Is government run health care a good idea? Here's an interesting perspective from Jay Leno.

Will turning over to the government our health care system a good idea? Considering our experience with the government running the postal service I'd say definitely not.

Here's Jay Leno's take.

"The Postal Service announced last week the Post Office lost $3.8 billion last year. ... I've got a good idea. Let's put the government in charge of healthcare! Fantastic idea!"

If Obama and Cong. Democrats pass a health care bill will it solve our health problems? Douthat says will merely kick problem down the street.

Are the problems with our nation's health care system going to be resolved if Obamacare is passed with or without a public option? It may reduce the number of people who don't have health insurance but it won't resolve the under cost problems driving premiums upward. In other words, it will give the appearance of a solution but in fact make the overall situation worse.

That's the analysis of the situation by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who in a column published in the Star Tribune, does a good job of giving an overview of the situation. He says:

Three major problems plague American health care. The cost of premiums is eating up an ever larger share of take-home pay. The cost of our public health care programs is eating up an ever larger share of the federal budget. And millions of people who need insurance are priced out of the market.

Now that Max Baucus’s version of health care legislation has been blessed, at least provisionally, by the hands of Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, it’s increasingly likely that Congress will pass reforms that address the third problem, while making the first two problems somewhat worse.

What will the Baucus type bill do?

If a Baucus-esque bill passes into law, we should expect a significant decline in the number of Americans without health insurance. But for Americans who have employer-based insurance — still the lion’s share of the working-age population — premiums could climb more swiftly than ever.

That’s exactly what’s happened under Massachusetts’s recent reform, the best state-level parallel to what Congress is attempting. The Baucus bill includes measures that might partially counteract this trend — delivery system reforms, for instance, and an excise tax on the highest-premium plans. But their effects are speculative; the Bay State’s swiftly rising premiums are facts on the ground.

Meanwhile, our long-term fiscal trajectory will remain as unsustainable as ever. Baucus’s legislation is revenue-neutral only under rosy political assumptions, and it adds another entitlement to an already-groaning system.

He points out what the reform won't do.

But any lawmakers voting “yes” should have no illusions about what they’re voting for. This version of reform probably won’t make health care more affordable for most Americans, or place the system on firmer footing for the long run. Despite all the talk about a once-in-a-generation opportunity, our political class will have barely finished congratulating itself before rising costs will force everyone back to the negotiating table to consider more radical approaches.

He also touches what many view as the liberals endgame and how a public option moves us closer to -- federal government takeover of health care through a single payer plan.

We know what one such approach would look like. It’s the eventual endgame that liberals pushing a “public option” are aiming for: a federal takeover of the health-insurance sector, paid for by rising tax rates, in which the government guarantees universal access while using its monopoly power to hold down costs.

Douthat has an alternative which he thinks will address the concerns of both those on the right and the left.

But there’s another path, equally radical, that’s more in keeping with the traditional American approach to government, taxation and free enterprise. This approach would give up on the costly goal of insuring everyone for everything, forever. Instead, it would seek to insure Americans only against costs that exceed a certain percentage of their income, while expecting them to pay for everyday medical expenditures out of their own pockets.

Such a system would provide universal catastrophic health insurance, in other words, while creating a free market for non-catastrophic care. In the process, it would marry a central conservative insight — that we’ll never control spending so long as Americans are insulated from the true price of their medical care — to the admirable liberal premise that nobody should go bankrupt paying for life-saving treatment.

The details would vary depending on your political predilections. Under the more free-market approach, championed by Harvard’s Martin Feldstein, the government would provide vouchers for the purchase of private catastrophic plans. Under a more liberal version, like the one sketched out by Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, the government itself would act as the insurer. And liberals and conservatives would no doubt disagree about where to set the income threshold, and what additional interventions to support.

I don't think his suggestion won't gain much support from President Obama and Democrat leaders in Congress who see this as their opportunity to push through what they want.

US Postal Service facing "acute financial crisis" says Postmaster. Do we really want the government now taking over our health care system?

The Postmaster General says the Post Office is facing an "acute financial crisis".

The following is from a posting on the National Press Club's website.

