ATWT Discussion Group

Topic: The health-care bill

I just read an article by John Stossel who calls the bill ''the triumph of mindless wishful thinking over logic and experience.''  In it, he brought up some questions that I thought were relevant and worth discussing:

1) How can the government subsidize the purchase of medical services without driving up prices? Econ 101 teaches -- without controversy -- that when demand goes up, if other things remain equal, price goes up. The politicians want to have their cake and eat it, too.

2) How can the government promise lower medical costs without restricting choices? Medicare already does that. Once the planners' mandatory insurance pushes prices to new heights, they must put even tougher limits on what we may buy -- or their budget will be even deeper in the red than it already is. As economist Thomas Sowell points out, government cannot really reduce costs. All it can do is disguise and shift costs (through taxation) and refuse to pay for some services (rationing).

3) How does government "create choice" by imposing uniformity on insurers? Uniformity limits choice. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bill and the Senate versions, government would dictate to all insurers what their "minimum" coverage policy must include. Truly basic high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic policies tailored to individual needs would be forbidden.

4) How does it "create choice" by making insurance companies compete against a privileged government-sponsored program? The so-called government option, let's call it Fannie Med, would have implicit government backing and therefore little market discipline. The resulting environment of conformity and government power is not what I mean by choice and competition. Rep. Barney Frank is at least honest enough to say that the public option will bring us a government monopoly.

Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?

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Save him in what way? Give him a well-paying job? Where, how, since lots of other people also can't find jobs? Giving him health insurance won't fix all his problems. This country cannot spend its way to prosperity, as it seems to be trying to do.

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Posted by: Suellen
Date posted: Fri Nov 13 22:57:10 2009
Message:
The Senate will have the last word. Woe to the present administration if it doesn't pass there. Back to square one!

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Posted by: Tosca
Date posted: Wed Nov 11 23:24:20 2009
Message:
I'm glad that provisions will be made to make sure insurance companies don't drop you because of certain illnessess. But at what cost?  In those 2,000 pages, is there anything saying they can't charge you quadruple for coverage because you have a pre-existing condition? (uh, but they WILL cover you!?)

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Posted by: dolphina
Date posted: Wed Nov 11 15:21:27 2009
Message:
The glaring flaw in Stossel's report is the absence of empirical evidence. Other countries that have government participation in the distribution of health care inevitably have lower per capita costs and better results (by widely accepted measurements such as life expectancy, infant mortality, etc). How can he simply dismiss this out-of-hand?

The people who condemn any and all government participation obviously must think America is the stupidest developed country in the world, since they believe we're the only one incapable of making such a system work.

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It is fine to say that but it doesn't really seem to answer the questions that Stossel posed. As this country is, in effect, bankrupt at the moment, living off loans from other countries I, for one, am worried about the cost. The CBO seems to raise the amount of the deficit every week and the first-decade numbers coming from the Whitehouse are smoke and mirrors. The new taxes that will finance the health-care plan begin in 2011 but the benefits of the program don't fully kick in until 2015. That makes the first decade numbers look artificially low. After that, the deficits become larger and larger.

That was my point - that Stossel posed certain questions while leaving out a massive consideration. His probe is woefully incomplete. eom/D

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