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:
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One would think taxpayers would be outraged. They're not, however, because they expect it. After all, when it comes to health care, most Americans think it should be paid for with 'other people's money.' " – Devon Herrick |
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| "Unlike single payer, market based reforms offer a real opportunity to reduce costs. The RAND health insurance experiment conclusively demonstrated that people who used their own funds to buy health care reduced spending by 30% without harming their health. Medical savings accounts (MSAs) build on this result by making it possible for people at all income levels to self-insure for routine health care costs. Reducing claims reduces everyone's overhead making health care, and health insurance, more affordable." -- Linda Gorman | |||
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| "In health care, the big culprit is
the tax deduction for employer-paid health insurance,
which has hard-wired into the American psyche the
expectation that companies should pay for their employees'
health insurance. After all, if an employer is willing to
spend $9,000 to give your family comprehensive health
care, few people would choose to take the $9,000 in cash,
pay $2,000 in taxes on it, and use the remaining $7,000 to
buy their own insurance.
"Unfortunately, the unintended effect of this $112 billion-a-year tax deduction is to make insured consumers largely indifferent to how much health care they consume or what it costs. And in the face of such indifference, doctors and hospitals and drug companies have done what any profit-maximizing industry would do: push prices and utilization up 7 to 10 percent each year until so many people are priced out of the market that government is forced to pump in even more money, spurring a whole new round of spending increases." -- from "A Culture Of Subsidies Inflates Costs"
by Steven Pearlstein, The Washington Post,
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The medicare reform, the privatization, the MSA provisions are ALL a mirage. The ugly truth about federal prescription-drug subsidies Forgotten factors in the Canadian drug pricing controversy more factors Prescription? Yeah, prescription for disaster |
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| "Medicare is responsible for a further run-up in the costs of medical care. The government is throwing more money in to a situation in which it has artificially limited the supply of doctors and limits the availability of new medication. Imagine if we had an auction -- and there are people who would be outbid because of previous government interference, and now the government throws more money into the hands of the bidders so the prices will just go on higher and higher." – Dr. George Reisman | |||
| So, prior to 1965, virtually everyone could afford medical care one way or another. Carrying so-called "medical insurance" (actually misnamed medical payment plans) was strictly optional. Now, thanks to government, people are virtually required to carry some, and it works badly because of volumes and volumes of indecipherablegovernment regulations. If you're angry with your HMO or PPO -- instead of the government (which basically brought them into being and told them how to run) -- realize you haven't seen the forest for the trees. (If you STILL don't get it, here's a clue: LESS, NOT more, government is needed. A LOT less.) | |||
| "When you can't get enough money out of the taxpayers,
then the political formula is to confiscate private money
by the back door, by imposing price controls on
businesses. Media pundits seem utterly uninterested in the
actual economic consequences of price controls, even
though the history of such consequences goes back for
centuries in countries around the world.
"Those consequences have repeatedly included shortages and quality deterioration -- which can be matters of life and death when it comes to medical care. But who has time to look up facts when there are exciting political strategies to chatter about?" -- Thomas Sowell, HERE |
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| EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND EXPLANATIONS OF THE PERVERSE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT PRICE CONTROLS, plus how "already 24% of U.S. health care is spent on administrative costs, largely imposed by government" ARE HERE. And now politicians at the state level are compounding the problems: see this. | |||
| See: "The push for price controls comes from a misreading of the marketplace. Critics rarely cite the fact that more than 70 percent of Medicare beneficiaries spent less than $500 from their own pockets for prescriptions last year. Instead, those critics point to the fact that the total of money spent on drugs last year rose by roughly 18 percent. But that's not the same as saying the cost of any one drug rose by 18 percent. In fact, most of the increase in money spent on drugs came from a big increase in demand as people utilized new drugs in place of more expensive and traditional medical procedures. For example, surgery for ulcers was once commonplace but now because of new and better drugs it has almost disappeared. A recent study found that every dollar spent on medical drugs translates into a decline of four dollars in spending on care in hospitals." HERE. | |||
| "Anyone who believes that we can afford collectively what we cannot afford individually is delusional." -- Arnold Kling | |||
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| "If you want to see the future of health care in the United States just look at the VA hospitals today. ... The Washington Times is reporting that many veterans are waiting up to six months for an appointment to see a doctor. ... That, my friends, is your medical future … and it is your medical future because you have accepted the idea that you have a 'right' to medical care, a right that politicians are all-too-willing to recognize." -- Neal Boortz, 5-26-03 | |||
