This passage from a recent Leno monologue pretty much captures the essence of government-run health care in general, and Obamacare in particular: People say, ‘Oh, where do hospitals get the nerve to charge $10 for an aspirin?’ See, this is why President Obama wants to do something about healthcare in this country. See, under his [...]
It would appear that the public is not so keen on having Big Brother decide which medical treatments are acceptable or not. When asked by NPR and the Kaiser Foundation how much they trusted each of three outside entities to make such decisions, only 42% had a great deal or a fair amount of faith in a government agency: For any “progressives” [...]
Yesterday, I highlighted an exceptionally goofy Health Affairs post in which Merton Bernstein reiterates the usual tired talking points about Medicare, including the preposterous claim that Medicare has lower admin costs than private insurance. Another talking point often repeated by single-payer advocates involves the virtually unlimited access to health care enjoyed by current beneficiaries of the Medicare program. Arnold Kling [...]
One of the more entertaining characteristics of single-payer advocates is their habit of making preposterous claims about Medicare. An illustrative example can be found in a recent post at the Health Affairs Blog, in which Merton Berstein makes the following assertion: Medicare-for-all would save hundreds of billions every year. Private insurers expend enormous sums for insurer commissions, advertising, Wall-Street-scale executive compensation, [...]
The advocates of government-run health care are doing their best to convince the American public that warnings about rationing under President Obama’s health care “reforms” are nothing more than the scare tactics of hidebound reactionaries. But Lawrence Summers, the President’s chief economic advisor, recently confirmed that rationing is precisely what Obamacare is about. The Washington [...]
When nurse Margaret Haywood discovered that elderly patients were the victims of widespread neglect in Britain’s socialized medical system, she reported it to the proper authorities. Predictably, the NHS bureaucracy did nothing. However, unlike most of her colleagues, Haywood refused to let the NHS apparatchiks get away with their refusal to take action. She assisted the BBC in filming and [...]
We keep hearing from our friends on the Left that the U.S. health system must be rebuilt from the ground up because the public demands it. As usual, however, the facts are not on their side. The Pew Research Center has done a survey of the actual public that shows our “progressive” brethren to be full of BS: [...]
Conservatives should be winning the health care reform debate. History, economics, and the American temperament are all on our side. The market-based model is logical, coherent, and compatible with the laws of economics. The central-planning model favored by the Left is faith-based, fraught with internal contradictions, and fails to comply with the principles of primary-school [...]
Add Jeff Goldsmith to the growing ranks of health care experts who doubt that the Obama adminsitration has any serious plan to pay for what they hilariously call “reform.” Goldsmith describes the the evolution of their financing strategy over at Health Affairs. Here’s the money quote: Opaque, faith-based financing was a major ingredient in sinking [...]
As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, most Americans are happy with the quality of their health care as well as their insurance coverage. In fact, more than 50% are OK with the cost. But our new masters are not interested in the opinions of the great unwashed. They want to kill the private health care industry. [...]
