Ezra Klein, always a fierce contender for this prize, takes the trophy in a walk with this utterly clueless post. Klein’s basic point is that health care costs will continue to rise unless the government imposes price controls (via the public plan or some other means of coercion) on physicians and other health providers. But he begins with a chart that makes the case AGAINST price controls. Take a look at it before I explain what I mean:
So, how does this chart undermine Klein’s case? In all of the nations listed, except for the United States, government tells doctors what they can charge. And they all have one other thing in common—-serious physician shortages. Their price controls have made it very difficult for doctors to stay in business, and patients are suffering. Take the much-vaunted Canadian health care system. Countless articles tell the same story:
Four million Canadians do not have a regular physician, indicating the acute lack of doctors in the country.
And where are these Canadian doctors going? They’re going where they can make a living—-the United States:
Canada has quietly emerged as a major supplier of physicians to the United States in the past several years, second only to India in the number of doctors it produces for the American medical market.
But what about France, the country with the “best health care system in the world” according to W.H.O.? Same problem:
The French health service, regarded as the world’s best, is falling apart, a petition signed by 286 of its most senior hospital doctors claims. Waiting lists, almost unknown in France five years ago, are becoming common, and there is a severe shortage of doctors and nurses.
And Germany? You guessed it, worsening doctor shortages:
The shortage of physicians in the country is ‘no longer a purely eastern German problem,’ according to the head of the German Physicians’ Association (KVB), Andreas Kohler. ‘The west is also threatened by a doctor shortage,’ Kohler told the German weekly news magazine Focus.
The story is the same in the Netherlands and Spain. And, what is worse, health care inflation continues apace in all of these countries. In other words, their price controls haven’t slowed the rise of health costs, but they have created serious physician shortages. Nonetheless, Klein thinks a “public option” that pays below-market rates to doctors and other providers would somehow produce different results here.
This reasoning is … well … dumb. If you refuse to pay doctors what they’re worth, they will go somewhere else (as Canadian physicians have been doing) or they will go into another line of work. Either way, the patients lose.
Comments 4
The links about other countries are not current. What is certain is that the US has a chronic physician shortage, particularly in primary care.
Posted 08 Dec 2009 at 2:00 am ¶“The US has a chronic physician shortage, particularly in primary care.”
Wrong again, Marc. What shortages we have are restricted to those localities (e.g. rural & inner city) where Medicare and Medicaid (i.e. gov’t insurance) are the dominant providers of coverage.
Why? Because, as in Canada, France, Germany, our gov’t insurance programs don’t pay enough to cover costs. So our doctors flee the areas in which Medicare & Medicaid dominate.
Where do they go? To the localities where private insurance dominates. There are no shortages of any medical service in the areas where most of the patients have private coverage.
If we implement some variety of the public option that pays Medicare rates and crowds out private health insurance coverage, we would soon develop the kind of shortages that exist in Europe (and your country).
Posted 08 Dec 2009 at 2:10 am ¶Far be it from this administration to address the facts.
Posted 08 Dec 2009 at 2:25 am ¶Isn’t this on the first quiz in Econ 101? If you want to create a shortage in anything, set the price lower than the equilibrium point, T or F?
Posted 08 Dec 2009 at 7:45 am ¶Post a Comment