Tag Archives: Rationing

Commentary

Cato Institute asks whether Sarah Palin was right on death panels

3 Comments

Story here at the libertarian Cato Institute. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts health care round-up)

Excerpt:

What Palin wrote about death panels clearly had nothing to do with counseling or with any other specifics in seminal House bill. What she wrote was: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.”

How could anyone believe Palin’s sensible comment about rationing was, in reality, a senseless fear of counseling? To say so was no mistake; it was an oft-repeated big lie.

Rather than even mentioning the House bill, Palin linked to an interesting speech by “Rep. Michele Bachmann [which] highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff.”

[…]Pending health care bills would make such government-mandated scarcity of health care much worse.  There would be massive shifting of money away from Medicare toward Medicaid.  But the extra Medicaid money would be spread around more thinly.  States would cut benefits to the poor in order to accommodate millions of new, less-poor people lured into Medicaid, at least half of whom (7 or 8  million by my estimate) currently have employer-provided health insurance.

The Senate health bill supposedly intends to slash Medicare payment rates for physicians by 21% next year and more in future years, with permanent reductions in payments to other medical services too.  It would also establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board which would be empowered to make deeper cuts which Congress could reject only with considerable difficulty.   If that’s not quite a “death panel” it would surely not be pro-life in its impact.

The Congressional Budget Office says, “It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would . . .  reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Actually, it’s clear enough that the proposed Medicare cuts won’t be achieved, but that efforts in that direction will nonetheless reduce access to care and diminish its quality.  The government can’t boost demand and cut prices without creating excess demand.  And that, in turn, means rationing by longer waiting lines and by panels (rationing boards) making life-or death decisions for other people.

The Cato Institute says that Sarah Palin is right, and I agree. She is the one who understands the economics of supply and demand – her critics are ignorant of the facts.

News

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer ever year in the UK

1 Comment

Story from the left-wing Guardian. (H/T Legal Insurrection via ECM)

Excerpt:

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer every year because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government’s director of cancer services. The figure is twice the previous estimate for preventable deaths….

Britain is poor by international standards at diagnosing cancer. [Prof. Mike] Richards’s findings will add urgency to the NHS’s efforts to improve early diagnosis….

Richards found that “late diagnosis was almost certainly a major contributor to poor survival in England for all three cancers”, but also identified low rates of surgical intervention being received by cancer patients as another key reason for poor survival rates.

Research by academics at Durham University led by Prof Greg Rubin has identified five types of delay in NHS cancer care: “patient delay”, “doctor delay”, “delay in primary care [at GPs’ surgeries]”, “system delay” and “delay in secondary care [at hospitals]”….

I followed the link on Legal Insurrection to this Medscape Medical News story, which talks about studies on cancer survival rates in European countries.

Excerpt:

One of the reports compares the statistics from Europe with those from the United States and shows that for most solid tumors, survival rates were significantly higher in US patients than in European patients. This analysis, headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2002.

The age-adjusted 5-year survival rates for all cancers combined was 47.3% for men and 55.8% for women, which is significantly lower than the estimates of 66.3% for men and 62.9% for women from the US Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program ( P < .001).

Survival was significantly higher in the United States for all solid tumors, except testicular, stomach, and soft-tissue cancer, the authors report. The greatest differences were seen in the major cancer sites: colon and rectum (56.2% in Europe vs 65.5% in the United States), breast (79.0% vs 90.1%), and prostate cancer (77.5% vs 99.3%), and this “probably represents differences in the timeliness of diagnosis,” they comment. That in turn stems from the more intensive screening for cancer carried out in the United States, where a reported 70% of women aged 50 to 70 years have undergone a mammogram in the past 2 years, one-third of people have had sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy in the past 5 years, and more than 80% of men aged 65 years or more have had a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. In fact, it is this PSA testing that probably accounts for the very high survival from prostate cancer seen in the United States, the authors comment.

I think that the breast cancer and prostate cancer numbers are significant, because it makes me think of the video in which Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn and Sue Myrick were talking about how Obamacare will limit diagnostic exams for breast cancer, because they are so expensive. When the government pays, they have to keep costs down to make sure that they have enough to pay for the elevated salaries of all the government workers who decide whether you live or die. And prostate exams would undoubtedly also be restricted because of costs.

What this Tom Coburn, M.D. video and he’ll explain. (H/T Hugh Hewitt)

He’s a medical doctor, so he knows what he’s talking about.

News

House health care bill provides health care for illegal immigrants with taxpayer money

Leave a comment

Robert Rector does the analysis here at the Heritage Foundation. (H/T National Review via ECM)

Here’s the abstract:

H.R. 3962 would deliberately permit illegal aliens to participate in the government health insurance exchange and in the public option insurance program. It would nominally bar them from receiving health care “affordability credits” and most regular Medicaid benefits, but verification procedures are weak and subject to fraud. Moreover, any limitations on benefits provided to illegal immigrants under the House bill are deceptive. The Presi­dent and the congressional leadership clearly intend that these limits will be only temporary, to be overturned by amnesty or “comprehensive immigration reform” legisla­tion that will be introduced next spring.

And here are the main points:

The health care bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 3962) clearly and directly contradicts the President’s declarations and promises. Under H.R. 3962:

  • Illegal immigrants are clearly permitted to purchase health insurance under the government health insurance exchange created by the bill.
  • Illegal immigrants are permitted to receive cover age under the “public health insurance option” created in the bill.
  • Illegal immigrants are ostensibly barred from receiving taxpayer-funded “affordability credits” to subsidize their health care, but the verification procedures used to determine the legal status of those who receive credits are weak and subject to fraud.
  • The bill expands the Medicaid program. Illegal immigrants are nominally barred from receiving most Medicaid services, but the verification procedures used to determine the legal status of those who receive credits are also weak and sub ject to fraud.
  • All illegal immigrant women who do not have private health insurance and who give birth inside the United States will have the full cost of childbirth paid by the U.S. taxpayers. There will be no effort to have the mother repay any of the cost. Given the fact that nearly 400,000 children are born inside the U.S. each year to illegal immigrant women, these costs could be quite large.
  • The bill will provide tax credits to small businesses to subsidize the purchase of health insurance for illegal immigrant employees. Under H.R. 3962, small businesses will be given tax credits to encourage them to purchase health coverage for employees; because firms are not required to verify the legal status of subsidized employees, both legal and illegal employees will receive taxpayer support.
  • Illegal immigrants will continue to receive so-called emergency medical services under the Medicaid program.

The full research paper, with references, is here.

BONUS: The Senate bill includes a monthly abortion premium for all enrollees in the government-run health plan.