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 […]
According to the WSJ, the recent raid on WellCare was prompted by fraud allegations:
[The raid] was spurred at least in part by allegations that the company inflated the amount it spent on mental-health care in order to keep money it should have refunded to Florida’s Medicaid program.
But the allegations were made pursuant to a qui […]
A variety of commenters at Kevin, MD and WhiteCoat Rants are puzzling over what can be at the root of this recurring problem.
Well, here’s a question that may help unravel the mystery: What do this hospital, this hospital and Walter Reed have in common with the NHS?
Answer: They’re all government-operated.
It doesn’t much matter whether the […]
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Posted 01 November 2007
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Employer-based health insurance premiums are up again, which means that the usual suspects will be renewing their calls for government-run health care. But Alex Epstein, of the Ayn Rand Institute, advises that government meddling is the cause of rising health care costs:
These skyrocketing premiums are testament to the huge destruction that the government’s massive control […]
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Posted 14 September 2007
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The CDC’s report on ER overcrowding is out, and the news isn’t good. ED visits are up 20 percent over the last ten years and the number of EDs actually available to treat these patients has dropped by 9% during the same period. What could be causing this? GruntDoc has a nice, succinct theory:
If you […]
A new study shows that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), in addition to being a huge financial burden on hospitals and physicians, has dramatically increased wait times in America’s emergency rooms:
EMTALA is another example of federal legislation that hurts the very people that it was meant to protect: low-income patients in […]
A standard feature of government-run health care is the dilatory adoption of new medicines and technologies. In Great Britain, for example, patients often have to go outside the NHS to access cutting edge treatments.
Sadly, as the NYT reports, the segment of American health care controlled by Washington suffers from the same bureaucratic inertia. The procedure discussed in the […]