The 234-year-old U.S. Postal Service is in acute financial crisis, John Potter, the 72nd Postmaster General said Thursday [October 8th] during a National Press Club luncheon.

After losing a projected $7 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, Potter said he is working to help the USPS reinvent itself. It won’t be an easy task, as 28 billion fewer pieces of mail were sent last year compared to fiscal year 2008, he said. Potter said that holiday mail, one of the traditionally highest volume periods of the year, was flat last year — and he expects it to be flat this December, as well.

In addition to more people using email rather than snail mail, and the lagging economy that is causing fewer people to mail printed ads pieces and other promotional materials, Potter believes the USPS’ deficit also grew out of a three-year-old law that added more than $5 billion to annual costs for prefunding retiree health benefits.

“I was nervous about it because I knew we just couldn’t afford to pay that bill when it came due last week,” Potter told the gathered crowd. “Our mailers were nervous, too. They were concerned we’d have to pull back on service to make ends meet — and that would have negatively affected their businesses.”

To stave off the deficit, Potter cut $6 billion in expenses and reduced the USPS career workforce by 40,000 positions. But the man who led the USPS for eight years, and championed the development of a strong privacy program, said that unless the USPS makes significant changes he forecasts losses of $5 billion per year for the foreseeable future.

Options he’s considering include reducing the current six-day per week deliver service of the mail to five days per week, which would cut $3 billion per year from the budget; and adding additional products and services for sale at the organization’s thousands of retail outlets as do postal services in other countries. In Japan, he noted, postal customers can purchase life insurance. In France, postal stations sell mobile phones.

“I am not wedded to any one approach, but we need to generate new revenue,” the postmaster insisted, noting that solutions may not come easily because of the way the USPS is organized. It is overseen by Congress, but is charged with running like a business. He did admit that politics is an issue he contends with, but said he’d prefer to keep his eye on the real issue of finding ways to balance his budget.

Certainly the Post Office like every other business is facing tough economic times which, coupled with the rise of the Internet and email, makes it's primary activity - delivery of mail - increasingly less attractive to the general public. I increasingly have second thoughts every time I put a 40 plus cent stamp on a letter.

The question is: should the government be in the postal business? Or can it effectively be in the postal business? The problem with government is it's not accountable to the market hence consumers. Therefore it's it's often incredibly inefficient in how it does things. And because it's owned by the government it simply doesn't go out business, it just runs up deficits which are covered by the taxpayers.

I think the experience with a government run postal office is instructive when considering plans to expand the government's reach and control of health care in our nation.

If the government can't effectively run the postal service, there's no question in my mind the government has no business taking on something as complex as the health care industry. Unfortunately, the stakes are much higher with health care; people's very lives are at stake versus delivering some letters and mail to our homes on time.

Will health care be better whatever form Obamacare passes Congress?

With significant majorities in both the US House and Senate, some sort of health care bill will no doubt be jammed through the Congress and signed into law. The question has to be asked will health care be improved or worsened in America. With greater government involvement and control, the answer is clearly worse. All we have to do is look at other nations which already have socialized medicine. They're trying to move away from it.

The salient question is about quality of health care not access. Today very few people don't have access to health care though many don't have insurance. Efforts to mandate health care insurance will provide illusory success. What I mean by that is many people still won't have insurance even if you mandate it. It's estimated that 15% of people don't have auto insurance even though it's required by law. But regulations and price control efforts will stifle access to quality health care and reduce innovation and development of treatments for people who are truly sick.

Gary Bauer highlights a couple of these concerns regarding where Obamacare could take us.

The Contradictions Of ObamaCare

In recent days, the Wall Street Journal’s website has posted two columns that have exposed the glaring contradictions of ObamaCare. In the first column, Peter Suderman notes that in our federalist system of government the states have been called “laboratories of democracy,” free to try “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Several states have already experimented with key elements of ObamaCare, and the results are not good. But Obama and congressional Democrats are about to put the rest of the country at risk by nationalizing those failed experiments. You can read Suderman’s article here.

