Be Careful What You Wish For

This is a timely topic, what with the presidential campaign ongoing and all. In a recent opinion piece in Investor's Business Daily, David Gratzer, senior fellow at think tank The Manhattan Institute, discusses the fact that the guy who started nationalized health care in Canada, Claude Castonguay, is now trying to save his country from the failings of a system known to be worse at taking care of its people than its pets.

"What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor."

Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits

I Think This Is Campaign Issue #2 (After Iraq)

From Fortune Magazine -

Why McCain Has the Best Health-care Plan

"Here's where [McCain's plan] gets interesting. Employers would no longer be able to buy more health care with $9,000 of their employees' money than the workers could buy on their own. The raison d'être for corporate health benefits would vanish. Employers have another compelling reason to pass the ball to the employee: While wages are rising around 3% ayear, their health-care costs are growing at three times that rate. 'I predict that most companies would stop paying for health care in three to four years,' says Robert Laszewski, a consultant who works with corporate benefits managers. Hence, an employer that pays $9,000 for your benefits would simply pack an extra $9,000 a year into your paycheck. (Why? Because in a competitive labor market, companies would have to hand over that cash to employees or risk losing them.) So you'd have $6,000 after tax, plus the $5,000 family credit, to buy insurance. That's $11,000 in new cash that employees can set aside for health care."

"The [Democrat] standard benefits package isn't just a bad idea because it will substantially raise the cost to taxpayers. It will also make it virtually impossible for Americans to buy insurance tailored to their needs. Suppose you're one of those 25-year-olds. You probably don't want to spring for a full-blown plan that covers old-age diseases like Alzheimer's and would rather save some money and go with a low-premium, high-deductible plan. But the Democrat approach requires that any competing plans be "actuarily equivalent" (Clinton's term) to the federal employee plan - which translates as a generous minimum standard for health insurance. 'With that mandate, you rule out high-deductible plans,' says Gruber. 'It would make it very difficult to design one that would qualify.'"

"The Democrat proposals have some additional drawbacks. First, the Dems want to heavily regulate the insurance industry by limiting everything from profits to marketing expenses. If the earning power of insurers is determined by federal regulators, their pricing will be too, and thus they will evolve into the equivalent of public utilities. Would you rather have medical prices set by fiat or by nationwide market competition?"

"Second, the Democrat plan exacerbates the fundamental problem in the American health-care system, which is that no one has any incentive to care about price. (How much is that MRI center charging for your ankle scan? Who cares? Just hand over the $50 co-pay and never you mind.) Creating a huge new medical superstructure would shift far more spending to third-party providers, chiefly the federal government, giving consumers even less incentive to concern themselves with the price of an MRI - or any other service, from an elective wart-removal procedure to a life-saving heart bypass. 'The Clinton and Obama plans would enormously increase total health-care spending, but disguise the extra costs by shifting them to taxpayers,' says John Sheils of the Lewin Group, a research firm that does statistical modeling for health-care plans."

He's No Christian Bale

Bale is, of course, the very fit star of "American Psycho". And he's Welsh. That's where this dude is from.

I knew this was coming, but I am very surprised to see it already -

"New Zealand Bars British Man's 'Fat' Wife"

I'm not sure why "fat" is in quotation marks there. Would they prefer to be referred to, as in the body of the article, as "morbidly obese"?

Shop Around

Newt.org has a clip of a little anecdote delivered by Newt Gingrich, in case you were thinking of some other Newt. He discusses the kind of market efficiency that is potentially attained by employing HSAs with the example of an expensive sleep apnea machine.

Delicate Genius Alert!

Dr. Scott Haig, an orthopedic surgeon in New York, has written a piece in Time about patients who Google. I have wondered how the abundance of health information on line has impacted the communication between doctor and patient, and here is an inside look. The phenomenon seems to irritate him quite a bit.

Frankly, the doctor comes off as a pompous jerk. He berates the patient for being selfish, but I think most normal people out there can sympathize with a person who is sick or injured. This doctor seems to prefer when patients don't ask too many questions, but on the other hand, ridicules "non-compliant Bozos who won't read anything longer than a headline. They don't want to know what's wrong with them, they don't know what medicines they're taking, they don't even seem to care what kind of operation you're planning to do on them. 'Just get me better, doc,' is all they say."

George Costanza would definitely throw his hands up about this delicate genius.

WHO Rated the U.S. Poorly in Health Care Quality? Exactly

I don't know what you think of John Stossel. Some people think he's kind of loony. I am one of those people, but in spite of that, I think he makes good points, backed up by data. He challenges commonly held beliefs, and even though his job is mostly to sell advertising for ABC, he works hard to educate America. He's won 19 Emmys and he went to Princeton.

In a recent piece he wrote for Real Clear Politics (that you may read here), Stossel criticizes the misleading conclusion made by the New York Times in its article about the World Health Organization's (WHO) ranking of wealthy nations and their efficacy in providing quality health care. The Times also points to a recently completed Commonwealth Fund study.

Stossel points to our high rates of transportation fatalities and homicides, as well as poor diet and exercise habits as factors that are not related to care that is administered by our nation's health care providers. He also mentions Rock Hudson as the last prominent case of an American leaving the U.S. for medical care.

The Battle of the Bulge

You've most likely heard about Michael Moore's latest "documentary", "Sicko". Larry King hosted an interview/debate between Moore and Dr. Sanjay Gupta that took place last night regarding the film, and Dr. Gupta's review of it.

Moore seems unable to have a calm and rational discussion unless it is with someone who doesn't challenge him. You may have noticed this in other interviews. I find it interesting how Moore ridicules Dr. Gupta's Indian heritage, and I wonder if he will be criticized for it. Of course, I've just made fun of Moore's obesity in the title of this post, in case you didn't notice. Please watch as Michael Moore shakes his head throughout the news piece, no matter what Gupta is saying, even when making comments that aren't critical of the movie.

If you have the time, I encourage you to watch all of the clips in their entirety. Both people make valid points, but Gupta puts forth more sanguine arguments, and clearly has a better haircut.

A Small Part of the Future of Medicine

Doctors and patients will, more and more, be communicating via the internet, over secure sites onto which they will log. Change is coming more slowly than many would like, but it's happening.

"An estimated 80 percent of Americans with Internet access would like to communicate with their doctors by e-mail, according to a HarrisInteractive Health Care Poll done in March 2005. That said, doctors have been slow to make use of the technology.

Only about one in four physicians reported that e-mail was used in his or her practice to communicate with patients in 2004-05, according to a study released a few months ago by the Center for Studying Health System Change, a health policy research organization in Washington. That was up from one in five in 2000-01."

One of the problems is that doctors aren't compensated for time spent on the phone or sending messages over the internet (not email, since it has to be specially encoded). I am remembering how stupid it was to get the results of an MRI in person, taking time off work, parking in downtown Boston, only to have a discussion with the doctor I could have easily had over the phone. This is the kind of stuff that absolutely must change for health care in this country to be effective and efficient.

Read the article on columbiatribune.com.