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 […]
Health Care BS
Market BS —
Category Archives: Market BS
FREE MARKET? WHAT FREE MARKET?
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 […]
MASSACHUSETTS HEALTH REFORM IS DEAD
That’s the conclusion Steffie Woolhandler, Benjamin Day, and David Himmelstein have reached. Why? Because Romneycare expanded coverage to everyone while making no serious adjustments to the other dynamics that affect cost. The inevitable result was a fiscal runaway train:
In sum, neither government, nor employers, nor the uninsured themselves have pockets deep enough to sustain coverage expansion […]
FREE MARKET COMPETITION IS YOUR FRIEND
Last year, I wrote that price competition between Wal-Mart and its rivals was a boon for pharmacy customers. Well, according to MarketWatch, the free market continues to work its magic:
In another expansion of its prescription drug program that has helped to increase its pharmacy sales, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it’s adding a 90-day supply of […]
THE FREE MARKET TRIUMPHS YET AGAIN
The WSJ Health Blog notes that Wal-Mart has saved its customers more than $1 billion with its $4 generics program:
Wal-Mart’s doing a bit of chest thumping this morning, claiming that its $4 generics program has saved consumers $1 billion — $1,032,573,012.61 as of March 10, to be precise.
These savings were brought about not by government cost […]
THE RHC: A MONSTER CREATED BY GOV’T MEDDLING
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 […]
WHY CAN’T I SELL MY KIDNEY?
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 […]