Tag Archives: Rationing

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Democrat health care bill will cost families over $1700 per year

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The Associated Press reports. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

The health insurance industry has been working until recently to help draft legislation, while publicly endorsing President Barack Obama’s goal of affordable coverage for all Americans. The alliance has grown strained as legislation advances toward votes in Congress.

Late Sunday, the industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans sent its member companies a new accounting firm study that projects the legislation would add $1,700 a year to the cost of family coverage in 2013, when most of the major provisions in the bill would be in effect.

Premiums for a single person would go up by $600 more than would be the case without the legislation, the PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis concluded in the study commissioned by the insurance group.

“Several major provisions in the current legislative proposal will cause health care costs to increase far faster and higher than they would under the current system,” Karen Ignagni, the top industry lobbyist in Washington, wrote in a memo to insurance company CEOs.

The study projected that in 2019, family premiums could be $4,000 higher and individual premiums could be $1,500 higher.

Keith Hennessey explains the study.

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How Obama’s public option would ration specialized care

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Story from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Take a provision in the Baucus bill that would punish any physician whose “resource use” is considered too high. Beginning in 2015, Medicare would rank doctors against their peers based on how much they cost the program—and then automatically cut all payments by 5% to anyone who falls into the 90th percentile or above. In practice, this rule will only apply to specialists.

[…]In Medicare, meanwhile, the Administration is using regulation to change how doctors are paid to benefit general practitioners, internists and family physicians. In next year’s fee schedule, they’ll see higher payments on the order of 6% to 8%.

[…]this boost for GPs comes at the expense of certain specialties. The 2010 rules, which will be finalized next month, visit an 11% overall cut on cardiology and 19% on radiation oncology. They’re targets only because of cost: Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease.

[…]The basic tools of heart specialists—echocardiograms (stress tests) and catheterizations—are slashed by 42% and 24%, respectively.

[…]Cancer doctors get hit because the Administration believes specialists order too many MRIs and CT scans. Certain kinds of diagnostic imaging lose 24% under new assumptions that machines are in use 90% of the time, up from 50%. There isn’t a radiologist in America running an MRI 10.8 hours out of 12, unless he’s lining up patients on a conveyor belt. But claiming scanners are used far more often than they really are lets the Administration “score” spending cuts.

And this change is applied to all expensive equipment, not just MRIs and CTs, so payments for antitumor radiation therapy will fall by up to 44%.

This will primarily affect the middle-aged and the elderly.

The case of Ontario, Canada

Here’s how it works in Ontario, Canada according the the National Post. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Excerpt:

Opponents of the public option maintain that Canadian-style health care would entail rationing, caps on care, bureaucratic interference in medical decision-making and even “death panels” deciding when the ill become too expensive to save. Most Canadians believe this is a gross exaggeration of reality. But then how to characterize Ontario’s decision to cut off funding for colorectal cancer patients taking a life-prolonging drug, in order to save $9-million a year?

[…]Ontario Health Minister David Caplan rejected the suggestion that the cap on treatment was a financial decision alone, arguing it was based on clinical evidence. But it’s easy to reach the conclusion that the province decided nine extra months of life for a dying patient wasn’t worth the money. Which is pretty much the kind of decision a “death panel” would be confronted with.

There are ways to reduce the costs of health care while retaining freedom of choice in a capitalist system. Health care is so highly-regulated already that we are not even trying a fully capitalist system, like the one in Switzerland that I wrote about earlier.

Further study

Learn more about health care policy from my previous posts on health care:

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Britain’s Office for National Statistics predicts looming demographics crisis

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Here’s an article from MercatorNet. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically.

[…]The fastest growing age group has been been 85-and-over group –now referred to as the “oldest old”. This group has doubled to 1.3 million since the early ’80s;

By 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double again to reach 3.2 million. It will grow to will account for five per cent of the total population;

The article is filled with statistics about the increasing number of retired seniors. In Western countries, seniors depend on the government social programs for pensions and health care. A lot of countries had a baby boom in the 50s and 60s so that a large number of of people are retiring. Unfortunately, due to feminism and the sexual revolution, the numbers of new workers has been decimated by hedonism, the breakdown of the family and abortion. So who is going to pay the income taxes needed to provide for the larger number of retirees?

Today, there just aren’t enough new workers to pay for all the social programs. Either the younger generation will have to be impoverished by high tax rates, or the older generation will have to be denied health care. In one sense this actually just, because the same generation of people that introduced their children to feminism is going to face the consequences of their worldviews. Young people were taught hedonism and that sex is recreational. Saving money and having children took a back seat to careers and having a good time here and now.

When a person expects to be taken care of by the government, they don’t save their own money and they worry about having more children to take care of them in their old age. The government started the whole wealth distribution game in order to equalize the life outcomes of people who worked and saved to pay for their own retirement and health care, with those who didn’t work and save. This caused those who were working and saving to slow down or stop, since it was now the government’s job to take care of people.

I also think it is interesting that the left-wingers who complained about “overpopulation” are going to finally find out exactly how badly they miscalculated. There is one group of people still having lots of babies. Muslims. And when they become the voting majority, a lot of multiculturalists will be surprised to see their liberties vanishing. In particular, special interest groups on the left, e.g. – feminists, will have their liberties curtailed. And so, feminism will have set in motion demographic forces that led to its own destruction.

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