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."

From the People Who Brought You Yummy Toothpaste

I'm sure Michael Moore would be absolutely shocked to find out the following -

Brits Resort to Pulling Own Teeth

"England has a two-tier dental care system with some dentists offering publicly subsidized treatment through the National Health Service and others performing more expensive private work.

But more than three-quarters of those polled said they had been forced to pay for private treatment because they had been unable to find an NHS dentist. Almost a fifth said they had refused dental treatment because of the cost."

Some used pliers to remove their teeth and others glued broken crowns back in. I had a buddy in college who did that once. The glue thing, that is.

Don't Take Two of These, Don't Call Me in the Morning

Head of the British Medical Association, Dr. Hamish Meldrum, has caused quite a stir across the pond. Maybe more interesting, however, than the information about the obesity debate that rages on in the UK and the good ol' US of A, is the fact that Hamish Meldrum is a Scottish name. That's incredible!

Anyway, the point is that Dr. Meldrum has come out in opposition to all of the over-medicalization (I guess that's a word in England. Whatever, they invented the language, even if they don't pronounce their r's.) of obesity treatment, and that prevention is clearly the ideal method of lessening that societal problem and the costs associated with it. Duh. We don't need MD's to figure that one out, do we?

Read the article here on "This is London".

I often find the readers' comments sections of online articles to be the most educational part of the experience. That is one of the many reasons that online media are more effective than print. You can't read a newspaper and instantly read how other people around the world are reacting to it. What an age in which we live...

Here is one such comment that I found to be especially poignant, especially given the European perspective it allows us to understand, and the struggle among proponents of healthcare reform, i.e. everyone -

"This is the problem with socialized medicine. Free individuals should have every right to make these "lifestyle choices" assuming any associated risks - including dying early or higher medical expenses. But when government provides healthcare for all, it is going to seek to constrain the rights of individuals in the name of the greater good."

- Jude, london, uk

The American Prospect Progressive Perspective

Please don't read that title aloud. You'll get saliva all over your computer screen.

Here is an interesting critique by Ezra Klein of the current, employer-sponsored health insurance system.

"There is no earthly reason for employers to control not just their workers' salaries, but their health security, too. There is no justification for a health system that dissuades would-be entrepreneurs from testing their brilliance, or unhappy laborers from striking out on their own, or disgruntled workers from leaving their positions. Nor is there a compelling rationale for forcing employers to assume the moral burden of providing medical coverage, or putting the generous employer at a competitive disadvantage because his competitor offers barebones coverage, or having GM pay more for health care than steel. On every level, in every way, the employer-based system is unjust, inefficient, and unwise. No plan that preserves it should be considered acceptable."

Healthy Americans Act (that's not an oxymoron)

This is something to watch. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is proposing an idea for national health care that is actually fairly reasonable, especially considering his party's history regarding same.

"Called the 'Healthy Americans Act,' the plan would require that employers 'cash out' their existing health plans by terminating coverage and paying the amount saved directly to workers as increased wages. Workers then would be required to buy health insurance from a large pool of private plans."

The plan doesn't allow employees to buy less comprehensive plans though, since the employer will be increasing salaries a similar amount as was spent on the prior year's coverage. This negates one of the benefits of going to HSA-compatible, high deductible plans.

Read about it on USA Today.com. I plan on reading more about the proposed legislation on the senators website: http://wyden.senate.gov/