The Big Humungous Gigantic Stupid
The Big Humungous Gigantic Stupid
Welcome to health care "reform" that will make both our fiscal and physical health suffer. Krauthammer writes on NRO:
Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method -- a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing. and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.
A few of the goodies in the Senate bill, causing an "overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency"?
•You'll find mandates with financial penalties -- the amounts picked out of a hat.
•You'll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third -- numbers picked out of a hat.
•You'll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies -- percentages picked out of a hat -- that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.
The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.
Then do health care the right way -- one reform at a time, each simple and simplifying, aimed at reducing complexity, arbitrariness, and inefficiency.
How are things going in Britain with government-run health care? Well, here's an article -- Simon Heffer writing for the Telegraph, "Want to fix the NHS? Go private":
This exposes one of the great pretences of the NHS: that it is there first and foremost for the benefit of patients. It isn't. It exists these days mostly for the benefit of various trade unionists who are fully paid-up members of the Brown clientele, and who earn good money as petty bureaucrats trying to "manage" things that, if they need to be managed at all, could be far better done by fewer people in much more efficient systems....There is a solution, but it would really put out of joint the noses of the clientele. When a hospital fails in the way that the Basildon and Thurrock Trust has, it should be turned over immediately to a private-sector hit squad to sort it out.
This does not mean violating the terms of the 1946 Act that set up the NHS, and depriving people of a health service free at point of use. It means that the people who provide them with that service do not work for the state, but for contractors employed by it. I can understand that this would upset Leftists in all parties - including in the Tory party, whose policy on the NHS is to do everything identically to Labour - but that would be too bad. The maintenance of the ideological purity of the politically motivated should not be put before the lives of those to whom the state has a duty of care: but that is precisely how things are at the moment.
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