This week, the competition for this coveted prize was absolutely ferocious. Indeed, a veritable blizzard of brainless reform posts poured forth from the “progressive” blogosphere.” But this post by Patrick Appel takes the biscuit on the basis of its breathtaking contempt for the voters.
Responding to a post at Reason discussing the value of placing “individuals on equal tax footing as employers when […]
Health Care BS
Market BS —
Category Archives: Market BS
DUMBEST REFORM POST OF THE WEEK (V)
THE GOP “HAS A PROBLEM” WITH REFORM
Philip Klein does a good job of summarizing the fundamental problem with our health care system: the U.S. health care market is everywhere shackled by government:
The way the health care system functions in this country is completely different from the way any other part of the economy functions. Everywhere else, American consumers face a dizzying array […]
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DUMB HEALTH POLICY
As anyone with a modicum of literacy in economics understands, a major driver of high health costs has been the absence of a national health insurance market. Grace-Marie Turner, for example, explains it thus:
Freeing Americans to buy health insurance across state lines would give people more choices in health care.
Why can’t they do so? Because it is against […]
OBAMACARE & PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS
Andrew Sullivan raises an issue that many opponents of Obamacare have difficulty handling: the plight of patients with pre-existing conditions. He begins, however, with a paean to the U.S. health care system:
Only 15 years ago, the retrovirus, HIV, was killing thousands in America … I was told in 1993 that I had a few years to live. I write […]
ARE CRITICS OF MARKET-BASED HEALTH REFORM SIMPLY NEUROTIC?
Most of the progressives I know and read seem reasonably intelligent, or at least not exceptionally stupid. Nonetheless, they often adopt positions that make a mockery of critical thinking.
Take their bias against market-based health reform: They can’t articulate a coherent justification for their position, yet they reject the market in favor of a nanny-state “solution” modeled on a series of spectacular failures.
So, what’s wrong […]
FREE MARKET? WHAT FREE MARKET?
The President has been on the road lately, peddling his half-baked health care “reform” program. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, he repeated the following Lefty canard:
We’ve got to admit that the free market has not worked perfectly when it comes to health care.
Nope. The free market hasn’t failed. We don’t have a free market for health care. What we […]
U.S. HEALTH SPENDING SLOWS … WHY?
One of the pretexts that single-payer advocates use to justify their push for government-run health care is cost. This is presumably why they have been so quiet about recent reports showing that health care inflation is slowing. As the Health Affairs Blog puts it:
National health care spending grew at its lowest rate in nearly a decade in 2007.
And what […]
BAUCUS & THE PRIMARY CARE PROBLEM
One of the most talked about features of the health care plan just unveiled by Senator Baucus is the ostensible relief it offers for the primary care shortage:
The Baucus plan would seek a continued focus on the high value of primary care-related services, with corresponding reductions in relative values for overvalued services.
This hook was no doubt added to […]
SHOPPING AT WALMART MAKES YOU THINNER
Stay with me here. This is not a bait-and-switch, I swear. A couple of researchers have actually found the following:
We estimate the impacts of Wal-Mart and warehouse club retailers on height-adjusted body weight and overweight and obesity status, finding robust evidence that non-grocery selling Wal-Marts reduce weight while grocery-selling Wal-Marts and warehouse clubs either reduce […]
PART-D EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS AGAIN
By now, everyone who hasn’t been living on a desert island knows that traditional Medicare is headed for a fiscal meltdown. However, as I have pointed out before, there is a silver lining to the black cloud.
One segment of the Medicare program in which the market has been allowed to work, the prescription drug program, has been outperforming cost […]