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(Don't mess with us, Sen. Bill Nelson; we're watching you...) |
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"Any alleged 'right' of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right."- Ayn Rand |
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See "Doctors Shrug" HERE |
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Middle Man Mess Medicare's Future Institute for Health Freedom Socialized Health Care Nightmare The Dangers of Socialized Medicine NO SUCH THING as a "right" to health care A Doctor Declares Independence from Medicare Price controls reduce the availability of critical life-saving drugs The Drastic Consequences of Pretending There's a "Right" to Health Care And they used to rave about the fabulous Soviet health care system... Younger Folks: Pay Attention or Pay the Bills When Medicare Mandates Killing Patients Health Care: a Value, NOT a Right The Road to Medical Serfdom Medicare is Unsustainable Murder by Medicare |
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| "Socialism has been discredited as an explicitly avowed belief but it still lives on in a thousand disguises, of which 'universal health care' is just one. Like so many pretty words used in politics, 'universal health care' is seldom examined in terms of what its actual track record has been in the countries where it has been tried." -- Thomas Sowell, HERE, HERE and HERE | |||
| The U.S. mortality ratio for breast cancer is 25%, but with single payer health care systems it's worse. In Canada and Australia it is 28%, in Germany it is 31%, in France it is 35%, and in New Zealand and the United Kingdom it is 46%. For prostate cancer, the U.S. mortality ratio is 19%. In Canada it is 25%, in New Zealand it is 30%, in Australia it is 35%, in Germany it is 44%, in France it is 49%, and in the United Kingdom it is 57%. In 1997, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of all patients on Canadian waiting lists died before even getting care. Check it out HERE. | |||
| von Mises' law: "Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to a calls for further government interventions..." ad infinitum. | |||
| “In America today the same nuclear
physicist who would laugh uproariously at the thought that
the average businessman should have a vote on whether to
allow physicists to study the atom would immediately turn
around and insist that he as a citizen and nothing more
should have the right to vote on whether the owners of
Texas gas wells should have the right to set their own
prices for their gas, whether the Federal Reserve should
increase the money supply at a faster rate, or whether the
federal government should 'stimulate' the international
economy by running budget deficits and 'talking down' the
dollar in exchange markets.
"The same sociologist who asserts with contempt that the average politician knows nothing about the realities of drug use and their effects would assert with aplomb, and without thinking to consult a single study or learning economic theory, that the government should 'solve' the problem of inflation by imposing wage and price controls upon all those businessmen who 'set their prices to rip-off obscene profits.' "And the average citizen voter, who can barely read at the so-called tenth grade level, asserts blandly that his votes justify the politicians’ use of police powers to dictate to doctors the standards of medical care and the maximum charges they can ask for their services.” -- Jack D. Douglas |
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| "People over 65 are paying more of
their spendable income for medical care now, than they
were before Medicare was enacted. It's been not a very
successful program. Government doesn't do things
well." – Barber
Conable "What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." -- Tom Clancy on Kudlow and Cramer 9/2/03 |
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| "Today 51% of all health-care dollars in America are spent by governments — not insurance companies, employers, or individuals, but by governments. If there is a crisis in health care — and there certainly is — the government, not the free market, is responsible for it. – Harry Browne | |||
| "Healthcare delivered through private enterprise would fix the problem. Consider LASIK eye surgery. That is a medical prodecure that is handled somewhat through the market place. Since it's been done that way, it's become routine, the quality has improved, and the prices have fallen. If that can be done for eye surgery, there's no reason it can't be done for knee surgery or heart surgery or any other medical prodecure -- other than people, who have a disdain for the marketplace, standing in the way of it." -- Dave Olson | |||
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"Proliferating HMOs certainly have serious problems, but
it is not because of market failures; it is because of a
failure to have markets. Specifically, the current
situation can be tied to three government policies. First, in the 1940s, in order to allow
workers to receive higher compensation in spite of
government-imposed wage controls, Congress allowed
money paid by employers for purchasing workers' health
insurance to be tax-deductible, although money spent
by individuals on their own health insurance was not.
Thus, there arose an incentive for individuals to rely on
employers rather than themselves for health insurance. As
a result, individuals are in the position of a dog at the
vet, watching as the guys with the money and the guys with
the medicine decide what to do with them. What's worse,
many people now expect health insurance, as opposed to
auto or life insurance, to be provided by employers.
