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What is the lesson of subsidies?

They cause uneconomical use of whatever is subsidized.

What happens when ‘everyone’ has health care and can effectively have someone else pay for the majority of it?

The Tragedy of the Commons.

Encouraging uneconomical behavior should not be a role of government. It sucked like an electrolux for housing by encouraging NINJA (No Income No Job or Asset) individuals to actually seek and GET government backed mortgages they couldn’t pay off. Likewise putting lots of money into failing companies and not allowing bankruptcy law to force them to re-organize along economical lines means the companies have no need to behave in an economical fashion.

Tort reform to limit payments to damages incurred and fixing a problem would be an excellent way to end the malpractice lottery of ‘pain and suffering’ awards that insurance companies pay and then raise the rates of doctors across the board due to such high payouts.

Eliminating the tax incentives to health care will then return it to its previous status of a hard earned ‘perk’ with a company and require individuals to actually take better care of themselves and not expect others to pay for their health or lack thereof. Encouraging charitable giving by the tax code for health concerns of the community incurs no disincentives via subsidies or the tragedy of the commons as it allows individuals to control just which charities they would give to so as to get affordable health care for the poor.

If you think the sytem is out of whack now, just wait for government to ‘help it’.

And why would I want my medical records online for “anybody” to see?

Yeah… just ask Joe the Plumber how careful government entities are with protecting your personal records…

Dash on July 27, 2009 at 3:14 PM

Republicans are talking about ideas of how to reform health care. Sen. Tom Coburn, one of hosts of “The Senate Doctors Show” has his Patients’ Choice Act which would be a lot better than anything being talked about by the Democrats.

The goobermint can fight it out with doctors and insurance companies on working to lower costs. In the meantime, I get coverage under a company and plan of my choosing without going bankrupt.

And the goobermint is free to audit me anytime as I could easily account for every penny.

My monthly insurance rate just went up another hundred dollars to $709 (single person) and I simply cannot afford to take another hit like that.

In fairness to my insurance company…I have no complaints about my plan coverage.

Their service has been top-notch thus far.

Newt, no one cares about yours or anybody else’s ideas on health care from the right. Good try though, Sir.

Dr. ZhivBlago on July 27, 2009 at 2:46 PM

The point is to dispute Republicans only being NO-sters. We aren’t, but we also realize the issue of unintended consequences with overhauling government/public policy. Notice how it went for Social Security Reform under GWB. Lots of talk, campaigning, bus tours, but ultimately no one wanted to dare it. Do any of us wish now we had past it?

That also applies to having the federal government lead the best-practices effort. It makes it a very small step from a “best practices” advisory group to a federal agency that imposes those decisions on providers. Call me a skeptic, but the federal government is hardly a model for best practices anyway. That effort belongs in the free market, which could be incentivized by tax policy.

I also had the biggest problem with #4. I think the best solution is to have government get out of the way instead of trying to craft policy to enforce the ‘best medicine’ being practiced. We need look no further than recent legislation to ‘protect us from dangerous toys’ for an example of ‘good intentions’ having crippling consequences on an industry and how business is done. I can only imagine how bad things would get if #4 were implemented to some degree (state mandates what constitutes best practices) and the rise in doctors being sued that would come and the chilling effect this would have on doctors making the best/right decision medically instead of what statistically the state says is the way to go. It would only get even worse if there were no torte reform.

I have the same concerns many of you do about the electronic medical records. Imagine how the dems in power could blackmail/take down conservatives if they had private things in their medical record that they would not want published. The lefties have already shown that they will abuse power to destroy anyone who opposes their agenda. Imagine if an up-and-coming conservative politician or leader had an STD from their youth or had been raped in the past(and wanted to keep that matter private) or if they had gone through some counseling during a tough time. There are just things that Big Brother doesn’t need to have at his fingertips. I do not feel secure at all that those records would not be perused by the democratic political machine in order to stop conservatives in their tracks.

I do feel that some kind of reform would be good, as it will definitely be held against us if we do not have anything to offer on this. But, I think it should be much simpler than what Newt is suggesting. Enroll the folks who qualify for govt. programs that are already in existance, and offer some sort of voucher for money toward private insurance for others. Implement some heavy duty tort reform to get rid of the frivolous law suits that drive the costs up so much… And let people be. There should not be mandates that plans have to cover a myriad of things the govt. deems necessary. There should be no mandate that poeple HAVE to have insurance. Help people a little and let them make their own choices.

And, of course, weed out the fraud.

It is ridiculous that the govt. ever got involved with healthcare to begin with, but it is involved now…. And I do think that we have to have something to offer or the dems will eventually get what they want and that would be devastating to our country. Anything we offer should be completely market-oriented (with the exception of getting qualified people on the state programs that are already in existence anyway). I think that is pretty much what the republicans are proposing, and it sounds okay to me. But, I don’t know if the tort reform is in there or not. And if it isn’t, it needs to be. That is the most important part, really.

If the Republicans want to impress me come up with something good that most of them can coalesce around and support.

Dash on July 27, 2009 at 3:14 PM

That “something” is leave the system alone and let the private markets work. That goes for health, autos, finance, you name it.

Only when the govt gets involved (can you say forcing banks to lend money to people who will never pay it back??) does the system fall apart.

You know what, too little too late. GoP had years to do something and did not. I hear nothing but no to Obamacare from them now so I presume either A) they have nothing better or B) they are getting out of the way as Obama buries himself with this plan.

If the Republicans want to impress me come up with something good that most of them can coalesce around and support.

Now the question of course is where does all this info get stored? Who has access? Does the data get sold? To whom? But aside from those issues, technically speaking it was pretty damn cool.

angryed on July 27, 2009 at 3:04 PM

Normally, the data sits at the hospital level. Staff can access the data electronically within the building. (Security is extremely strict about firewalling off the parts of the network that deals with staff or patient data!)

The data does not get sold. There is plenty of pressure right now that keeps it from happening (internally by concerned physicians, and externally by HIPAA laws).

And while HIPAA laws are vague… that can sometimes be a good thing. It tends to make the hospitals over-cautious in analyzing the risk they are exposing themselves to.

I think before we do anything, we need to know what our current true costs are, not what we are paying directly.

wallyone on July 27, 2009 at 3:03 PM

Of course, if the government got out of the health business, we’d have a much clearer picture of true costs. As Ann Coulter’s column this week mentions, government-mandated coverage for elective treatments has spiked the cost of insurance. When in-vitro fertilization is covered, a lot more people choose it. Her car analogy is spot-on. Government healthcare should really cover basic transit (like a seat on the bus), not full-service health care (like a BMW with GPS and bluetooth).

Of course, the best government plan for health care would be to get completely out of that business.

What are fraud levels like in non-government health plans? And does the health care industry as a whole have higher or lower fraud levels than other industries?

hawksruleva on July 27, 2009 at 3:00 PM

Good questions. My bigger point is that “ELIMINATE FRAUD” is always thrown around as a magic cost saver. But it’s foolish and unrealistic to think you can do much about it. This applies to govt and private institutions. Sure you can save a couple of bucks here and there but if you’re losing $200B a year today, you’ll at best be losing $190B next year.