Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Any day now, the U.S. Supreme will rule on whether the
Obamacare insurance mandate is constitutional. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
How can forcing me to engage in commerce be constitutional?
But there's a deeper question: Why should government be
involved in medicine at all?
Right before President Obama took office, the media got
hysterical about health care. You heard the claims: America spends more than
any country -- $6,000 per person -- yet we get less. Americans die younger than
people in Japan and Western Europe. Millions of Americans lack health insurance
and worry about paying for care.
I have the solution! said Obama. Bigger government will
give us more choices and make health care cheaper and better. He proceeded to
give us that. Bigger government, that is. The cheaper/better/more choices part
-- not so much.
Costs have risen. More choices? No, we have fewer
choices. Many people lost coverage when companies left the market.
Because ObamaCare requires insurance companies to cover
every child regardless of pre-existing conditions, WellPoint, Humana and Cigna
got out of the child-only business. Principal Financial stopped offering health
insurance altogether -- 1 million customers no longer have the choice to keep
their insurance.
This is to be expected when governments control health
care. Since state funding makes medical services seem free, demand increases.
Governments deal with that by rationing. Advocates of government health care
hate the word "rationing" because it forces them to face an ugly
truth: Once you accept the idea that taxpayers pay, individual choice dies.
Someone else decides what treatment you get, and when.
At least in America, we still have some choice. We can
pay to get what we want. Under government health care, bureaucrats will decide
how long we wait for our knee operation or cataract surgery ... or if we get
lifesaving treatment at all.
When someone else pays for your health care, that someone
else also decides when to pull the plug. The reason can be found in Econ 101.
Medical care doesn't grow on trees. It must be produced by human and physical
capital, and those resources are limited. Politicians can't repeal supply and
demand.
Call them "death panels" or not, a government
that needs to cut costs will limit what it spends on health care, especially on
people nearing the end of life. Medical "ethicists" have long
lamented that too much money is spent in the last several months of life. Given
the premise that it's government's job to pay, it's only natural that some
bureaucrat will decide that 80-year-olds shouldn't get hip replacements.
True, surveys show that most Brits and Canadians like
their free health care. But Dr. David Gratzer notes that most people surveyed
aren't sick. Gratzer is a Canadian who also liked Canada's government health
care -- until he started treating patients.
More than a million Canadians say they can't find a
family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries to determine who gets to see one. In
Norwood, Ontario, my TV producer watched as the town clerk pulled four names
out of a big box and then telephoned the lucky winners. "Congratulations!
You get to see a doctor this month."
Think the wait in an American emergency room is bad? In
Canada, the average wait is 23 hours. Sometimes they can't even get heart
attack victims into the ICU.
That's where we're headed unless Obamacare is repealed.
But that's not nearly enough. Contrary to what some Republicans say, we didn't
have a free medical market before Obama came to power. We had a system that
limited competition through occupational licensing, FDA rules and other
government intrusions, while stimulating demand through tax-favored
employer-based "insurance," Medicare and Medicaid.
If we want affordable and cutting-edge health care,
there's only one approach that will work: open competition. That means
eliminating both bureaucratic obstacles and corporate privileges. Only free markets
can give us innovation at the lowest possible cost.
Of course, that also means consumers should spend their
own money on health care, limiting insurance to catastrophic expenses.
Americans don't want to hear it. But that's the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment