Mandatory Coverage Is Easier Said Than Done

NY Times ^ | June 11, 2007 | REED ABELSON

[Jim Noble]

Here you go:

EMTALA FAQ

[HungarianGypsy]

All told, those seven little stitches cost me over $1200, and for all I know, more bills will come in for the cost of the air I breathed or the magazines I read in the waiting room. BTW, when I was a kid in rural Texas, I cut the same arm on the other side and got five stitches. Our family doctor patched it up, and I think charged $50. This is why, as much as I despise Michael Moore, his next movie is going to be a hit.

This is why we choose not to have insurance. When my oldest son cut his head open it cost us $75 cash at the doctor's office. Not to mention, you have to choose a doctor off their list (if your favorite isn't on there tough luck).

[William Tell]

I wonder how much discussion our Founders had on the government mandating universal health care coverage?

There seems to be no limit to what the government can decide is beneficial and therefor mandatory. It's making me sick, and I have high deductibles.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have."

[CSM]

“When these twentysomethings get in car accidents, they get great medical care, paid for by taxpayers.”

Why wouldn’t the already compulsory car insurance pay for that?

[CSM]

You should look into an HSA option. That would allow you to pay for those costs in pre-tax dollars.

[syriacus]

The question is,

How do we separate those who really "cannot afford" health insurance from those who simply do not want to pay for it ?

A friend of mine, who sold her house a year ago, has 70,000 dollars in the bank, yet she thinks she is too poor to buy health insurance. At the same time, she worries that some medical catastrophe will wipe out her savings.

She also thinks people are entitled to government provided health insurance coverage if they can't afford it and they don't get it from their employers. She works part-time, has no coverage, and wants someone to give it to her.

People used to include health insurance premiums in their monthly budgets. Nowdays that insurance is felt to be an entitlement, and people who pay for their own insurance feel "gypped."

[devolve]

---

• Zoe Baird
  
• Kimba Wood
  
• Linda Chavez
  
  What do these 3 women have in common?
  
  
• Nancy Pelosi
  
  What does this women have in common with them?

[potlatch]

They ALL hired ILLEGAL wetbacks - a word you don’t see anymore.

[dixiechick2000]

They all employ illegals.

What do I win? ;o)

[TChris]

People want the best health care someone else's money can buy.

Well put.

[FreeKeys]

Why not? Most states compel people to buy car and house insurance...

Car insurance, yes, but NOT because the government(s) themselves caused an explosion in traffic accident-costs as they did with health care costs.

Medicare's Long Term Impact

--

The Federal Government, through its Medicare regulations, is beginning the rationing of medical care, partly on the pretext that "medical care is just too costly these days." Well, whose fault do you think all that is in the first place????

--

"Scratch the surface of an endemic problem ... and you invariably find a politician at the source." -- Simon Carr
"To err is human, but it takes a politician to really screw things up." -- Old American Adage

"The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government.  Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors,  but government." -- Neal Boortz	"Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions..." -- Ludwig von Mises
"You could get good catastrophic coverage for $40, $50, $60 a month if you didn't have all these crazy [government] mandates." -- Steve Forbes, 3-10-07	"Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem." -- Ronald Reagan

Medicare, which went into effect in 1965, and the HMO-subsidizing act, which was passed in 1973, together triggered a non-stop explosion in health care costs which dwarf  price increases in virtually all other products and services for consumers.  Just LOOK at the chart:

CLICK THIS CHART TO ENLARGE: data and charts thanks to Economagic.com "This is great!" -- Mark Skousen, when I handed him a copy of this chart.

''The original critics of Medicare/Medicaid were correct:  In 1965, ''(m)ost of the elderly already had health insurance. The poor were treated at city, county and charity hospitals ... Emergency Room treatment, regardless of insurance, had been enacted under Eisenhower. Medical care was available to only slightly fewer people than now.  ''Since 1965, health care costs have doubled [from 5.9%] to 14% of GDP ... ''(D)octor and hospital bills have always recovered the cost of unpaid treatment. What's new is cost shifting by government. ['Controlling' costs by underpaying for treatment, which forces individuals and private insurers to make up the difference.]  ''From 1985 to 1989, unpaid hospital care grew slightly, from 5.5% to 6.0% of billing. But  government  underpayment  shot  from  0.6%  to  5.0%- the same years private insurance premiums started skyrocketing.  ''Don't blame hospitals. The more Medicaid and Medicare patients they treat, the more they have to increase prices on everyone else. Then, some consumer group will accuse them of price gouging.'' – Mike Hihn in Liberty Issues, Sept-Oct, 1994 (some of the data has been republished in separate articles still available here and here)..

