Posted on 06/19/2003 3:30:03 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Edited on 07/12/2004 4:04:01 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Congress is about to enact a new administration-approved bureaucratic entitlement program
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Someone want to explain that to me. I though price caps caused shortages not premium explosions.
"That violates Bush's important principle — which the entire free-market policy community supports — that a new drug benefit should be a carrot to encourage seniors to join [private] modern health plans that can provide better benefits," she says.
This is a double edged sword. If the private plans are anything like the current alternatives to Medicare they are not better benefits for the average patient.
What the current alternate Medicare plans do is cut benefits that are used on average more and add benefits that are used on average less. Thus if the average patient switched from standard Medicare to the private plan and had average problems, he would on average get less benefits.
If the Medicare patient can project which benefits he will most likely need, then it might make sense for him to switch to a plan better suited to his particular needs. However for most patients without known problems they would be better off on standard Medicare.
If only the patients with known problems switch to alternative plans that are better suited to their particular problems then total costs go up. Because they are utilizing new benefits that they wouldn't have had under Medicare. While the patients remaining on Medicare also have a higher utilization of standard benefits.
However, behind all of this one has to consider that benefit cuts are not a zero sum game. If you cut preventive care or minor care, and the patient or his family doesn't obtain that care, then you end up with major medical expenses when the situation is allowed to deteriorate. In other words, denying a $100 doctor visit can result in a hospital stay costing $5000, or a chronic illness resulting in thousands.
Price caps end up reducing supply. Those who need to buy the supply-restricted good end up having to pay through the nose for it.
Hospitals and nursing homes have a vested interest in keeping patients biologically alive as long as possible (as long as the patient is biologically alive they generate revenue) whether or not such actions are in the best interest of the patients or their loved ones. The net effect is that instead of having a full life that ends with a relatively easy and peaceful death, patients often get many months or years of torture added to the ends of their lives.
This isn't to suggest that nobody over 65 (or even over 100) should ever get medical treatement for anything. If people are still having a full life at 100, then would be entirely reasonable and proper that they should spend money on medical care that will let them continue to have a full life.
In many cases, however, people who have basically died are kept alive as near-zombies. As these people's bodies fail more and more completely, the cost of each additional day of life goes up and the quality of that life goes down. Ironically, the socialist programs that keep these patients alive can't even claim the normal socialist justification (that when they take A's money and give it to B, it does more to improve B's quality of life than it would have A's). Instead, they just serve to torture the elderly and their families.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to improve the situation. Many of these people, having been denied the ability to have a full life leading up to a natural death, are now stuck in the Twilight Zone. No normal human contact, and nobody help them with the courage to pass on. They've come to perceive their unnatural condition as normal, and so they just endure it.
Most people, given a choice between retiring a year earlier or getting to live an extra year as zombies in a nursing home would probably opt for the former. And yet people now have to work longer and longer before retirement to support people in nursing homes, many of whom should by all that is right already have passed on. I would like someone to explain how this is in any way, shape, or form a good thing.
How can they pay through the nose for it, if there is a price cap? I can see where they wouldn't be able to get it. I can see where once the price cap is lifted there is a short term increase until supply catches up with demand.
Don't get me wrong. Price caps are hardly ever a good idea, unless a monopoly or collusive oligopoly situation exists. But I just don't see them driving up premiums. Killing quality of care yes, but not premiums.
How can they pay through the nose for it, if there is a price cap? I can see where they wouldn't be able to get it. I can see where once the price cap is lifted there is a short term increase until supply catches up with demand.
Don't get me wrong. Price caps are hardly ever a good idea, unless a monopoly or collusive oligopoly situation exists. But I just don't see them driving up premiums. Killing quality of care yes, but not premiums.
How can they pay through the nose for it, if there is a price cap? I can see where they wouldn't be able to get it. I can see where once the price cap is lifted there is a short term increase until supply catches up with demand.
Don't get me wrong. Price caps are hardly ever a good idea, unless a monopoly or collusive oligopoly situation exists. But I just don't see them driving up premiums. Killing quality of care yes, but not premiums.
Generally, even with price caps, there are ways of paying more to get things.
For private payers maybe, but I don't see an insurance company going out of their way to obtain drugs for a client. They will just throw their hands up and say, "we will pay the usual and customary rate, when you find it"
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