Archive for September, 2009
Health care is unequivocally not a right
Posted by Jon Kovaciny in Uncategorized on September 11, 2009
This Letter to the Editor by Jon Kovaciny was published in the September 11, 2009 issue of the Mankato Free Press, in response to this letter, published September 4. Has your letter been published recently? Submit it!
In his Your View published Sept. 4, Scott Urban attempted to connect government-provided health care to natural rights and our nation’s founding documents. His letter was littered with noble-sounding words and emotional appeals, but was wholly inaccurate, in my opinion.
Health care is unequivocally not a right. It’s especially not an American right, as Urban stated several times. Are those living in other countries somehow less worthy? Life, liberty, and property are rights; health care is a responsibility. Don’t confuse the two. Unlike rights, health care (and other goods and services) must be provided by someone. I have no more right to free health services than I would to a free shopping cart full of groceries. Whether I need a dozen eggs or an MRI, it is my responsibility to pay for them. If you need eggs or an MRI, please don’t use the government to forcibly and anonymously extract money from me to pay for what you’ve received.
Government “charity” is not charity at all, and it has destroyed real charity and created a permanent class of dependents. Urban appealed to the Constitution’s general welfare clause to legitimize federal provision of health services. This clause is a common excuse for government to do nearly anything it wants, as someone always benefits whenever the government hands out other people’s money. General welfare is not doing nice things for individuals, but for the good of the Union as a whole.
The Constitution does not and cannot grant fundamental rights, nor can any document or proclamation – it instead prohibits our government from interfering with the rights that all people already have. It is this that made America unique and allowed liberty to flourish.
The original version of this letter, before awkward editing by the Free Press staff, is available here.
President Obama’s Health Care Speech
Posted by Bruce Kaskubar in health care on September 10, 2009
Some guy — OK, it’s me — responds to President Obama’s health care reform speech given to the joint session of congress on September 9.
It’s windy and on the Olmsted GOP web site.
CATO on Health Care legislation
Posted by Bruce Kaskubar in health care on September 9, 2009
The CATO Institute has just published an 18-page analysis of current legislative initiatives in Congress. Entitled, “Halfway to Where? Answering the Key Questions of Health Care Reform“, it includes the following observations.
Under all three proposed bills, millions of Americans would not be able to keep their current coverage.
All three bills contain an individual mandate, a legal requirement that every American obtain adequate health insurance coverage.
As with the individual mandate, employer-provided policies must meet the government’s designated minimum benefit requirements.
Since the rules for HSAs require that they be accompanied by a high deductible plan, the result would be to end HSAs.
Under one scenario, 89.5 million workers would be forced into the government plan.
Under the House bill, physician income would decline by $13.4 billion in the first year alone, a decline of 6.3 percent or almost $20,000 per physician.
Despite promises being made today, taxes will eventually have to be raised for the middle class.
Using the 75-year actuarial period that the government applies to other entitlement programs … the net present value of the program’s unfunded liabilities would exceed $9.2 trillion.
National health care systems in other countries use comparative effectiveness research as the basis for rationing. [This is supported by real world experience.]
In the long run, the only way to spend less on health care is to consume less health care.
While the bills contain no direct provisions for rationing care, they nonetheless
set the stage for government rationing and interference with how doctors practice medicine.
Under all the current versions of health reform, Americans will end up paying more and getting less.
Stossel on Health Care
Posted by Bruce Kaskubar in health care on September 9, 2009
400 seconds of reason brought to us by John Stossel on ABC via YouTube.
Government health care has sad stories and worse. Dogs and cats have it better than people in Canada.
Eye Care in the U.K.
Posted by Bruce Kaskubar in health care on September 5, 2009
This just in from the Missouri Society of Eye Physicians and Surgeons …
The United Kingdom in the late 1990’s established the National Institute for Health and Clinical Experience (NICE). It was pitched as a body that would ensure that the government-run National Health System used “best practices” in Medicine. What NICE has become in practice is a rationing board. [emphasis added] NICE has become the sole gatekeeper that reduces spending by limiting treatments that NHS will provide for 61 million UK citizens.
