Thursday, August 20, 2009

Obamacare IS rationing and worse than even the status quo.

****Doing sensible things is thwarted by Obama's constituencies of tort lawyers and unions. Rationing is what's left and will fall primarily on the backs of seniors so they must be lied to.****
http://tinyurl.com/n7nztf
ObamaCare Is All About Rationing Overspending is far preferable to artificially limiting the availability of new procedures and technologies. By MARTIN FELDSTEIN
...rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama's health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive....The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works."...Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism...In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it....not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."...use rationing to limit health care is to rein in the government's exploding health-care budget. Government now pays for nearly half of all health care in the U.S., primarily through the Medicare and Medicaid programs...government outlays for Medicare and Medicaid to rise to 15% of GDP by 2040 from 6% now...The rising cost of medical treatments would not be such a large burden on future budgets if the government reduced its share in the financing of health services....no reason why limiting outlays on Medicare and Medicaid requires cutting health services for the rest of the population...misplaced medical egalitarianism.
...our tax rules lead to the wrong kind of insurance...not surprising that employers and employees have opted for very generous health insurance with very low copayment rates...evidence on health-care demand implies that the current tax rules raise private health-care spending by as much as 35%....eliminate the tax rule that is causing the excessive insurance...more cost-conscious behavior that would lower health-care spending...there are substantial differences in the priority that different people attach to health....The unions are particularly vehement in their opposition to any reduction in the tax subsidy for health insurance...political choice is between government rationing and continued high levels of health-care spending....rationing would be much worse than excessive care.
...Like virtually every economist I know, I believe the right approach to limiting health spending is by reforming the tax rules. But if that is not going to happen, let's not destroy the high quality of the best of American health care by government rationing and misplaced egalitarianism.

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