Naive & Intelligence-Challenged

Posted by Merrill Matthews in Economic principles, Health Care, Insurance Regulation, Maine, Massachusetts on Aug 1st, 2008 | no responses

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Do you ever get the impression that people who keep calling for more government control and provision of health care are — I don't want to sound too judgmental here — dumber than a stump?

For some reason, they seem to think that once the government takes control, the U.S. health care system will:

Pay doctors fairly
Allow doctors to practice medicine the way they think best
Significantly reduce administrative costs
Improve efficiency and quality of care while lowering total costs.

And they base these assertions on . . . the fact that no government-controlled health care system has achieved any of those goals — including existing U.S. government programs?!

There is no bigger fraud being foisted by the reformers than that once the government gets involved costs will go down while quality and efficiency go up. Just look at Massachusetts. Yes, thousands of the uninsured — along with thousands of those who had private coverage but decided to opt for the government-subsidized care — now have coverage, but the cost overruns are phenomenal. And there are numerous news accounts of people having difficulty finding a doctor who can see them. Other major state reform efforts are having similar cost problems. While Maine is having to increase taxes to cover the overruns from its Dirigo Health, the state (unlike Massachusetts) hasn't actually moved many of the previously uninsured into coverage.

There simply are no examples of government-run health care systems getting it right. None. If a doctor kept trying to perform the same failed therapy on his patients in the way that some politicians and reformers are trying to force their health care vision on the rest of us, those patients would sue him for malpractice.

Maybe that's what we should be doing to those who won't stop until the government controls the whole health care system.