In 2007, the board restricted access to two drugs for macular degeneration, a cause of blindness. The drug Macugen was blocked outright. The other, Lucentis, was limited to a particular category of individuals with the disease, restricting it to about one in five sufferers. Even then, the drug was only approved for use in one eye, meaning those lucky enough to get it would still go blind in the other. As Andrew Dillon, the chief executive of NICE, explained at the time: “When treatments are very expensive, we have to use them where they give the most benefit to patients.”
– adapted (by MoSEPS) from Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2009 “Of NICE and Men” page A14.
Eye Care in Alberta Canada
Posted by Bruce Kaskubar in health care on September 5, 2009
This just in from the Missouri Society of Eye Physicians and Surgeons …
Calgary ophthalmologists say waiting times for cataract surgeries in the city have skyrocketed since the cash-strapped Alberta superboard slashed the number of the procedures it purchased this year. One major clinic said the number of cataract patients on its waiting list doubled to 2,290 from
1,124 six months ago. A second facility said delays were growing so long it had to cancel all mild and moderate cataract cases and is now concentrating only on nearly blind patients. The growing wait times follow Alberta Health Services’ decision to buy about 2,000 fewer local cataract surgeries in 2008-09 compared to the previous year in an effort to cut costs.
In Calgary, the public health system does not perform cataract operations, instead contracting out the procedure to surgeons at private clinics. In recent years, the former Calgary Health Region paid for additional cataract surgeries at the private clinics–beyond the surgeons’ regular quota –in a bid to cut waiting lists. But the practice required the health authority, which has since been replaced by the superboard, to spend over its budget. This year, in the face of a $500 million deficit and a smaller than usual increase in its operating budget, Alberta Health Services said it would stick to its budget for cataract surgeries. The superboard estimates it bought about 8,500 of the procedures in 2008-09 — a significant drop from 10,340 the year before. The decision to buy fewer cataract surgeries is not the only cost-cutting measure at the superboard. In addition, there are new tight restrictions on hiring health workers as well as foot surgeries.
– adapted (by MoSEPS) from Calgary Herald, May 20, 2009, “Wait times soar for cataract surgery in Calgary.”
Partisan blame game doesn’t help
Posted by Jon Kovaciny in Letters to the Editor, Opinion on September 1, 2009
This Letter to the Editor by Jon Kovaciny was published in the April 9, 2009 issue of the Mankato Free Press. Has your letter been published recently? Submit it!
Leigh Pomeroy’s April 4 letter blaming the Republican Party for the current financial mess largely misses the mark. I certainly have no illusions of innocence for the Republican leadership, but they are nowhere near wholly responsible, as Pomeroy surmises. The partisan blame game distracts us from the underlying issues.
The economic meltdown has been brewing for decades, not years, and while its direct causes are numerous, they not difficult to see once you begin to look in the right places.
The root cause is the failure of Americans to read and understand why the Founders established our republic the way they did, and our similar failure to vote for leaders who uphold the principles enshrined in our Constitution.
This venerable document is treated by most of our elected officials as little more than a historical curiosity, but if we want to persist as a free nation we must heed its words. It is a rule book for our government, but they haven’t been following the rules. Now we are paying the price in lost liberty and a crumbling economy; the road to our current financial hell was paved with good intentions.
Pomeroy is correct to be wary of our government’s actions to get us out of this mess. They are guaranteed to fail and will likely relegate the United States to an economic backwater for a decade or more.
I suggest that we look for answers to the people who saw this coming, rather than to those who proclaimed our economy to be strong right up until the moment it fell apart. Fortunately for us non-economists, the answers are not complicated. Read Tom Woods’s new bestseller “Meltdown”, watch Peter Schiff videos on YouTube, or peruse Mises.org.