Congrats USA! Health care for all!! ??

By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, July 19, 2010

If you want a preview of President Obama's health-care "reform," take a look at Massachusetts. In 2006, it enacted a "reform" that became a model for Obama. What's happened since isn't encouraging. The state did the easy part: expanding state-subsidized insurance coverage. It evaded the hard part: controlling costs and ensuring that spending improves people's health. Unfortunately, Obama has done the same.
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Similar forces will define Obamacare. Even if its modest measures to restrain costs succeed -- which seems unlikely -- the effect on overall spending would be slight. The system's fundamental incentives won't change. The lesson from Massachusetts is that genuine cost control is avoided because it's so politically difficult. It means curbing the incomes of doctors, hospitals and other providers. They object. To encourage "accountable care organizations" would limit consumer choice of doctors and hospitals. That's unpopular. Spending restrictions, whether imposed by regulation or "global payments," raise the specter of essential care denied. Also unpopular.

Obama dodged the tough issues in favor of grandstanding. Imitating Patrick, he's already denouncing insurers' rates, as if that would solve the spending problem. What's occurring in Massachusetts is the plausible future: Unchecked health spending shapes government priorities and inflates budget deficits and taxes, with small health gains. And they call this "reform"?

Tort reform could save $54 billion, Congressional Budget Office Says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Congressional Budget Office is now estimating that limits on medical malpractice lawsuits -- reforms favored by many Republicans -- could save the government as much as $54 billion over the next 10 years.


The government spends about $2.5 trillion on health care every year.

The Democrats’ “historic achievement,” shocking as it seems, turns out to be an expensive, jobs-crippling monstrosity that is filled with unintended consequences. Employers are likely to dump employees into highly subsidized exchanges. It’s not going to bend the cost curve. And today, the Associated Press reports:

President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.
The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.
Up to 3 million people could qualify for Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the anomaly. That’s because, in a major change from today, most of their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income for determining eligibility.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s communications director e-mailed me in response to this report, “Nearly every week we find a new reason to say ‘repeal and replace.’ ”

To understand how a major piece of legislation could be so badly crafted one only has to recall the mad dash to jam it through Congress. The point was to get something, anything in there to take root. Unfortunately, it is already rotting from within. As the AP observes, the administration isn’t even claiming this one is an error: “Indeed, administration officials and senior Democratic lawmakers say it’s not a loophole but the result of a well-meaning effort to simplify rules for deciding who will get help with insurance costs under the new health care law. Instead of a hodgepodge of rules, there will be one national policy.” Perhaps if lawmakers knew what they were voting for this would have been fixed.

Still, one can’t help but think that the administration and Democratic Congress didn’t have a firm grasp of some basics in our existing health-care system. James Capretta, for example, responds to The Post’s Ezra Klein, who repeats some standard liberal tropes. Capretta explains that in criticizing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) Medicare reform plan, liberals seem to be confused about the highly successful Medicare Part D plan, which provided a model of a popular, market-oriented and subsidized health-care plan that came in under budget.

As to Klein’s claim that a downturn in drug expenditures was responsible for cost reductions, not Medicare Part D, Capretta replies, “Part D plans have aggressively pushed generic substitution as a way to lower premiums — and they have had considerable success. Isn’t it likely that this trend among the elderly has influenced how physicians and pharmacists behave with all their patients? In sum, the drop in drug spending systemwide is not evidence of Part D’s irrelevance. Indeed, it reinforces the point that Part D has been effective.” Put differently, it provides evidence for conservatives’ premise that shifting cost to the recipient reduces excess usage. This concept remains a foreign one to the left.

Likewise, Capretta responds to a second assertion: “Klein cites estimates from the CMS actuaries to argue that, even if Part D cost escalation has been moderate in the past, it is set to rise sharply in the future. But he fails to mention that a main reason for projected cost growth going forward is that Obamacare expanded the drug benefit by closing the so-called ‘doughnut hole.’ Moreover, the actuaries have noted that these projections come with great uncertainty. What we do know with certainty is that costs in the program’s first five years have come in remarkably low.”

And finally, Capretta confronts a misrepresentation head on: “Klein argues that Medicare beneficiaries are paying premiums in 2011 that are 57 percent higher than they were in 2006. This is demonstrably false. The data Klein cites are based on a subset of the program — the stand-alone drug plans — which means Medicare.”

If this issue is any indiction, we have a clue as to how Obamacare got so screwed up. Those who drafted and now tout it have a shaky understanding of how markets operate and a built-in preference for top-down management. But it turns out that millions of people making individual health-care decisions are a lot smarter than the bureaucrats who constructed such a massive structure that no one can be expected to understand it and its consequences. Who knew?

Man robs bank for $1 hoping to get healthcare in jail:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/21/benzinga1188971.DTL

America: where you need to be rich, enslaved by an employer, or a criminal to get affordable healthcare. I don't think it is going to get any better soon.

He's got lots of doctors, all right. No medicine or equipment, but lots of doctors. Maybe Raul and Fidel's doctors have medicine, I don't know.

The Cuban government operates a national health system and assumes fiscal and administrative responsibility for the health care of all its citizens.[1] There are no private hospitals or clinics as all health services are government-run. The present Minister for Public Health is José Ramón Balaguer.
An overall worsening in terms of disease and infant mortality rates was observed in the 1960s, but recovery occurred by the 1980s.[2] Things have since improved considerably. AIDS is only one-sixth as common on a per-capita basis as in the United States.[3] Like the rest of the Cuban economy, Cuban medical care suffered following the end of Soviet subsidies in 1991; the stepping up of the US embargo against Cuba at this time also had an effect.[4] Cuba has one of the highest life expectancy rates in the region, with the average citizen living to 77.64 years old[3] (just under the United States' 78.11 years[5])

Health care spending per person per annumn:
Cuba $251;
UK $2,389;
US $5,711

The report found health care costs will average $8,160 this year for every man, woman and child, an increase of $356 per person from last year.
Meanwhile, the number of uninsured has risen to about 48 million, according to a new estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The government statisticians estimated that health costs will reach $13,100 per person in 2018, accounting for $1 out of every $5 spent in the economy.

they work for Target and qualify for food stamps.

Interviews with 10 of the store’s employees suggest that an important issue behind the unionization drive is frustration about being assigned too few hours of work, sometimes just one or two days a week.

Retailers are increasingly assigning such short workweeks as they seek to build an extensive roster of workers to fill their ever-changing scheduling needs. But some Target workers say that means they are offered too few hours to qualify for the company’s health plan.

Ms. Williams, who receives $200 a month in food stamps to help her and her 18-year-old son, complained that she was often assigned just three days of work each week, down from full time when she started nearly nine years ago.