Negative Space: health care
- The Democrat’s anti-health health-care plan
- The new Kennedy health care plan supported by the Obama administration appears to be designed to reduce consumer choice and increase consumer costs.
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- Everybody gets $7,000 a year
- Charles Murray argues that we can vastly reduce the cost of the welfare system and social security simply by giving everyone $7,000 a year plus a health plan.
- Exchanging the market for high prices and corruption
- The Democratic health insurance exchange looks like it’s going to make many of the same mistakes politicians made in California when they tried to choke electrical power through a power exchange.
- Government food courts
- Imagine there’s no grocery… it isn’t hard to do… nothing to grill or fry for…… and no bacon too…
- Gravity-driven health care
- All government programs are market-driven, just like all government buildings are gravity-driven. We cannot escape the laws of nature simply by adding the word “government” to the beginning of a phrase.
- Health care for prisoners
- Our criminal justice system must account for the possibility that it is wrong. Decent health care is one of the most obvious ways it should do this.
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
- The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Health care the Chicago way
- You can’t fight the law of supply and demand. All you can do is increase the costs of compliance.
- June 2: Mitt Romney’s Day
- “Onward my brave Morons! Let this be known forever as Mitt Romney’s Day!”
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
- Phase 1: Reforming health care
- Our current health care system works so poorly we want to expand it: instead of a bunch of huge organizations vying for the attention of multiple employers, we’re going to have a few (at best) even bigger organizations vying for the attention of government bureaucrats. Why not come up with some reform that actually reforms?
- The precarious value of middlemen
- In a world of choice, a middleman must add value (lower prices, ease of delivery) in addition to their added costs (fewer choices, lower quality, etc.) But the costs are always there. Once a middleman is mandated, there is no longer any need to add value.
- Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence
- Paul von Zielbauer at the New York Times writes about the piss-poor health care available to prisoners.
- Removing any motive to help patients
- “Removing the profit motive” from health care removes the motive to help patients.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
- Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- S-CHIP redux
- Yeah, remember that? Both sides wanted to spend more. And yet their examples were all people who had insurance under the current system.
- San Francisco-style budgeting
- The health “reform” bill appears to be bringing San Francisco-style budgeting to Washington.
- Universal Health Care
- Should I quit my job and rely on public health care? Why do we rely on employers to provide something as important as our health care?
- When You’ve Got Health, You’ve Got Everything
- Freedom? Five bucks. Health? Five bucks. Inciteful Fiction? Free!
- Why we must not ration health care
- Rationing health care means fewer cures.
More Information
- Defensive Plaintiffs
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Dafydd again demonstrates why Big Lizards is on my blogroll. The effects of lawsuit mentality on health care costs:
“Doctors pay stunning premiums for malpractice insurance, in some cases more than $200,000 annually for physicians in certain specialties, such as obstetrics or anaesthesiology—and far more for hospitals—even for doctors and hospitals with excellent records.”
“Virtually every doctor and hospital is guaranteed to be sued several times in his career… no matter how good and careful a doctor he is. Several estimates have found that the cost of malpractice insurance alone is about 10% of the total cost of doctor and…
- Good Intentions Aren’t Enough with Health Care Reform
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The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.
However, the maximum fine for those who refuse to purchase health insurance is $750. The result: many people, especially the young and healthy, will simply not buy coverage, choosing to pay the fine instead. They’ll wait until they’re sick to buy health insurance, confident that insurance companies can’t deny…
