Read it and weep.
change that defies belief
Surreal Spending
The House is poised to take a final vote on the compromise $800-billion spending bill on, appropriately, Friday the 13th, with the Senate likely to follow soon after.
In my 36 years in Washington, I have never seen such a surreal environment, with hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed taxpayer money being spent without committee hearings or even meaningful public debate over the thousands of new and expanded programs the bill funds. [Read more…]
Obama goes to the bully pulpit
Barack Obama Washington Post Editorial
re: “…the same old partisan gridlock that stands in the way of action…”
It’s not enough that the Democrats have control of the House, control of the Senate, control of the Presidency, and a liberal majority on the Supreme Court?
When did a limp-wristed majority afraid to act on its’ own beliefs become “partisan gridlock?” You can’t blame Republicans for the Democrats’ lack of courage to support their own convictions.
And elevating Republicans’ reasonable disagreement with socialist programs to the virtual level of a thought crime is frankly Orwellian. If socialist programs had ever accomplished what they set out to do, anywhere, anytime in history that they have been tried, Republicans would probably sign on. But we’ve been down this road of failed big government responses to economic crisis, and many people who lived through the Great Depression are still alive to attest to those socialist failures. The way to stimulate our economy is to get government off our backs and allow people to keep the fruits of their labors.
The stimulus plan the President brought out of the House is built on False Dilemmas, ineffective solutions, poor returns on the dollar, and arbitrary market dislocations. It benefits one class – the government bureaucrat class. Everyone else loses.
Great. The American people get the government they deserve. And the government they got is Democrats who don’t need Republicans to pass their stimulus plan. What they need is to grow a pair, men and women alike, and pass their plans in the light of day as THEIR plans, and be judged by THEIR plans’ results as Democrats. And if they can’t muster the testosterone to be held accountable for their own plans, they have no one to blame but themselves.
And Republicans need to grow some pairs too. Conservative philosophy is worth standing on. They must hold the line and not agree to another dollar of spending or taxation. It would be a big mistake for them to try to blend in with Democrats at this juncture. Look what happened the last time a Republican tried to pass himself off as a Democrat – the McCain campaign lost definitively. Tax and spend is a guaranteed loser for a Republican.
Democrats don’t need bi-partisan support to enact their plans, and each time they ask for it, Republicans should lock their mouths shut and throw away the key. The change Republicans need in Washington is to quit the spending spree that went on under President Bush, learn when to keep their mouths shut, and start acting conservatively.
Also See: Alyssa Lappen on Stimulus Plan
Also See: The Fierce Urgency of Pork
Stealth Care
Stealth Reform, by Grace Marie-Turner
Congressional leaders are arguing over whether they’ll get a comprehensive health reform bill passed this year or next. But, in fact, major health reform is speeding through Congress in two bills that are on the fast track to enactment — SCHIP and the economic stimulus bill.
Expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to children in families well into middle-income ranges passed the Senate yesterday and will likely be signed into law by President Obama early next week. In some states, children in families earning $100,000 or more would be eligible for taxpayer-supported insurance, as would adults already receiving it, clearly changing the mission of the program.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) asked, “Is the real intent of this legislation to replace the private health care system with a government-run health care system?” The response from Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin (D-IL) was that he didn’t want to “trap people into private health insurance.” Heaven forbid!
Nine Senate Republicans broke ranks and voted with Democrats in favor of the SCHIP expansion; 40 Republicans crossed over and joined nearly all Democrats in passing the nearly-identical House version of the bill last week.
Nonetheless, the partisanship in the debate was evident: Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he was “disgusted” by the way Democratic leaders handled the debate. “It does not bode well for cooperative work in the coming months,” he told The Washington Post.
But the real game-changing health provisions are in the economic stimulus bill, where millions of Americans would be added to Medicaid and other taxpayer-financed health programs — without committee hearings or virtually any debate.
