At Mark Souder's health care town hall meeting Friday, former City Councilman Dr. John Crawford succinctly identified a major problem with Obamacare and similar proposals:
Government involvement is a huge part of the problem in health care,” Dr. John Crawford, an oncologist and former Fort Wayne city councilman, said. Crawford, strongly opposed to proposed changes in health care, said that costs rose faster as more and more forms of insurance, especially government coverage, accelerated “the separation of the purchaser from the payer.”
Government has been a major factor in exploding health care costs. How can anyone seriously argue that further government involvement will reduce costs? Argue that we need more or better coverage, if you will, or that to deny insurance for people with pre-exiting conditions is immoral, but be honest about the costs involved. If more people are covered, there will be either greater costs or less treatment.
And Fort Wayne attorney David Van Gilder asked a question that gets to the heart of the debate:
Is health care a fundamental right or a privilege?
[. . .]
“I believe access to health care is a basic right,” Souder told him. “Do you have a right to have other people pay for it?” Souder argued that in the spirit of charity, Americans should fund medical care for people who cannot afford it. But that doesn't mean such charity should become a government institution.
Even access to care is only a basic right in the sense that government shouldn't be able to deny it. That makes it a negative right in the way long recognized as the foundation of this country, such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Governments are just only as long as they recognize such basic freedoms. The line Souder is attempting to avoid crossing is the one separating such negative rights from positive rights -- the right to have something provided by government, whether it's food, shelter or health care. Finite goods can be guaranteed to all only if they are redistributed among those who have them and those who do not. That means government does the redistribution, which makes something a privilege that can be granted or denied or changed at will. "Rights" don't change.
Comments
"How can anyone seriously argue that further government involvement will reduce costs?"
1. Lower administrative costs. Government programs don't have to pay shareholders, CEOs, or - depending somewhat on the nature of the government insurance plan - legions of bureaucrats to flyspeck each claim to see if it can plausibly be denied.
2. Economies of scale. The bigger the pool of insureds, the easier risk is to manage. For a big enough population, you can predict the risks fairly accurately. Additionally, with that kind of purchasing power, you can negotiate good rates.
3. Stitch in time. If uninsureds or underinsureds get treated sooner rather than later, their care will generally be less expensive.
Doug's arguments warrant serious consideration. Our present system is already a government insurance program, albeit one in which a major portion of adminstration has been outsourced to for-profit corporations. The cost burdens for this system largely fall on employers who must either typically eat the major portion of annual premium increases imposed by their present carriers or incur the additional costs involved in shopping around and installing a cheaper and usually less attractive alternative. The ongoing result is higher premiums for lower levels of service and a bigger tax burden on everyone in order to pay for those who are squeezed out of the "private" carrier programs and into Medicare or Medicaid, not to mention higher prices for all medical services in order to make up the difference between what is charged and what is paid either by private or public medical insurance. The current business model which interposes for-profit administrators between the purchasers and the providers has proven to be a dismal failure in controlling costs for everyone.
[...] counsel is probably more than happy to answer it. I don’t know if Leo Morris considered his question rhetorical, but I went ahead and offered some possible answers anyway. Leo asks, with respect to [...]
Doug Masson needs to consider the realities of governmemt programs. In the end, all government programs cost more administratively because all agencies overstaff, overpay employees, ignore efficiencies, enact too many rules and regulations and do sloppy work which causes other government agencies to have audit and study them to find out where all the extra money is being spent.
Dr. Crawford quoted Reason Magazine: "At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion."
In 2007, we spent $407 billion on Medicare and we will have no Medicare funds by 2018. So we cannot pay for the programs already in place but now we will spend $2 trillion more in a down economy that supposedly has had $1.5 trillion
spent for TARP, Stimulus and Bailout programs.
As for Doug's economies of scale, we can attain those by simply changing the laws to permit interstate pooling of insurance risks. That costs the taxpayer nothing.
As for covering all uninsured, that means 10 million , not 47 million people. Let's tackle that problem with market-based solutions and good old fashioned American charity. As it now stands, no one, citizen or illegal alien, is denied medical treatment at our hospital emergency rooms or at private clinics such as Matthew 24.
In the words of the great Renaldus Maximus:
"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people, has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project
From an column in the Washington Post:
U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.
Read the whole thing here-http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101778_2.html
Kevin:
I suggest that you google "Medicare's administrative costs" and you find ample information to show that government costs are indeed higher than private insurance.
Gadfly, facts will not sway the disciples. To observe and comprehend facts, one must possess a modicum of common sense. Which, as we have all observed is not prevalent in the genetic makeup of most liberals.