"The second governmental contribution to our current health-care mess was Congress's creation in 1965 of two public programs: Medicare, to cover health-care costs for the elderly; and Medicaid, to cover health-care costs for poorer Americans, like John Q. With the government paying for such care, health insurance for the elderly disappeared, while self-help and subscription organizations (a major source of funding early in the twentieth century, before Social Security) declined even further. Naturally, government spending on health care started to skyrocket. With the government paying, price was no object. So what did the government do to control costs? It introduced another policy. "The third problem policy was the HMO Act of 1973, which provided government subsidies to HMOs and mandated that all businesses with more than twenty-five employees offer the HMO option. Further, during the 1980s, Congress allowed many states to force Medicaid recipients into HMOs. And whose idea was it to herd people into HMOs? "On March 3, 1978, Leftist icon Senator Edward Kennedy bragged, 'As the author of the first HMO billever to pass the Senate, I find this spreading support for HMOs truly gratifying. Just a few years ago, proponents of health maintenance organizations faced bitter opposition from organized medicine.' He added, 'HMOs have proven themselves again and again to be effective and efficient mechanisms for delivering health care of the highest quality. HMOs cut hospital utilization by an average of 20 to 25 percent compared to the fee-for-service sector.' Yes, by kicking out people like John Q.'s son!" -- Edward L. Hudgins, HERE. As Harry Browne has written, "The Act was finally repealed in 1995, but by that time HMOs had become thoroughly entrenched as the centerpiece of employer-sponsored health programs." -- As the damage had already been done. Big time. And even Teddy Kennedy and his colleagues, now posing as opponents of HMOs and the horrors "they" caused, are using them as an excuse for even more of government's meddling in the medical care field, instead of its getting completely the hell out. ... Browne continues, "Once again, the politicians are seizing the opportunity to save us from their own handiwork." |
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| More doctors than ever are refusing to accept new Medicare patients. Why? Well, some of the reasons are: Medicare’s complex pricing system, the need to spend an hour on Medicare paperwork for every four hours of patient care, practically incomprehensible regulations, “a system of central planning and price regulation in which bureaucrats control nearly all aspects of the financing and delivery of medical services,” and “mountains of red tape, sluggish and inappropriate payments for services provided, fears of retaliation for even accidental book-keeping mistakes.” Find Dr. Robert E. Moffit's report HERE. | |||
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"Health care prices have risen faster than
inflation. The threat of controls over health care
has brought forth a chorus of protests from economists,
and from former price controllers, who learned about price
controls the hard way. Thus, C. Jackson Grayson, who
headed Nixon's price-wage control experiment from 1971 to
1973, warns: 'price controls will make things worse.
Believe me, I've been there. ... Controls have not worked
in 40 centuries. They will not work now.'
"Grayson warns that, already 24% of U.S. health care is spent on administrative costs, largely imposed by government. Clintonian price control will cause regulations and bureaucrats to proliferate; it will raise medicals costs, not lower them. Barry Bosworth, who headed price control efforts under Jimmy Carter, reacted similarly: 'I can't believe they are going to do it. I can't believe they are that stupid.' He pointed out that health care, a field where there is rapid innovation in goods and services, is a particularly disastrous area to try to impose price controls. "But none of these objections is going to work. ... Clintonians don't mind if price controls cause shortages of health care. In fact, they welcome the prospect, because then they can impose rationing; they can impose priorities, and tell everyone how much of what kind of medical care they can have. And besides, ... there's that deeply satisfying rush of power. We should know by now that reasoned arguments by economists or disillusioned ex-controllers are not going to stop them: only determined and militant opposition and resistance by the long-suffering public." -- Murray N. Rothbard |
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| "Nationalized health is synonymous with delays, waiting lists, rationing, and high taxes." -- Dr. Christopher Lyon | |||
| "The hospitals in Canada are so overloaded they’re unable to observe even basic hygiene procedures, a basic failing which covers everything from the Ontario health system’s incubation of SARS to Labrador’s gift of Chlamydia to its gynaecological patients." -- Robert Clayton Dean | |||
| "Many countries impose price controls on drugs. The result is that few, if any, new drugs are developed in those countries -- France and Canada being good examples. France used to have a vibrant pharmaceutical industry, but now it is almost dead. The U.S. and Switzerland provide a disproportionate share of all new drugs, in large part because they have resisted price controls. How many important new drugs were ever developed in the socialist countries or countries with state-controlled pharmaceutical companies? Almost none." -- Richard W. Rahn |
