Reply #91: the author claims to be a Dem, but his thinking is rife with half-truths [View All]

sugar-coated corporate-love RW memes and selectively omitted facts...


I almost stopped reading midway through the first page:

"All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well."

The motives of insurers and big pharm are profit-driven, and profit-driven ONLY...


And of course in this passage he leaves out what is by far the biggest eater of the budget:

"Yet spending on health care, by families and by the government, is crowding out spending on almost everything else. As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast."


Here; he admits the single-payer is better but still sneaks in that "ration" meme:

"Many reformers believe if we could only adopt a single-payer system, we could deliver health care more cheaply than we do today. The experience of other developed countries suggests that’s true: the government as single payer would have lower administrative costs than private insurers, as well as enormous market clout and the ability to bring down prices, although at the cost of explicitly rationing care."


Pretty good at spitting out statistics with no context (i.e., population growth, demographics, etc) and a shaky conclusion

"From 2000 to 2005, per capita health-care spending in Canada grew by 33 percent, in France by 37 percent, in the U.K. by 47 percent—all comparable to the 40 percent growth experienced by the U.S. in that period. Cost control by way of bureaucratic price controls has its limits. "


This guy really doesn't live on our planet:

"In competitive markets, high profits serve an important social purpose: encouraging capital to flow to the production of a service not adequately supplied." O RLY?



This is at least the third time he's spewed the 'over-regulation hinders the effectiveness of insurers' line:

"Health care is an exceptionally heavily regulated industry. Health-insurance companies are regulated by states, which limits interstate competition. And many of the materials, machines, and even software programs used by health-care facilities must be licensed by state or federal authorities, or approved for use by Medicare; these requirements form large barriers to entry for both new facilities and new vendors that could equip and supply them."


More selective omission:

"Consider the oft-quoted “statistic” that emergency-room care is the most expensive form of treatment. Has anyone who believes this ever actually been to an emergency room?"

I know this isn't always the case everywhere, but I imagine the costs of saving someone who got shotgunned or tried to get cute on his motorcycle and arrived to the ER 60 seconds from death can be quite high...Not to mention to cost of a chopper (sometimes) to get them in...



And here, he gets to the jist of it...Funny how a pro-business, free market lover guy liberally quoting the WSJ never realized how much single-payer would pay for itself in the long run:

"Regardless, the administration has suggested a cost to taxpayers of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. That, of course, will mean another $1 trillion or more not spent on other things—environment, education, nutrition, recreation. And if the history of previous attempts to expand the health safety net are any guide, that estimate will prove low."

and two paragraphs later, NOW he wants to get into the "but this will pay for itself!! it makes too much sense NOT to do it!!!"

"The Rand Corporation has estimated that the widespread use of electronic medical records would eventually yield annual savings of $81 billion, while also improving care and reducing preventable deaths, and the White House estimates that creating and spreading the technology would cost just $50 billion. But in what other industry would an investment with such a massive annual return not be funded by the industry itself?"


and on the last page, the author just goes right over the edge...to sum up he wants:

1. One universal manditory insurer (abolish everything we have now, government and private)

2. mandatory healthcare accounts (with provisions to spend it elsewhere if desired) for routine things...

3. universal catastrophic insurance for anything over $50,000 (there's the real rub...hospital administrators are either going to start filing a bunch of $50,001 broken arms, or a bunch of $49,999 broken arms...) and then there is this epic line:

"But the real key would be to restrict the coverage to true catastrophes—if this approach is to work, only a minority of us should ever be beneficiaries."

does the word 'ration' mean anything to him??

4. Big Gummitt covers the poor and low-income on a sliding scale, including vouchers for free checkups every 2 years...

And to finish it off he gives some love to Wal-Mart for cornering the market that used to buy cheap drugs from Canada, boutique doctors and a few other things, never bothering to say how much more efficient or cost-effective it could ever be over a single-payer program...or how it would really control costs...