Added: 927 days ago by Keiper CM | Posted in: Politics | 51 Comments

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<div align='center'><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog/18788/Grandma-Doesnt-Have-To-Die-Today/'>Grandma Doesn't Have To Die Today</a><br><div align='center'></div><br><a href='http://www.kontraband.com/blog'>See more like this on kontraband.com</a></div>

Or simple solutions to serious problems with health care.

There's a line in a Kaiser Chief's song that goes, "suck more blood than a backstreet dentist." As an American, this is a barely recognizable image. Under our current, broken system of health care that consumes roughly eighteen percent our total economy thanks to over-regulation, bloated legal settlements, and other well-intentioned catastrophes, the idea of unlicensed dentists practicing in back alleys is little more than a blurry nightmare. The idea that a man like Ian Boynton, a British veteran at that, would take the extreme measure of pulling out thirteen - thirteen - of his own teeth because he was unable to locate an NHS dentist is, in a word, unconscionable.

But if the current United States government has their way, this and many other European-inspired medical horrors will become an everyday part of life.

According to the World Health Organization, the United Kingdom has the eighteenth best health care system in the world while the United States is thirty-seventh. You are nearly twice as likely to survive prostate cancer once diagnosed in the United States compared with the UK, eighty-one to forty-three percent. That's also according to the WHO.

Fortunately, single-payer, nationalized health care will never actually happen in this country. Americans may be ignorant and generally disinterested in domestic policy, but we are not stupid. It does not take a genius to understand what happens when a government attempts to compete in an industry they happen to regulate. Imagine your odds on the pitch against a squad of officials. There is an inherent and clearly understood disadvantage to competing against someone who can change the rules as they see fit and on the fly.

There are more than enough reasons the president's best-laid plans are doomed to failure from basic economics to delayed and denied care. Simply put, the cost of providing a service necessarily dictates the price the consumer is charged for that service. In a free market, it is competition among providers that drive down the cost of goods and services. In order to survive, businesses will lower prices and offer increased services or better customer service in order to attract clients. By increasing a consumer's choice in vendors you directly increase the quality and variety of the goods or services available. That is the crux of the free market system.

There is absolutely no way any government is capable of reducing costs in a free market. What governments do is fix prices and pass off the remaining costs to private companies, or worse yet, taxpayers. Because governments do not produce revenue, which is to say profit from a good they manufacture or service they provide, governments are handcuffed by a strict, pre-determined budget. At least, they're supposed to be.

You need only look as far as the near-bankrupt Medicare program currently offered by the United States government to see how a public option in health care would work.

A visit to your doctor has a certain number of costs associated with it: your doctor has to rent the building, or pay taxes if he owns it, he has to pay his staff, light and heat the building, there are medical supplies, office supplies, malpractice insurance, plus he has to be able to turn a profit otherwise he'd have to get another job to support his family. All this and more gets factored in to the going rate for just a basic check-up.

Let's say this works out to a hundred dollars, or euros if you'd prefer. A private insurer will pick up an agreed-upon amount while the remainder is billed to you directly as your co-pay. In order to accept Medicare, a doctor has to agree to accept what the government is willing to pay for the same exact examination or treatment. If the government decides they are only going to honor the first seventy dollars, the doctor still has to make up the other thirty to stay in business. How he, like every other doctor bullied into accepting Medicare from the sheer volume of people who use it or the fear of being ostracized in the community, covers the remaining cost is simple: he passes it along to your healthcare provider. So instead of being charged the hundred dollars you would in a truly free market, you get hit for one hundred and thirty. As far as the doctors accounting sheet is concerned, he's right in line with his hundred dollars per customer schedule.

Let us also, for the sake of the argument, ignore that this practice of passing costs from one business to another for the purpose of artificially inflating a balance sheet is considered a 'shell game' by the government and considered a major criminal offense. To say this another way: the current government healthcare program known as Medicare could not legally exist as a private enterprise.

Nearly all of the private insurance in America is purchased through our employers, as is mandated by the federal government. Once the public option controlled by the government were to become available, there would be no need to continue requiring businesses to offer a health insurance plan. In fact, there would be plenty of incentive for the government to do just the opposite.A fter all, what's the point of offering government run healthcare if no one's going to use it?

With the main purchasers of health insurance free to keep their additional profit, and healthcare costs artificially high for reasons previously discussed, every single private insurer will be forced to close. A business cannot survive on the revenue from Canadian parliament members alone.

The irony, which is certainly lost on those in congress, is the de facto nationalization of the health care industry will directly cause the public option to implode. Without someone to pass the remainder of the actual cost of providing medical treatment onto, the program's budget will swell and bloat exponentially. Slimming profit margins for doctors means the medical profession will begin to shrink. Fewer doctors means longer wait times and poorer attention. The New York Times, not that I put any faith in the Old Grey Lady, released a study they did in June 2009 that revealed three quarters of respondents consider their current health care satisfactory or better. That number, I promise, will drop substantially when the government inevitably creates a system where a patient has to wait three months or more to see a doctor who's so overworked, he can't remember his patient's name.

