“John Galt” has a different suggestion for fixing what ails the American healthcare field:
We have some real problems: Bizarre incentives that have led to runaway costs. Rescission. An employer stranglehold over workers’ healthcare. Overuse in the form of care prescribed to protect doctors from lawyers, rather than protecting patients from illness. Arbitrary requirements to carry coverage for other people’s expensive risks.
The truth is that every one of those issues could be addressed — right now, and in a bipartisan fashion — without a single-payer system, a mandate, or any other form of “universal healthcare.” It wouldn’t even take a single massive “reform” bill — just a few simple bills, mostly repealing existing regulation.
But the left has settled on universal healthcare. The “public option.” No other reform is acceptable. No other reform will be permitted. Nothing can actually be fixed if it will lower the number of people who might benefit from a universal system, or if it will reduce national dissatisfaction with market-based care.
It’s quite true that there’s already massive government involvement in the health market, and that a lot of that consists of regulations that have dubious health benefits, but measurable detriments to patients, doctors, and hospitals.
The intersection of the War on Drugs with the government’s role in healthcare, for example, has led to a number of doctors being imprisoned for “inappropriate” prescriptions of painkillers to patients with chronic pain issues. It has also led to a huge number of doctors being afraid to prescribe what their patients actually need, for fear of being charged and convicted of “drug trafficking”. Many patients now suffer prolonged pain because they can’t get an adequate dose of painkillers and can’t find doctors to prescribe them.
All this, in pursuit of getting tough on illicit use of prescription medicine. Government at its finest.
Either Obama is right and he can truly cut $500 billion of waste, fraud and abuse out of the Medicare budget or Medicare dependent seniors must die when $500 billion is cut from muscle and bone because there really wasn’t that much fat.
Comment by HealthCare Reform — September 30, 2009 @ 19:54