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"We began in 1994 by bringing health security to every American. Our universal health care program brought equity and access to all. While the overall program is a little more expensive than the $2 trillion dollars we estimated, I [am] pleased to announce that costs are dropping somewhat this year, due to a drastic increase in the number of people who died while waiting to see a doctor. Nevertheless, we brought you health security [*Congress applauds*]." – from the chapter "Every American's Right" in Michael Graham's tongue-in-cheek book, Clinton and Me "Most Americans don’t know enough about basic economics to fill out one fortune cookie. ... The principal villain in rising health care costs is the government. Not pharmaceutical companies, not doctors, but government." --- Neal Boortz "Government is good at only one thing: it breaks your legs, then hands you a crutch, and says, 'See! If it weren't for government, you wouldn't be able to walk!' " – Harry Browne, author of Why Government Doesn't Work and other books "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." -- P. J. O'Rourke "Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "While health insurance plans have long been cut back drastically all over the country, the self-funded insurance of the county employees of Niagara County, N.Y., reimbursed more than $1.25 million since 1999 for its workers' purely cosmetic face peels, breast implants and liposuction; taxpayers finally realized what was going on when property taxes shot up by 20 percent this year." [Buffalo News, 6-2-02] "Do not pinch yourself: everyone will say ouch, now that we've become a 'collective body.' " -- Cat Farmer "It's not mere coincidence that "medicare" and "mediocre" are spelled nearly alike." -- Rick Gaber "Men aren't fools; when it's raining soup, they have sense enough to grab a bucket." -- Michael Miller |
| "The single most exciting thing you encounter in
government is competence, because it's so rare." --
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1976 "Elected officials are no longer afraid of the law or the people. The people are uneducated and believe whatever ABC, CBS, NBC tell them." – Jerry Jones "Most government most of the time wreaks incredible destruction on people’s lives and is completely unaccountable for it." -- David R. Henderson "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "There are some things that you can always bet on. One is that when Congress comes up with a new program it never works right over the long haul. Another is, when Congress goes to fix the mess it has made the mess only gets worse." -- Lyn Nofziger "People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men." -- H.L. Mencken "Scratch the surface of an endemic problem ... and you invariably find a politician at the source." -- Simon Carr, in his review of The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto "Doing nothing in the public policy world allows much more to be done in the real world." -- Thomas Hazlett "Whenever you come across a screw-up this big, you know the government is behind it." -- Ann Coulter "To err is human, but it takes a politician to really screw things up." -- Old American Adage "Politicians, Like Bombers, Seldom See Their Victims..." -- Donald Boudreaux "The problem with politics isn't the money; it's the power." -- Harry Browne "Everything the government touches turns to crap." -- Ringo Starr "Government is the problem, not the solution." -- Ronald Reagan |
| "Why is it that any time government
takes over something for a few years, it's assumed
that people are too incompetent to do it for
themselves?" -- Julian Sanchez "If government had taken over the auto industry in 1920, today we'd all be driving Model-T cars -- and saying, 'If it weren't for the government, we'd have no cars at all.' " -- Harry Browne "An individual who can rise above the social trends that sweep along his fellows so that he can observe their operation has an incalculable advantage over all those who do not." -- Robert R. Prechter, Jr. "The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos." -- H. L. Mencken, 1919 "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence." -- Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) "What's also so incredible about Democrats is that they continually fail to grasp that the reason that health care is one of business' highest cost burdens is BECAUSE of intrusive government micromanagement and hyperregulation of the health care industry, and a swarm of sharks - er, lawyers, rather - circling every single provider of health care and health insurance ... they've got a blind side when it comes to the idea of government doing less or even, heaven forbid, nothing at all." -- Michael Pelletier |
| "It is no crime to be ignorant of economics,
which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one
that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.'
But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and
vociferous opinion on economic subjects while
remaining in this state of ignorance." -- Murray
N. Rothbard "One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us noble and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Paul Johnson "...the first thing to be aware of is that the basic principles of ethics or morality are widely disputed, not at all self-evident and uncontroversial. Thus at the least it should be clear that any claim that the moral or ethical opposes the technological and scientific is brazenly question begging, presumptuous." -- Prof. Tibor R. Machan |
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