"It was the unfair tax-deductibility imbalance which Congress instituted during World War II which started the long-term spread of the fundamentally irrational (basically idiotic) 'someone else is supposed to pay for my health care' attitude which Americans blindly accept as normal today." -- Rick Gaber   "After over half a century of employer-provided health care coverage, the American people have developed a phobia of paying for health insurance themselves." -- Arnold Kling "In reality, because government actions have been a major factor in forcing up the price of health care in America, we now have the perverse situation in which someone who either does not have access to private insurance or qualifies for government payments must face the system out of pocket.  While politicians and their allies are fond of decrying the fact that at any given time, millions of Americans lack health insurance, they [conveniently] forget that they themselves have played a major role in creating the conditions that have made going without health insurance a recipe for individual financial calamity." – William L. Anderson "The wealthiest government employees or corporate executives who receive health care insurance as a part of their compensation package receive this benefit on a tax-free basis.  Anyone who pays their own health insurance premiums or medical bills must struggle to wring these payments from income that is fully taxed.  This practice transcends unfairness and lack of equity.  It also inflates the cost of health care for everyone." -- Richard E. Ralston, HERE. "For many years the government has subsidized the demand and restricted the supply of medical care. One consequence has been a rapid increase in both the relative price and real expenditures for medical care. The relative price of [all] medical care has increased at an increasing rate; ... Total expenditures for medical care have increased from 5 percent to 13 percent of  GDP over the past thirty years and are now the most rapidly growing component of both private payrolls and government budgets." -- William Niskanen, Cato Institute,  in Regulation Vol. 15 No. 4, 1992, at  http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n4-cur.html

Some years ago, the British physician Max Gammon, after an extensive study of the British system of socialized medicine, formulated what he called "the theory of bureaucratic displacement." He observed that in "a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like ‘black holes,’ in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of ‘emitted production.’" Gammon’s observations for the British system have their exact parallel in the partly socialized U.S. medical system. Here, too, input has been going up sharply relative to output. This tendency can be documented particularly clearly for hospitals, thanks to the availability of high-quality data for a long period. The data document a drastic decline in output over the past half century. From 1946 to 1996, the number of beds per 1,000 population fell by more than 60 percent; the fraction of beds occupied, by more than 20 percent. In sharp contrast, input skyrocketed. Hospital personnel per occupied bed multiplied ninefold, and cost per patient day, adjusted for inflation, an astounding fortyfold, from $30 in 1946 to $1,200 in 1996. A major engine of these changes was the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. A mild rise in input was turned into a meteoric rise; a mild fall in output, into a rapid decline. Hospital days per person per year were cut by two-thirds, from three days in 1946 to an average of less than a day by 1996. -- Dr. Milton Friedman, HERE: http://www.hooverdigest.org/013/friedman.html

"If you subsidize something,  people want more of it." -- Alan Reynolds, HERE

---

"If a government were put in charge of the Sahara Desert, within five years they’d have a shortage of sand." -- Dr. Milton Friedman

---

"As we just saw, and as I have pointed out many times, the component of our health care finance system that is in the worst shape is the component that is publicly funded. Maintaining the current level of availability of health care services under Medicare is not going to happen. Maintaining it under 'Medicare for all' is not going to happen, squared. ... If politicians thought that they could take over the health care system without making huge cutbacks in availability of services, we would already have a single-payer system in Woodstock-nation states like Massachusetts or Oregon. Single-payer in the United States is a chimera, like energy independence. Single-payer's political appeal here could never survive a serious attempt at implementation." -- Arnold Kling

"When the government pays, health care's lack of affordability becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In health care, as in other things, government is the high-cost producer." -- Arnold Kling

"The prescription for better health care is more freedom to innovate, not remote-control surgery from Washington." -- Arnold Kling

> How to Cure Health Care by Milton Friedman

> Let's Make Health Care Inexpensive Again!

The way to better, cheaper healthcare: Don't make it a human right by Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux

"We propose a simple change to tax law that would cut unproductive health spending, reduce the number of uninsured and promote greater tax fairness. For anyone with at least catastrophic insurance coverage, all health-care expenses -- employee contributions to employer-provided insurance, individually purchased insurance and out-of-pocket spending -- would be tax-deductible. The deduction would be available to those who claim the standard deduction and to those who itemize.

