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 […]
Most single-payer advocates believe that our health care system would operate more efficiently if it were “managed” by our masters inside the Beltway. David Strom of the Minnesota Free Market Institute uses the following hypothetical scenario to show why they are wrong:
An economist examines consumers’ automobile purchases and comes to the conclusion that the market is completely out […]
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 […]
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 […]
At first glance, retail health clinics look like a classic “lower-end” disruptive innovation—a medical delivery model that caters to a segment of the market that has been inadequately served by the traditional delivery model. But the RHC phenomenon isn’t really a response to normal market forces. It’s a reaction to perverse incentives created by government price controls.
CMS payment reductions for primary care services have created […]
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 […]
I’m no Bush basher, but this time he has really pissed me off. As part of a belated effort to get federal spending under control, he wants to cut Medicare payments to hospitals. Here’s how it will work, according to the NYT:
The largest amount of Medicare savings, by far, would come from hospitals: $15 billion from an across-the-board reduction […]
I can always use an extra $30 or $40 thousand. So why can’t I put my left kidney up for sale on eBay? Well, as John Stossel explains in this op-ed, Al Gore and his accomplices in Congress made it a federal crime:
In 1984, U.S. Rep. Al Gore sponsored a law making the sale of organs […]
Advocates of government-run health care routinely accuse those who disagree with them of “defending the status quo.” Ramesh Ponnuru exposes the irony of that charge in Time:
Most Americans of working age get their health insurance through their employers. The Democrats running for President want to keep it that way. The Republicans don’t … They want […]
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 […]
