Free market reform advocates object to single-payer health care for a variety of reasons, including our belief that such a system would involve government micromanagement of hospitals and doctors. As if to prove our point, Medicare is about to send out an army of auditors whose primary mission is to put the clinical and billing decisions of providers under the microscope:
‘What […]
The elderly bobby-soxer of TAP, as Mark Steyn aptly describes Ezra Klein, inadvertantly exposes the essential paternalism that animates the single-payer project:
Liberal solutions don’t try and force the individual into a governing role he or she is not equipped to assume.
In other words, the hoi polloi are simply too stupid to make their own health care decisions, so their betters in […]
Single-payer advocates promote the fiction that people who disagree with them are “against reform.” In reality, however, the most ferocious defenders of the status quo are those who favor government-run health care. The Florida Times-Union reports on a typical campaign to undermine market-oriented reform:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush led the most ambitious and significant reform to Medicaid in the country. Since he […]
Single-payer advocates would have us believe that the high cost of health coverage is caused by greedy insurance companies. And, predictably, the remedy these people recommend is more government regulation.
Well, as this excellent WSJ piece explains, more government regulation is not the solution. Why? Because excess government regulation is the CAUSE of high insurance prices.
To hear some of the presidential […]
That the latest version of Arnoldcare has been lambasted by both free-market and single-payer advocates suggests that the plan has serious problems. And it does indeed offer the worst of both worlds: heavy-handed government interference in the health care market and preservation of private insurance monopolies.
But, being a hospital finance type, I was really taken aback by the proposed 4% tax on […]
Great Britain’s socialized medical system rations care by restricting patient access to providers and state-of-the-art treatment. The NHS uses a variety of tactics to accomplish this, including the refusal to pay for some highly effective cancer drugs.
Some NHS patients have responded to this egregious policy by offering to pay for the needed drugs out of their own pockets. Incredibly, the NHS won’t allow […]
Did you think you were safe from the whims of CMS apparatchiks simply because you’re not a geezer yet? Think again.
Because Medicare bureaucrats have, in their infinite wisdom, decreed a reimbursement rate that barely covers half the cost of certain cancer drugs, many private patients will probably be denied life-saving treatment:
New Medicare rules for this class of radioimmunotherapy cancer drugs may bar thousands of lymphoma patients from […]
We are often told by the advocates of government-run health care that a single-payer system would be innocuous because our masters inside the beltway would not actually own hospitals or employ clinicians. Well, the WSJ Health Blog demonstrates the vacuity of that assertion by explaining the latest P4P proposal from the single-payer system known as […]
There has been a good deal of happy talk from the bird cage liners about Medicare’s new rule on medical errors. Unfortunately, the media (and even some health care bloggers who should know better) have it wrong.
Like most bureaucratic brainstorms, this latest CMS decree will almost certainly do more damage than good. Dr. RW has […]
It is common for advocates of government-run health care to quote WHO statistics in order to document the alleged inferiority of American health care. A perennial favorite purports to show that the U.S. barely edges out Cuba in some categories.
I have pointed out before that the WHO makes no attempt to verify the health care […]