Tag: ObamaCare

Categories
too much government

Mugged by Obamacare

Sometimes people rush to support the destruction of their freedom (and that of others), then become shocked to learn how destructive such destruction can be.

Businessman and “left-​leaning activist” Link Christensen, former advocate of Obamacare, once cheered this sweeping assault on what remains of our medical freedom because “it sounded like a good idea to offer insurance to all the people in the country.”

Perhaps he didn’t realize what kind of “offers” get foisted on us by government force. Anyway, his enthusiasm has now waned. Christensen and his employees currently pay about $60 a month for insurance coverage. But this insurance does not satisfy Obamacare’s mandates. To switch to a compliant program, they’ll have to fork over at least twice as much.

“It’s not going to be any type of bargain for people who work for me,” Christensen observes. “I’m concerned that my employees and others in that socioeconomic background are going to be left without any coverage.…”

Not the way things were supposed to be! What happened to the promised paradise?

Yet the higher costs, shrinking alternatives, and other baleful effects of Obamacare and of government interventionism generally are predictable. Perhaps Mr. Christensen and others inclined to leap before they look when it comes to government nostrums can now try the reverse. Perhaps they can think twice the next time somebody flourishes a pair of handcuffs and says “Here, put these on, it’ll help people.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Heap Bad Medicine

Could medical insurance — insurance for “health care” — itself act like a drug?

Are we addicts?

Third-​party (“insurance”) payments sure are super-​convenient. But their convenience comes at a cost: insurance (and other third-​party payers) that remunerate doctors and hospitals directly is what’s driving much of the price inflation in this sector.

Automobile insurance policies overwhelmingly pay the insured, not the mechanics, and we have no automobile repair crisis.

This was related with utmost clarity by Jeffrey A. Singer in his recent Wall Street Journal commentary “The Man Who Was Treated for $17,000 Less.” A patient got an astoundingly better price for a surgery by simply setting aside his insurance program and paying in cash. Singer explains why:

  1. “Hospitals and other providers make their ‘list’ prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators. No one is ever expected to pay the list price.”
  2. “[M]ost people these days don’t have health ‘insurance.’ They have prepaid health plans. They pay premiums to take advantage of a pre-​negotiated fee schedule arranged for and administered by a third party.”
  3. “It is the third-​party payment system that interferes with true price competition, so ‘market clearing prices’ can’t develop.”

Singer reminds us that specialty services like Lasik eye surgery, which tend not to be covered by insurance policies, have improved in quality and gone down in price.

Alas, as he laments, the United States is “headed in the exact opposite direction” from a real, cost-​reducing solution. To a nation addicted to third-​party payers in medicine, Obamacare is nothing more than upping the dose of the same old drug.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Unions of Opposites

Not everything in Dr. Obama’s garden is coming up roses.

Even erstwhile — or perhaps masochistic — supporters of the thorny “Obamacare” legislation have sought exemptions from its costs and mandates, or complained about its “unexpected” destructive impact.

The AFL-​CIO, for example, laments that employers otherwise subject to Obamacare mandates need not provide health insurance for employees working less than a certain number of hours. To get below the threshold, some big employers are systematically slashing employee hours. This trend may “[destroy] the 40-​hour work week.” Oops.

Also thanks to Obamacare, some health insurance coverage is being excised from existing compensation packages, such as coverage for employees’ spouses. United Parcel Service has just joined the ranks of employers lopping such benefits. The company says Obamacare’s costs and mandates are a big part of the reason.

Not so fast, UPS! Isn’t this a biased misreading of the situation, as some experts claim? Bear with me here. According to the New York Times, “Several health care experts … said they believed the company was motivated by a desire to hold down health care costs, rather than because of cost increases under the law.” See, it’s not that UPS is trying to lessen the impact of cost increases; they’re only trying to reduce costs.

“Apples and oranges” or “six of one/​half dozen of the other”?

One may as well pretend that persons breaking out of jail seek freedom when in fact they are merely endeavoring to escape imprisonment.

Let us not confuse such starkly opposite things. Thank you, experts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Forced to Innovate

Not everything new is wonderful.

When a company improves its operations, it seeks to do so in a way that decreases costs or produces features customers want enough to pay for. It works to ensure that the benefits of adopting new procedures outweigh the costs.

At least, this is what profitable companies do when free to act in accordance with their reason for being.

Government regulations clash with this, however. One of the “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” provisions of Obamacare, for example, forces medical practitioners to convert to electronic record-​keeping — even if they think the burden unjustified.

A businessman may be wrong about whether to try a new way — and, if he does adopt an innovation, about how fast or thoroughly to adopt it. If he’s wrong, he’s free to change his mind as evidence comes in. But, in medicine, government edict replaces entrepreneurial judgment.

Mandates and prohibitions are already rife in the medical industry; Obamacare makes a bad situation worse. “In today’s health care system,” writes blogger Rituparna Basu, “a doctor’s judgment as to whether it makes sense to adopt a new technology for his practice is deemed irrelevant. The government is the one calling the shots, and jeopardizing doctors’ practices in the process.”

A sound diagnosis.

The prognosis might not be so negative, however. While governments tend to prescribe uniform, one-​size-​fits-​all “cures,” ongoing advances in genetics point the other direction, to individualizing medical practice, finding specific causes of illnesses, and developing genetics-​informed, patient-​specific cures.

But it’s just possible that individually focused medicine would be enhanced by a healthy dose of individual freedom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture insider corruption national politics & policies

Non-​Reciprocity

There’s a basic rule that folks who seek power tend to forget and those in power flout outright: the principles we foist on others must apply also to ourselves.

Notoriously, Congress piles regulation over regulation upon the American people, but absolves itself from those very same laws. This became an issue, recently, when our moral exemplars on Capitol Hill began to speak loftily for a higher minimum wage and against modern internship programs.

“A new study,” Bill McMorris wrote last month, “found that 97 percent of lawmakers backing the minimum wage are relying on unpaid interns to help get the bill passed.” McMorris used the H‑word in his title, as have many similar reports before him: hypocrites.

The program requirements of the Democrats’ “ObamaCare” have proven to be more burdensome than Nancy Pelosi promised. So President Obama now declares, unilaterally, to postpone applying the employer mandate in the law. Consider, too, the many waivers granted to other groups for various rules and regulations rules. None of this was done to better implement a carefully thought-​out policy, but not to aggrieve certain influential groups.

And here we get to the heart of today’s weakness on principles.

You see, it’s not individuals who matter to our leaders, it’s powerful groups … groups that fund or swing re-elections.

And that’s the principal reason government policy works at cross-​purposes, to our general detriment. Instead of insisting on broad rules that apply to all, our leaders pit group against group, favoring one, then another, then later still another.

Madness for us; method for them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
video

Video: Obamacare in Oregon, with Guitar and Four Cellos

The organization setting up the “health care exchange” in Oregon is spending a lot of money on advertising, to help make Obamacare more palatable to skeptics in the Beaver State … or at least help proponents feel better about it. 

http://​youtu​.be/​x​V​U​J​NEDpEkg

Does this song do anything for you? 

For more background, consult Northwest Watchdog.