Our Bloggers

Try Freedom for a Change

Kudos to the editors of the New Hampshire Union-Leader, who're able to see through the "false premise" and "nonsense" the Obama administration is relentlessly pushing to drive their oppressive health care agenda.

The free market in American health care is not kaput - nor is it the "status quo" – as the statist power-centralizers would have it. Market innovation and ingenuity has for decades been suppressed by government. Real reform, says the Union-Leader, starts by rolling back the powers of politicians and bureaucrats, not expanding them.

There are numerous health care reform options that don't involve massive government takeovers of health care. For example, reducing state coverage mandates could reduce premiums by thousands of dollars and allow people the option of buying basic, low-cost coverage. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division have both found that state certificate of need laws, which require state approval of new medical devices and services, don't keep costs down and can actually increase them.

There are many other reforms that could cut costs without expanding federal control. Obama would prefer that the public not hear about them. The media would do the American people a great service by making sure that they know about all the options, not just the ones the administration is pushing.

Meet the New CON, Same as the Old CON

The Chicago Tribune exercised itself into a commendable lather this week, once more vigorously, effectively — and probably futilely — punching out the State of Illinois' most odiferous low-hanging bag of corrupt bureaucratic dung.

Last we looked in, lawmakers in America's second-largest (or is it the third now?) failed state were trying to decide how best to varnish over their vindictive certificate-of-need soviet's crass history of villainy and incompetence. The legislative culmination of their elite and considered wisdom? Change the CON board's name, make it bigger and bombard everybody on it with generous paychecks.

"In the great Illinois tradition of spending money for nothing, legislators this year explored a useless, corruption-plagued, money-burning agency … and made it grow," a Trib editorial declared on Wednesday. "The lawmakers made it cost more too."

Actually the agency in question, the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, is about to perish. Or rather, the name will perish. Out of the ashes will rise … Ta-Da! The equally unjustifiable Health Facilities and Services Review Board! The Health Facilities Planning Board is an embarrassment. It is supposed to regulate hospital expansion in the state but has turned into a prime example of pay-to-play corruption(.)

…The old useless board had five members. The new useless board has nine. On the old board, members didn't get paid. At least above the table. On the new board, everybody gets paid. The chairman gets $90,000 a year. Commissioners get $65,000.

Periodically considered for euthanasia several times over the past few years, only to time and again be rescued by Gov. Blagojevich and his merry band of allied statehouse pranksters, the CON commission was supposed to die of sunset clauses this July 1.

But acting as usual in the interests of connected collectivists and privileged corporatists rather than free-market competition and patient choice, Illinois lawmakers decided instead to breathe unholy new life into the loathsome socialist abomination.

Why is this happening? Because the Illinois Hospital Association wanted it — and the association is a powerful lobby.

The Trib goes on with the obligatory call for Blago's replacement, Pat Quinn, to reject the bill and abort the new board because CON regimes inevitably result in "higher costs and less efficient care for patients."

The chances of a veto seem pretty slim, though. Back in April, Quinn's first choice to head the health-care infrastructure central planning board was a radical single-payer advocate. Supposedly picked to "restore integrity" to the crooked committee, Dr. Quentin Young — who was at one point Quinn's personal physician — shortly thereafter had to withdraw from consideration because he was himself intractably ensnared in a conflict of interest that made him ineligible for the post.

The reality is that Gov. Quinn, like a majority of politicians in Illinois (and 36 other states), might very well be ideologically incapable of seeing things so simply, rationally and morally as to let personal freedom and economic liberty guide the health care industry.

Just In Time

In this new video short, Colorado's Independence Institute reminds us (in case we had forgotten) that there's an army of policy wonks and political wankers amassing who want to mandate that all America have a compulsory Massachusetts-style health insurance program.

Cato’s Can-Tan Combo Tag-Teaming Obama Tonight

Director of health policy studies Michael "I'm not Tanner" Cannon has unanswered questions leftover from an op-ed ABC published today for President Obama in tonight's "Special Report from the White House" airing on ABC at 10pm EDT.

Cannon and senior fellow Michael "I'm not Cannon" Tanner will both be live-blogging the event.

Cato encourages concerned Americans to (if ABC allows it) email questions for the president, and for Healthy Competition subscribers to submit their favorite question from the op-ed.

Here are three from Cannon's volley of queries that I particularly like:

• You found $600 billion worth of inefficiencies that you want to cut from Medicare and Medicaid. If government health programs generate that much waste, why do you want to create another
• You recently said the United States spends "almost 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. And yet … the quality of our care is often lower, and we aren't any healthier." Achieving universal coverage could require us to spend an additional $2 trillion over the next 10 years. If America already spends too much on health care, why are you asking Americans to spend even more?

• You have said, "Making health care affordable for all Americans will cost somewhere on the order of $1 trillion." Precise dollar figures aside, isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Who’s Parenting the Paternalists?

Last week concierge medicine advocate Steven Knope appeared on FoxBusiness to discuss the prospects of health care reform in America, and what role a robust market embrace of retainer-based medicine might play in improving future doctor-patient relationships.

Knope observed that concierge medicine services are available in some places for as little as $100-$150 a month (comparable to a daily pack of smokes or a foofoo coffee), which he said hardly seems unreasonable "if health is important to people."

True, the practice may not be the "single solution" to humankind's health care challenges, Knope acknowledged. But one would also have to happily suffer gullibility, historical ignorance and political blindness to imagine our federal welfare state delivering a health system conceivably comparable in cost and quality to the unshackled American private sector.

We need to get out of this idea that there's a Utopian system – created either by business or the government – which is going to solve all of our health care problems.

