companies who pay for all this stuff.

Heritage concludes, "When prices are determined through administrative procedures rather than market processes, both patients and producers are anesthetized from normal market incentives to reduce prices and spending." Yet our friends from the left think that more of this will cure the problem. This excuses them from making the tough decision, a signature failing of the left.

Many of us have offered up good, real-world solutions to problems of health cost. These fall not so much on deaf ears but on a president with a radical, statist agenda.

Robert Craven