The second column, entitled “Obama’s War On Specialists,” was an analysis of how the Obama plan will impact any American suffering from heart disease, cancer or any ailment requiring a specialist. Here’s what it said:

“Democrats are systematically attacking specific medical fields like cardiology and oncology … trying to engineer a ‘cheaper’ system so that government can afford to buy health care for all -- even if the price is fewer and less innovative ways of extending and improving lives. …The increase in specialists has tracked advances over 50 years in medical science and technology. Democrats look at these advancements and see only the costs, not the benefits. …

“Markets are supposed to determine the composition of the workforce, not a command medical economy run out of Washington. …Americans might take a different view of health-care ‘reform’ if they understood that it means snuffing out the best medicine.”
This is a very important point that cannot be ignored. Last year, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office told Congress, “In explaining why health costs rose over the past several decades, most analysts agree that the most important factor has been the emergence, adoption, and widespread diffusion of new medical technologies and services.” [Emphasis added.] Do we want to save money by going back to 1970s technology, by denying MRIs and life-saving drugs like the socialized “command medical economies” in Europe?

The Washington Times recently pointed out: “A new study by … the University of Pennsylvania shows that for the eight most common types of cancer, Americans have dramatically higher survival rates than Europeans. For all malignancies, the five-year survival rate for men is 66.3 percent in America. In Europe, it is only 47.3 percent. The rate is 63 percent for women in America, but only 55 percent for European women.” The lives those statistics represent are at stake in this debate.

Share these facts with friends, neighbors, co-workers and relatives so that they understand what this plan will do to specialist care in this country.

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death." Who said that?

There's an interesting post on Politico yesterday by Ben Smith entitled, "We are God's partners in matters of life and death."

A reader points out that President Obama's call with the rabbis today — as recorded in Rabbi Jack Moline's and other clerics' Twitter feeds — freights health care reform with a great deal of religious meaning, and veers into the blend of policy and faith that outraged liberals in the last administration.

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death," Obama said, according to Moline (paging Sarah Palin...), quoting from the Rosh Hashanah prayer that says that in the holiday period, it is decided "who shall live and who shall die."

The president ended the call by wishing the rabbis "shanah tovah," or happy new year — in reference to the High Holidays a month from now.

Who said that? Must be some leader from the religious right. Wrong. It is President Obama who said this in a conference call with rabbis on his health care reform proposal.

I think it's fine. The more integration of moral discourse in the public square the better. However, one still has to critically evaluate what's actually being said and whether it lines up with what's right and good.

In the case of Obama's push for more government controlled health care I think it moves us farther away from what's right and good. It will mean rationing of care by the government, abortion coverage, premature ending of the lives of many seniors, and of course cost us a lot more money.

Of course, just because one invokes the name of God don't assume it's right and good. Case in point are the ELCA Lutherans and the push of many in that denomination to endorse homosexual behavior, behavior which is clearly a violation of Scriptural standards, and the "Law of Nature and Nature's God", terminology employed by the Founders to describe the grounding of what's truth.

ObamaCare's Perfect Day

For centuries, doctors took an oath to protect life and to uphold the covenant relationship with their patients. Even now, with the Hippocratic Oath discarded due to its problematic prohibition of abortion and euthanasia ("do no harm"), doctors still recognize at some level that they have a covenant with their patients, not just a code of conduct.

See: The Hippocratic Oath Today (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath.html)

And: Taking the Hippocratic Oath Seriously (http://al007italia.blogspot.com/2009/06/taking-hippocratic-oath-seriously.html)

So with the prospect of government-run health care, my question is this: Where's the oath that the government health care bureaucrats will take? Whose interests will they swear to protect?

With whom will the bureaucrats who run the system and make health care decisions have a covenant - with millions of patients they never see or interact with, or with the government from which they get a paycheck twice a month?

Obamacare advocates like to point to the Mayo Clinic as a model for quality care with controlled costs. Does anybody really think bureaucrats will follow Mayo Clinic's model of care: "The Needs of the Patient Come First" (http://www.mayoclinic.org/needs-of-patient/)?

For a chilling, prescient view of where Obamacare is headed, read "This Perfect Day" (1966), by Ira Levin. Levin's magic number was 62. I wonder where the actuaries set it now?

