More on Healthcare and the Summit

The Healthcare Summit raised a lot of interesting points. The main one being, there is just a philosophical difference in how government should be looked at. Liberals, and thus Democrats, believe there should be an overriding central authority that supercedes any marketplace idea. This includes the following things, among others: that every adult has to acquire health insurance, or get penalized for it (do we actually get arrested for this?); that employers will get fined 8% if they don't have any of their employees covered; that Washington bureaucrats get to decide what constitutes as acceptable coverage for any US citizen.

One of the things that has struck me is how little people have discussed how Washington cannot manage any entitlement programs anywhere close to what the financial estimates become. For instance, the Medicare program when it was introduced way back when, was supposed to be just a sliver of what it has turned out to be. If you look at the following federal run programs, it doesn't take a liberal genious (oxymoron?) to figure that the government struggles mightily with doing business: US Postal Service- Projected 800 Billion deficit this year (UPS and FedEx are wildly successful); Social Security- Going to be insolvent at any time; Medicare- Going to be insolvent before we retire.

The Conservative way is much better. This includes the following things:

• Tort Reform. The CBO estimates this could save as much as $50 Billion per year in medical malpractice savings.
• Ability to Buy across state lines. The would allow all of the insurance providers to compete for your business. In essence, the consumer can go with the most affordable price, no matter what state it is located in.
• Buy from Imported Drugs from Canada. This was a bipartisan agreemlent, but apparently, not bipartisan enough as it was not included in the current House or Senate bills.
• Healthcare Savings Accounts. This idea was brandished by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and it is overwhelmingly popular and successful. This allows a family to have, say, $2,500 put into their healthcare kitty. From there, a family gets to choose how it spends its money on care. This plan does have provisions in case of catastrophic conditions occur, which really helps the consumer. This plan gives control to the consumer, not the government. A similar plan was offered by McCain in the 08 campaign.

An article by Economist Thomas Sowell also makes a great point about how all of these estimates fly in the face of reality. As he calls it, Alice in Wonderland. The main point he makes is how they are making estimates based on what kind of medical services we use when we have to pay for all of its costs. If the government were to take over, people would be going in for about every reason imaginable. Say for instance I got a skin rash and I was in line before someone who may have a potentially cancerous tumor. That person would have to wait in extraordinarily long lines while the people in the front of the line would get helped first. And back to the original point here, the costs would go up extravagantly because people would be making "free" doctor or ER visits, when they otherwise wouldn't have gone. Sowell says that "bureaucratic rationing is then imposed, to replace self-rationing."