The problem with health care today in the United States is that medical care and services cost too much. Now, everyone seems to think that the only solution to this problem is to go with a single-payer system like Canada or Cuba. Only one problem: there is another solution that no one is talking about: consumer-driven health care. And this is the only solution that actually works.
At lunch yesterday, I went to the Chinese buffet and started to read a new book on this issue by Regina Hertzlinger, a professor at Harvard University who specializes in health care policy. So now I understand it a little more. And I managed to round up a few podcasts that can explain her idea of consumer-driven health care to you, too. (I listed them in a sensible order)
This is the key insight that everyone must understand:
Many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them against the exorbitant cost of treating their own leukemia. But how many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them from the expenses of treating their own depression?
Everyone recognizes that the more fully we wish insurance companies to defray our out of pocket expenses for our car repairs, the higher the premium they will charge for the policy. Yet foregoing reimbursement for trivial or unnecessary health-care costs in return for a more suitable health-care policy is an option unavailable under the present system. Everyone with health insurance is compelled to protect himself from risks, such as alcoholism and erectile dysfunction, that he would willingly shoulder in exchange for a lower premium.
Liberty means choosing the right amount to pay for your own health care, based on your own lifestyle choices, and your own risk assessment. Anything less is tyranny.
Along those lines, people who are sexually promiscuous or who abuse drugs will be paying the same medical premiums as everyone else, under Obama’s health care plan. Your lifestyle decisions are irrelevant to the amount you pay and the amount of coverage you get.
Excerpt:
Under the terms of the health-care reform bill approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the legal use of tobacco products is the only vice for which insurance companies will be able to charge their customers higher premiums.
…In other words, a person could have been admitted to hospitals three times for heroin overdoses, or been pregnant five times out of wedlock, or been treated for venereal diseases at least once per year for the past five years, but none of these factors could be used to charge that person a higher insurance premium.
This is a massive transfer of wealth from clean–living, productive citizens to citizens who are not minimizing lifestyle risks and who are not productive. This is nothing but a massive incentive for people to stop working and stop being moral. What would be the point to restraining yourself? Someone else will pay for your mistakes anyway, right? And that’s just what the compassionate, progressive secular-leftists want. To abolish income differentials and the privileges of moral living. So everyone will be the same, and no one will feel bad for being lazy and immoral.
It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
As Ed Morrissey explains in this Hot Air article, the government has a track record running health care programs already, such as the Indian Health Service. This is a single-payer system run by the federal government. Click through to the article and find out how good of a job government does of running anything. People are dying. Government-run health care is an inefficient system that allows bureaucrats to decide how health care is rationed.
Books I am reading about health care
Right now, I’ve picked out 3 books on health care to help me learn about the issue.
Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure
by Dr. Regina Herzlinger
The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
by David Gratzer, M.D.
The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care
by Sally C. Pipes
The latter two books are by Canadians intimately familiar with the Canadian single-payer system.
As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.
But what if they don’t buy it?
Then Section 401 kicks in. Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan.
I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance? After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”
That is true. But if you’re a single person with income of $44,000 or higher, then you’re above 400% of the poverty line. You would not be subsidized, but would face the punitive tax if you didn’t get health insurance. This bill leaves an important gap between the subsidies and the cost of health insurance. CBO says that for about eight million people, that gap is too big to close, and they would get stuck paying higher taxes and still without health insurance.
He uses several different examples to show how Obama’s plan would raise taxes on people making much less than 250,000 dollars a year. I know what you’re thinking – “Wintery! Obama promised he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class!” Well, he’s going to do exactly what is consistent with his voting record. If only the left-wing media had told us his voting record, instead of talking incessantly about Sarah Palin’s children.
Americans for Tax Reform has been documenting Obama’s string of broken tax promises. Obama first shattered his $250K promise only 16 days into the presidency when he enacted a 61 cent tax increase on cigarette packs, disproportionately hurting low-income Americans. Next, Obama aggressively supported the cap-and-trade tax that, if the bill passes the Senate, will increase energy costs for an average American family by $1,500. Now, in a recent interview with Obama’s Senior Adviser David Axelrod, the administration is waffling about how taxes will be raised for health care reform. When asked if tax increases on families making less than $250,000 might pay for health care, Sen. Schumer, D-N.Y. said, “There are lots of things on the table now.”
Next time, don’t worry about Tina Fey’s sketches, worry about the thousands of dollars that Obammunism will cost you in increased health care costs, increased electricity costs, higher taxes, lost income, stock losses, interest on the national debt, etc. Katie Couric isn’t going to give you all your savings back. Campbell Brown isn’t going to give you your job back. They’re rich Democrats. They don’t care about truth.
As John Boehner points out, many of the so-called “rich” above $250K a year in earnings are small-business owners who simply file their business revenues as personal income. A 5.4% “surtax” — really just a hike in the upper tax bracket — will take more of their capital out of their businesses and reduce the opportunity for job growth.
The Post notes that the “surtax” would apply to about 2.1 million Americans. The mandate for coverage will force almost four times as many middle-class Americans to pay higher taxes as a result of the ObamaCare plan in the House while preventing them from getting coverage. The House hasn’t soaked the rich; they’ve declared war on the middle class and the uninsured.
WINTERY KNIGHT 