If Obamacare doesn't pass what will?

Here's an interesting column on health care, "Obamacare developing into Insurance Changes," by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. He thinks an overal of the entire health care system is not going to pass.

By year’s end, President Barack Obama will emerge with something he can call health care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they’ll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended. The beginning of the retreat was signaled by Obama’s reference — made five times — to “health-insurance reform” in his July 22 news conference.

Reforming the health care system is dead. Cause of death? Blunt trauma administered by the green eyeshades at the Congressional Budget Office.

What did the CBO reveal?

Three blows:

(1) On June 16, the CBO determined that the Senate Finance Committee bill would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, delivering a sticker shock that was near fatal.

(2) Five weeks later, the CBO gave its verdict on the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, Dr. Obama’s latest miracle cure, conjured up at the last minute to save Obamacare from fiscal ruin, and consisting of a committee of medical experts highly empowered to make Medicare cuts.

The CBO said that council would do nothing, trimming costs by perhaps 0.2 percent. A 0.2 percent cut is not a solution; it’s a punch line.

(3) The final blow came when the CBO euthanized the Obama “out years” myth. The administration’s argument had been: Sure, Obamacare will initially increase costs and deficits. But it pays for itself in the long run because it bends the curve downward in coming decades.

But instead Congress and Obama will target insurance companies in such a way that it will only make the problem worse. What will it look like?

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no pre-existing condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn’t this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

The net result will be kicking the problem down the road which will only increase problems rather than solve them.

Government health care may be toxic to the elderly

While Obama chides Doctors who abuse the health care system by removing tonsils to make more money, he endorses a plan that pays Doctors to improve ROI by counseling the elderly and terminally ill about what medical care they will receive in their final days.

This article, "Time To Go, Grandpa" by Pat Buchanan sheds some insight into this possibility with Obamacare.

Time To Go, Grandpa
Pat Buchanan
Townhall.com

"With "controlling costs" a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, "rationed care" takes on a new meaning for us all.

London's Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by 95 percent the number of steroid injections, such as cortisone, given to people who suffer severe and chronic back pain. "

"Specialists fear," said the Telegraph, "tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as 500 pounds each for private treatment."

Now, twin this story with the weekend Washington Post story about Obamacare's "proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical treatment they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills," and there is little doubt as to what is coming."

Read More

The dangers and consequences of government run health care. And who do we trust God or government?

There's a great video on government run health care put out by the Acton Institute. In a few minutes it succinctly points out the dangers of government run health care. Frankly, the mess our health care system is currently in, rising costs, etc. is largely due to government intervention in the health care system. Now President Obama and Democrats in Congress want even more.

In very simplistic terms, the ultimate issue and question is who do we trust or put our security in, God or government? Some may ask what does God have to do with our health care system. For one, He's created the government as an institution in society to do certain things. When we reject His design for government, in a sense, we're rejecting Him. And second, who do we look to for our ultimate security in life, to provide for us, God or the government. Here Jesus' words come to mind about not worrying and trusting God to meet our basic needs. Or if we believe it all depends on us, we'll look to government.

First step towards nationalized, government directed health included in national economic stimulus bill

The financial and political leviathan called the economic stimulus bill is being criticized for the amount of money it's spending, $800 to 900 billion, what it's being spent on, and how much it will actually stimulate the economy. But there are other provisions discovered in the bill which should also give lawmakers pause.

Earlier, I mentioned the provision which prohibits funding to public facilities which are used for worship services. Now there's a provision which is a key building block for moving towards a national health care system.

According to a Bloomberg news story:

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

New Penalties

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

For a government run or directed health care system to work, it's essential they gain access to all patients' medical records and in turn start to decide who can receive what treatments. Universal, government run health care means bureaucrats will start injecting themselves into what were formerly patient-doctor decisions.

This has been fought in Minnesota for a number of years where certain legislators have attempted to exert more state control and regulation of health care. With the Obama Administration, the same effort is now being made in Congress. The ultimate consequence of more government involvement in health care is rationing and reduced health care quality.