Here are some, but by no means all, of the health reform provisions in this gargantuan economic spending bill: [Read more…]
Same Quality at 1/10th Cost
Oct 31, 2008
Sundays at the Goodman household tend to include the New York Times crossword puzzle, the Dallas Cowboys football game….and (not to be missed)….an e-mail press release from Health Affairs, describing their latest, most interesting and most newsworthy offerings.
Yet by far the most interesting, informative and valuable article I’ve ever read in Health Affairs didn’t make it into any press release. Nor did it get covered in any of the mainstream health policy media outlets. It was an article about a country with institutions that produce health care quality as good or better than what we have, at a fraction of the cost! It describes how and why this happens and what institutions keep similar innovations from occurring in the United States.
So why the news blackout? Hard to say. As in art, food and sex, perhaps in health policy there’s no way to explain the diversity of human interests.The country is India, where fewer than one in seven people purchase health insurance. Yet two-thirds of Indian households rely on private medical care — a preference that cuts across classes and even extends to rural and paramedic care. Not to put too fine a point on it, but India appears to have the largest free market for medical care found anywhere in the world.
[Read more…]
Dollars to doughnuts diagnosis
marginal coverage
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has been boasting that his state’s health reform initiative has reduced the number of uninsured by half, with nearly 300,000 more people added to the health insurance rolls. What he doesn’t say is that four out of five of them are relying heavily on taxpayer subsidies for their coverage. [Read more…]
Goodman’s Law
From Liberating The Supply Side by John Goodman
Ask yourself this question: If Blue Cross were paying all the drug bills, would Rx.com even exist today? Would Wal-Mart be offering $4-a-month prescriptions? Would Publix be giving away antibiotics for free?
The fact that there is the most price competition in the market for drug therapies and the least for hospital therapies is an illustration of Goodman’s Law, which says that innovation and entrepreneurship are inversely proportional to the degree of third-party payment.
Goodman sums it up
“In all of social science – whether economics, politics, sociology, history, etc. – there is only one model that (a) is internally consistent and (b) can explain and predict. That is the model developed by economists. All the rest is gobbledygook. And more often than not, it is highly opinionated, value-laden gobbledygook.”
Economic theory predicts that in any system in which all the actors find it in their self-interest to overuse resources, fail to improve quality and impede access to care, there will be system-wide problems of cost, quality and access. And this prediction holds not just for the United States, it holds for the health care systems of Britain, Canada and other countries as well.
candidate’s health care plans
consumer-driven health care
From: Forbes Commentary By: Regina Herzlinger
09.04.07, 6:00 PM ET
We have turned over $2.2 trillion of our money to those who manage our health care, without holding them accountable. Not surprisingly, these folks–hospitals, insurers, governments–used the money to benefit themselves.
Insurers, hospitals and governments have gotten fat–our bloated health care costs kill the competitiveness of U.S. firms and more than 40 million people are uninsured, mostly because they cannot afford it–while 300,000 people die every few years from medical errors. Arrogant insurance bureaucrats deny people the services they paid for, while many insured find their coverage inadequate for serious illnesses. The uninsured who are charged the very highest prices by our nonprofit, ostensibly “charitable” hospitals are all too often driven to bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, doctors leave the profession in droves because of insurer, hospital and government micromanagement of their activities. Most of the doctors enrolled in my Harvard Business School M.B.A. courses explain, “I can no longer practice medicine.” The powerful grip of the status quo also scares off the entrepreneurs who represent the best hope of transforming this whale.
Only two stakeholders can fix this–you and I. We must take back our money and we must decide how to spend it. We should be buying health insurance for ourselves, using the foregone salaries and mammoth taxes we once turned over to this self-serving crew. Switzerland’s consumer-driven health care system points the way: The Swiss have universal coverage, spend 40% less and enjoy an excellent, private health care system.
We are in a war for control of $2.2 trillion. If we do not win it, our health and economy will go up in flames.
Regina Herzlinger is the first woman to be awarded tenure at the Harvard Business School as the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration. Her new book, Who Killed Health Care? (McGraw-Hill), details the consumer-driven battle plan that can revive our doctors, economy and good health.