"The most important effect of tax deductibility would be to reduce unproductive health spending. Under current law, medical care purchased through an employer's insurance plan is tax-free, while direct medical care purchased by patients must be made with after-tax income. As we and many others have observed, this tax preference has given patients the incentive to purchase care through low-deductible, low-copayment insurance instead of out-of-pocket, which in turn leads to cost-unconsciousness and wasteful medical practices. In addition, the tax preference for insurance creates incentives for the health-care system to rely on gatekeepers rather than deductibles and copayments when it does try to control costs. The cost of gatekeepers are financed out of insurance premiums that are paid with before-tax dollars; deductibles and copayments are paid with after-tax dollars." 
-- Glenn Hubbard
 

"The current system encourages doctors to charge outrageous sums, more than they know insurance will cover, so they maximize their profit and write off the rest ...  It's a horrible system that has all the wrong incentives for everybody involved." -- Edward Glamkowski 

"Bingo!!   Once again, privatization--*total* privatization--is the best solution.  Get government, and government-sanctioned business collectives, out of the health 'care' picture entirely and, just maybe, I can go back to typing the word 'care' (in relation to 'health') without the quotes. :-)" -- Edward Britton 

Health Care Regulation: A $169 Billion Hidden Tax

INTERSTATE HEALTH INSURANCE?

CANADA STARTS BACK TO PRIVATE MEDICINE

CANADIANS' HEALTH WOES

"FREE" HEALTH CARE????  See: "A Canadian earning $35,000 a year pays a stunning $7,350 in health-care taxes."HERE

WHY MEDICINE IS SLOWLY DYING IN AMERICA

AMERICANS FOR FREE CHOICE IN MEDICINE

In a recent poll, more than 80 percent of Canadians rate the system “in crisis.”

The Health Care Prescriptions of a COLLECTIVIST ECONOMIST

An Epidemic of Meddling: The totalitarian implications of public health

Peter W. Huber:  Of Pills and Profits: In Defense of Big Pharma

-- more where the above came from

[devolve]

• George H. W. Bush
  
  
• Alberto Gonzales
  
  
  
  What do these two men have in common?
  
  
  
  Both have relatives who entered the USA illegally and have since committed felony crimes!

[Petronski]

Next up - mandatory donations to the DNC!

Next up - mandatory donations to Willard "Mitt" Romney.

[potlatch]

Lol, you are in a “Twenty Questions” mode tonight. Glad you went ahead and wrote the answer.

[undeniable logic]

You are suggesting that young guys should pay almost a grand a year for something statistically don't need merely because some of them are getting benefits they did not pay for.

This is a dumb comment. Catastrophic coverage is exactly for something that according to your implicit definition, "statistically they don't need." By definition, catastrophic coverage is a low probability event with high cost. Since the gov't has demanded that health care be provided if the catastrophic event were to occur, then it only makes sense that gov't requires that the individual pay an actuarially fair price for this coverage. In a competitive market, private insurance will charge an actuarially fair price for the coverage.

BTW, you have it ass backwards. The current system is more socialist. Right now, the uninsured are getting catastrophic coverage for free paid for by the taxpayers. That is socialism. Requiring that individuals pay for the coverage that they are already receiving is moving towards a less socialist system.

If anything, we have lost a bit of our freedom. We are no longer free to choose whether or not we want access (for a price) to health care in case of a catastrophe. But the gov't long ago decided that access MUST be provided. If this is the case, it is only natural that an individual should bear his own cost for this access.

[undeniable logic]

People don’t need health insurance. They need health care.

Oh really!?! What percentage of the population could afford to pay 100 grand or more for health care in the face of a catastrophe?

[undeniable logic]

This is why we choose not to have insurance. When my oldest son cut his head open it cost us $75 cash at the doctor's office.

That's why you don't have insurance! What would you have done if god forbid your oldest soon had Leukemia? Taken him to the doctor for $75? People on this thread are unbelievable!

[Travis McGee]

Then: “Let them eat cake.”

Now: “Make them eat cake.”

[Freedom4US]

Source? They don’t need no stinkin’ sources. Facts just get in the way of a good story, and if repeated often enough hardly anyone will notice.

[Freedom4US]

Everyone wants “free” health care, but they don’t seem to make the connection between that (even if not free) and the destruction of, well, free society. It’s no coincidence that the nanny state takes over in this manner.