We already know that the government has failed miserably in terms of its nationalized medical experiments, which are Medicare and Medicaid. These systems are simply going bankrupt, as is Social Security. If you use the analogy of having a child and you give them a couple credit cards, and they run through two or three, the answer is not to trust them and give them a credit card with a higher limit. And I think that's what we're going to do if we trust these politicians to run our health care system. It is simply going to be a dismal disaster.

 Here's the 8-plus minute segment:

Matthews on Reform: Keep It Manageable, Make It Affordable, Don’t Mandate It

StateHouseCall contributor Merrill Matthews, director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, has an opinion piece for ABCNews today lauding health coverage reform efforts in the Volunteer State. He says the rest of the country — Washington, D.C. included — ought to take note.

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, probably understands the challenges of maintaining and financing a universal health insurance system better than any Democrat in Congress. So why aren't the Obama administration and the congressional leadership listening to him?

Health care reformers received the first major setback in their reform efforts when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) "scored" (i.e., estimated the financial cost) of Senator Max Baucus's D-Mont., health care reform proposal at $1.6 trillion over 10 years and Senator Edward Kennedy's D-Mass., bill at $1 trillion — and neither senator had handed CBO the complete legislation.

While most people agree that we need ways to make health insurance more affordable and reduce the number of 46 million uninsured, the public is also concerned that the country can't keep piling on more debt. That's where Mr. Bredesen comes in.

Read the rest…

The Consensus on Health Care Spending: We

According to the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of Americans don't think "we" in this country spend the appropriate amount on health care. That oughta indicate something pretty important, right?

It does indeed. Respondents to the question are almost evenly split among those who say "too much" and "too little." (And in what could potentially signify a startling shift among Stupid Party/Evil Party constituency alignments, Democrats and people whose education level is a high school diploma or less were most likely to think the country doesn't spend enough on health care, while Republicans and college grads were more likely to say it spends too much.)

What all this agreeing to disagree shows is that in America's colossal health care market, determining the "right amount" our civilization should be spending is no more a matter for government central planners and statist social engineers to determine than for them to decide the "right amount" members of a free and prosperous culture ought to spend in the aggregate on any other pursuit of individual preference, preservation, well being, advancement, achievement or happiness.

Reports Pew:

Relatively few Americans believe the country as a whole is spending the right amount on health care at this point, but there is no consensus on what the problem is. Just as many Americans say we are spending too much on health care (38%) as too little (40%).

This represents a sharp turnaround in the balance of opinion from three years ago. In early 2006, a 57% majority said that the country as a whole was spending too little on health care, while about half as many (26%) said we were spending too much.

Fortunately, it appears our ruling class of radical reorganizers and men and women of government action, who're preparing to spend a cool trillion or so and hatch voracious new taxing schemes in the name of making health care more "affordable," know exactly what is needed even if our mercurial nation hasn't much of a collective clue.

Paul Prescribes Medical Freedom on CNN

Speaking about President Obama's scheduled speech today in Chicago before members of the American Medical Association, Texas Congressman Ron Paul says that for those of an interventionist mindset, socialized medicine is the logical next step from the corporatist system we have now. Paul, of course, says he'd rather "medicine be delivered in the marketplace like other goods and services."

Bad Medicine

President Obama declared today he doesn't want to socialize American health care, drive private insurance plans out of business or force people onto a government-run "public option," and that anyone claiming his proposals lead in that direction is guilty of employing "fear tactics."

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. My view is that health care reform should be guided by a simple principle: fix what's broken and build on what works.

…If you like your health care, the only thing reform will mean is your health care will cost less. If anyone says otherwise, they are either trying to mislead you or don't have their facts straight.

In fact, says Cato's Michael Cannon, Obama's the one who's been hoodwinked or is seeking to deceive when he tries selling the idea that ever more government intervention into, direction of and regulatory authority over medicine does not constitute "a Trojan horse for a single-payer system," which, the president acknowledged, he has "taken some flak from members of my own party" for as yet resisting. Cannon writes:

(U)nder the proposal supported by the president, government would control more and more of our health care decisions. Government would compel Americans to purchase health insurance, controlling its content, how much we pay, and the relationships between insurers, doctors, and patients. Government bureaucrats would determine whether Americans receive certain medical services.

There may be no better salesman than Barack Obama, but his product is deeply flawed. The so-called "Public Option," or government-run plan, that President Obama supports would slowly but inexorably lead to the destruction of the private insurance market and the imposition of a government-controlled single-payer system.

Take 2.0 of These & Tweet Me in the Morning

In the New York Times' "Doctor and Patient" column yesterday, Dr. Pauline Chen examined the obvious pros & potential pitfalls of physicians taking increasing advantage of interactive platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Wrote Chen:

Social media platforms can turn 10- or 20-minute doctor's visits into an ongoing dialogue, where sources of information and, potentially, support are continually available to the patient and the doctor. "Platforms like Twitter can be powerful if doctors are a lot more active in disseminating their expertise," said Dr. (Sean) Khozin (who blogs and can be found on Twitter @SeanKhozin, is an internist and founding member of Hello Health, a paperless "concierge" practice based in Brooklyn that utilizes e-mail, instant messaging and video chat for coordinating care). "Patients are being bombarded with information online, but I don't think all that information necessarily empowers them. You also need expertise."

Social media has kept me connected with colleagues and a few former patients, allowed me to stay up-to-date with certain health care and medical education issues, and helped me to keep abreast of Web-based resources that might be useful to those I care for. It has also taught me a tremendous amount about the experiences of patients and caregivers, information I'm not sure I would have had access to had I not been engaged online. Although I am far from a savvy user, I have come to think of social media like I do any other test, instrument or procedure; it's extremely helpful in some situations, and for some patients, and less so in others.