Rich Karlgaard has a short explanation of our health care problems.
“This is how President Obama should start a speech on health care — "My fellow Americans: We are old. We are fat. We are afraid of lawyers."
Each contributes to higher spending on health care.
I love this headline from a blog post at The Insider, a site published by The Heritage Foundation: "The Power to Make People Buy Stuff Is Not in the Constitution." It’s about the individual mandate to buy insurance.
(Cross-posted from State House Call.)
It’s easy to forget that health and health care are two different things, though they do affect each other. Personal choices make a difference in the quality of a person’s health.
“Americans make a number of lifestyle choices that lead to a greater proportion of babies being born with a low birth weight,” which increases the chances of infant mortality. Even so, “the United States actually has a lower infant mortality rate for low-birth weight babies than does Canada.”
For the Christian, “love thy neighbor” is right up there with “love the Lord thy God.” Should that compel the Christian to lobby for a health care industry that’s heavily regulated if not controlled by government?
Not so fast, says Rev. Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty.
Something called the League of American Voters says that it wants to purchase advertising time on ABC for a thirty-second spot, but was denied. They call it a “brazen act of censorship.” That’s a bit overwrought — I prefer to call it “editorial discretion,” since “censorship,” strictly speaking, is something that governments do.
The Georgia Public Policy Foundation says that the Congress could learn from Georgia’s example:
For more, see the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.
(Cross-posted from State House Call.)
Eric Davis of the Nevada Policy Research Institute reminds us of one of the bizarre features of health care today: We rarely know how much something will cost ahead of time. As if we needed another example of how the health care industry needs a shake-up.
Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) argues an obvious but important point: Medical malpractice reform is nowhere in the national debate on health care, and it should be.
Perry offers up his own state as an example of the problems caused by medical lawsuits, and what a state might do about it.
You know the expression about taking something with a grain of salt? When it comes to advocates of new government health programs making estimates of how much their dreams will cost, you might want to find the Sam’s Club-sized version.
Mitch Pearlstein, president of the Center of the American Experiment, dusted off an Op-Ed he wrote during the days of debates over HillaryCare, the the insights are still instructive.
The Caesar Rodney Institute says that in the health reform debate, we should ask “If Americans were starting from scratch with establishing a health care insurance framework in America, what would we want?”
It’s not that we can actually start from scratch, the institute says. But rather, it focuses the mind.
Geoffrey Lawrence, a policy analyst with the Nevada Policy Research Institute, discusses the public option in this video:
Lawrence focuses on concerns over cost-shifting and the fact that even without a new government program to compete with private companies, legislative proposals favored by leaders in Congress are “detestable on their own mandates.”
Michigan residents are more familiar than many Americans with the downfalls of Canada’s government-run health care system.
That’s because so many Canadians come here to receive life-saving care when the wait lists in the country’s socialized medical system constitute a serious threat to their lives or quality of life.
Health care “coverage” isn’t the same as actually getting health care. Case in point: The Oregon health plan denied a cancer patient’s request for a new prescription drug — but was willing to pay a doctor to help her commit suicide.
You can watch a short video from a local TV newscast, which features the patient herself, as well as the head of the rationing board.
CalPERS, the retirement system for California state employees, wants Congress to do something about rising insurance costs. It complains that insurance premiums it pays for its employees, their dependents and retirees has increased 60 percent since 2003.
Yet more proof that the “free market” in health insurance is anything but free. A South Dakota insurer is merging with a company in North Dakota. It would like to offer insurance in North Dakota.
But first, Sanford Health needs to wait at least two months for the North Dakota insurance department to review its application.
One argument in the health care debate is that we simply must require everyone to have health insurance, otherwise, those of us who do have insurance will pay more.
So how has that worked out in the one state that has actually done that?
Hasn’t the state at least kept the rate of increase under control? Consider this: Nationwide, premiums increased 33 percent between 2003 and 2008. In the Bay State, they increased 40 percent.
Though this site focuses on responding to and commenting on news relating to health reform, sometimes it’s useful to return to some basic principles. To that end, let me direct you to a useful publication by the National Center for Policy Analysis, called "State Health Care Reform: Key Questions and Answers."
Very few people live in employer-sponsored housing or eat from employer-sponsored grocery stores, yet a majority of people get employer-sponsored health insurance. That means that losing a job is a double whammy.
The National Center for Policy Analysis offers 10 ways to keep health coverage if you lose your job.
As some Americans remain swept up in the attempt to further socialize health care, it’s helpful to remember that excitement about a proposed sweeping change to the system is not a new phenomenon.
(h/t to Don Boudreaux for the quote)
We need to remember that there is no perfect system in health care, and ObamaCare is no exception. The pros and cons of every system need to be thoroughly studied and debated. This is one of the many reasons Americans are demanding that legislators read the health care reform bills before voting on them.
A number of legislators have introduced bills to amend their states’ constitutions with the goal of preserving health freedom. The bills typically include language that does the following:
The states represented so far include:
The Arizona measure will be on the general election ballot in 2010; the Florida resolution has been prefiled in advance of the 2010 session, the Michigan resolution was filed just this week and the Minnesota resolution was carried over from the 2009 to the 2010 session.
Recently the North Dakota Policy Council held an open meeting on health care reform. Now the council has put a video of the event online.
It features ideas for making health and health insurance more affordable, and lessons from states that have enacted “universal” care.
Are your tax dollars and charitable donations being used to stump for a government takeover of health care?
The Deseret News has an article about how the health care debate is playing out in Utah. It mentions that “Judi Hilman, executive director of the Utah Health Policy Project,” became the de facto defender of federal reform proposals during the meeting.”
Timely Medical Alternatives is a company set up to expedite the treatment of patients on wait lists in Canada’s health care system. By helping Canadians access private medical care in the United States or Quebec (where the government monopoly on health insurance was found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), Timely Medical Alternatives can provide their clients “with options, referrals to hospitals, clinics and diagnostic imaging facilities.”
In today’s Detroit Free Press, columnist Brian Dickerson bemoans the fact that health insurance reimburses individuals for health care on the same terms regardless of whether they adopt healthy or unhealthy lifestyles:
Welcome, Brian, to the world of skewed incentives that dominates the current health care market — all the product of various government regulations and impositions. In this case:
On July 28, Jon Caldara, late-night talk radio host on Denver’s KOA AM850, spoke at a rally for health care freedom called “Hands Off My Health Care.”
Here’s the video:
Caldara asks, “What’s the rush?” and then encourages the crowd to demand that members of Congress “read the bill.”