There is, of course, an ugly, draconian solution to this unintended consequence: rationing. For sure, it won't dare be called that. To soften the negative stigma associated with eugenics, some nameless, faceless bureaucrat will repackage the decision-making process of which names on a list live and die based on a pre-determined, arbitrary budget as "comparative distribution" or something equally ambiguous.

In Norcross, Ontario, they just pull names out of a lottery hat every month to see who gets treated. Google that if you don't feel like sleeping tonight.

Now, it is easy to criticize and find fault with any government plan, as Republicans and Democrats gleefully demonstrate every time they fall out of power in Washington. With this in mind, allow me to put forth some simple, minor suggestions to streamline a system that is as effective and inventive as any health care system in the world.

First, tort reform and specifically caps on financial awards for class action malpractice lawsuits must be enacted and strictly enforced. Until doctors and pharmaceutical companies are safe from predatory trial lawyers like John Edwards and his ilk, the front-end costs of providing safe, necessary treatments and medications, as well as the development of new drugs and procedures, will be disproportionally higher than necessary. As it currently stands, ambulance-chasing attorneys, such as and including John Edwards, dupe sympathetic juries into awarding cartoon-sized monetary awards to class action defendants made up of grieving family members thanks to junk science studies that are later discredited. And the worst part? The lawyers keep the lion's share of the settlement payouts!

By greatly limiting the amount a jury could award and by increasing the criteria required to bring class action malpractice suits to trial, the front-end costs to the medical profession would plummet back to their natural, free market levels. This alone would drive every other associated cost and price of the entire health care industry, again eighteen percent of the overall United States economy, down significantly.

Next, the government needs to allow individuals as well as businesses to purchase their insurance from outside their states as well as within their own. Currently, it is illegal, with the exception of a few, non-competitive national providers, to purchase insurance outside your home state. On its face, this makes no sense. How can it be that the government could allow a select handful of providers to offer national plans while restricting other providers offering similar options by their state's borders? If Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield is capable of offering health insurance nationwide, I have to believe at least some of their intra-state rivals could do so as well or better.

In fact, my home state of New Jersey used to have this same approach to auto insurance. The state regulated the industry so closely that auto insurance companies used to keep offices open for auditors because of the frequency of their visits. Local providers could not survive the taxes and fees associated with doing business in the state. National providers, too, eventually began to give up and started pulling out. The more the state government intervened in the auto insurance industry in an effort to increase the number of insured New Jersey drivers, the fewer the choices and the higher the prices. The result, of course, was a sharp increase in uninsured motorists.

It wasn't until the old guard of state assemblymen were voted out of office in the mid to late nineties that more and more auto insurance providers returned to the state offering its residents more choices and lower costs. As competition increased unabated by government meddling, the number of insured motorists skyrocketed.

This example brings me to my next point: auto insurance, like homeowner's insurance, keep their costs down in part by offering a la carte plans. It makes no sense for a twenty-year-old man to pay for the same premiums that a sixty-year-old mother of three pays. People in their twenties do not have the same needs or worries as their parents. No one gets the same level of insurance on their first car than they do their first new car. The government still requires drivers to carry insurance on their cars, but not full coverage. Each state requires basic accident insurance; it is the individual who decides to increase their deductable, to purchase bumper to bumper coverage, roadside assistance, and on and on.

Everyone should have some kind of emergency insurance because there's no way to know when something unfortunate happens like a broken bone or head injury, or worse. That is not to say everyone should purchase full body insurance including regular check-ups, prepaid hospital stays, and so forth. If you only required basic, emergency room coverage of our citizens, the base cost of premiums and co-pays would plummet to a point where there would be no significant financial advantage to risking personal bankruptcy by going without any health care. And, of course, individuals would still have the option to purchase additional insurance for regular check-ups and prepaid hospital stays if they so choose.

And finally, as a way to entice businesses to get involved with the health and well-being of their employees, the government could offer tax breaks to businesses that sign up their employees to insurance programs. By combining individuals into a block of employees, businesses would have the ability to negotiate better prices for the same or better coverage than as individual employees. The logic here is simple: as volume increases, cost per unit decreases. The more clients an insurer can sign up, the lower the cost per client and the higher the profit per client. The government's sole role in all of this is to act as referee and simply call a fair game.

Do not, under any circumstances, pick winners and losers. Let private enterprise thrive with as little regulation and oversight as possible. Cut the corporate tax rate and let revenue flow downstream into the pockets of our citizens. Tear down the bureaucratic red tape and let smaller insurers into the market. Allow existing insurers to provide care across state lines.

The most important task government has is to trust its citizens to take care of themselves. The average American, and every other person in the world for that matter, is smart enough to seek out and decide their own level of care and how much they are willing to pay for it.

In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, "The nine most dangerous words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Added: 927 days ago by Keiper CM | Posted in: Politics | 51 Comments

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