One of the reasons I find it so difficult to take “progressive” policy wonks seriously on health care reform is that they seem utterly incapable of honest and informed analysis. A typical manifestation of that intellectual handicap can be found in this post by Maggie Mahar, which begins with a misleading conflation of disparate data:
A combination of spending on new construction and hi-tech equipment pushed the nation’s hospital […]
The advocates of government-run health care supplement their thin repertoire of legitimate arguments with a series of canards that they hope will be accepted as facts. Sally Pipes debunks five of these myths in The Washington Times:
I. 47 million Americans do not have insurance.
The [Census] Bureau counts anyone who went without insurance for any part of […]
The state of California has decided to slash Medicaid payments to physicians by more than $50 million. AMNews reports that Dr. Richard Frankenstein, President of the California Medical Association (CMA), thinks the state has created a monster:
Cutting funding for health services, particularly when it costs California valuable federal matching funds, is neither humane nor financially […]
Dr. Wes links to a WSJ article that delivers some predictable news on health care spending. The pontifications of the NYT and various “progressive” policy wonks notwithstanding, aging baby boomers will put enormous upward pressure on health care expenditures during the next decade. The bill is expected to reach $4.3 trillion by 2017:
Dr. Wes is justifiably frustrated by the widely-believed myth that physician salaries are a major […]
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Posted 27 February 2008
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Jeff Goldsmith is not only one of the most thoughtful observer’s of U.S. health care, he is one of the few policy wonks who eschews crisis mongering. That all-too-rare reluctance to contrive a black cloud for every silver lining informs his latest post at the Health Affairs blog. Countering the general pessimism that greeted the recent CMS report on health spending, Goldsmith predicts “a more […]
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Posted 18 January 2008
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The Happy Hospitalist links to a scary article about how much Medicaid pays for ER visits compared to other sources of payment. Here’s the most horrifying datum:
Researchers at the University of California San Francisco and Stanford University found that the uninsured patients paid 35 percent of their overall emergency room bills in 2004, versus 33 […]
A central issue in the debate over health care reform is spending. The consensus seems to be that the steady increases we have seen in health care expenditures as a percentage of GDP are symptomatic of a dysfunctional delivery system badly in need of repair.
Not everyone endorses this gloomy perspective, however. In a recent article […]
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Posted 08 November 2007
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Despite the popularity of conspiracy theories involving “big pharma” and “the health care industrial complex,” the causes of health care inflation are actually pretty mundane. The Committee for Economic Development, a DC think tank, has produced a report that does a good job of boiling them down:
First, there is cost-unconscious demand … we have created […]
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Posted 19 October 2007
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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 […]
According to “the most comprehensive analysis of the issue yet produced,” the U.S. has the best 5-year cancer survival rate of 22 countries studied. Although the Telegraph focuses on the dismal performance of Great Britain’s imploding system of socialized medicine, it also provides a chart showing the best performers.
Averaging the rates for men and women, […]