Oregon Health Plan Denies Chemo Medicine

Happy Monday! This is a sad and sorry video; coming to an America of the future if we get ObamaCare.

On Life Expectancy

Another Democratic talking point challenged; this time its the low U.S. life expectancy myth that supporters of ObamaCare continuously parrot. From Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho:

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.

Read the entire paper here.

HT: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution

Do we really need this?

A "Fannie Mae" of Health Care?

Words of economic wisdom from Nancy Pelosi

From the WSJ:

Blue Dogs who are dragged into Speaker Pelosi’s office should be aware of just how she is selling the health care bill. Yesterday, she told supporters it represented “real change,” because it meant “a cap on your [health care] costs, but no cap on your benefit.”

Yup. This is the kind of ass-backwards economics that is driving health care "reform" by Democrats. Doesn't Pelosi understand that what she is proposing is simply economically untenable? Apparently not. Here's a video of Ms. Pelosi selling her brand of economics.

Health Care - Canadian Style

Yes, I know that Democrats and the White House are not proposing universal health care like in Canada. But the Canadian system started small and it eventually crowded out any semblance of the free market.

A Bill To Force Congress To Sign Up For ObamaCare

It really is telling when Senate Democrats voted against requiring all members and their staffs to enroll in any new government-run health plan. That's right. It's not good enough for them but fine for the great unwashed. Even Mr. Socialist, Bernie Sanders, wouldn't sign himself up for the government-run health plan. Only brain addled liberals would support this ponzi scheme.

Libertarians Discuss Health Care On National T.V.

Penn Jillete, John Stossel, and Glenn Beck discuss health care reform. Good stuff.

Single Payer health care Does Not Mean less Bankruptcies

E. Frank Stephenson over at Division of Labor notes the following: Single payer health care advocates have been claiming for some time now that a single payer health care system prevents bankruptcies due to medical expenses. A new study by the Fraser Institute (A Canadian think tank) finds that this claim is false. Bankruptcy rates are higher in Canada even though Canadians don't have to fret over medical expenses.

Walmart and The Noose Of National Health Care

If you haven't heard the news about Walmart and it's surrender to a national health care scheme, here it is. The best analysis of this whole sorry business comes from Megan McArdle at the Atlantic:

I find it hard to believe that none of the liberal commentators breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart's "capitulation" on national health care have even entertained the most parsimonious explanation: that Wal-Mart is in favor of this because it raises the barriers to entry in the retail market, and hammers Wal-Mart's competition. Yet somehow, this appears nowhere in any of the analysis...

On the other side, there is regulatory capture. Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation's largest private employer. Target and Macy's probably won't have a seat at the table. So Wal-Mart can influence the rules in ways that benefit Wal-Mart at the expense of the competition. This is partly because the regulators often cycle into jobs at the firms they regulate, but also simply because the regulator's attention is finite, so being consistently at the table allows you to shape their views over time. Again, this isn't some kind of crazy right-wing analysis; regulatory capture was first diagnosed by a Marxist historian named Gabriel Kolko.

Walmart has pulled one of the oldest tricks in the book and it has positioned itself rather nicely to beat down competitors with nary a liberal backlash. Once again we see how a government scheme tilts the playing field in favor of big business. I don't fault Walmart for their tactic. In fact, I think that its the most rational approach to a federal government that is threatening to create a frightful business environment.

Massachusetts State Sponsored Health Care is a FLOP!

You won't find this story readily available in the mainstream media:

Only 26 percent of likely voters in Massachusetts believe health care reform has been a success and just 21 percent believe reform has made health care more affordable, according to newly released poll results. The Rasmussen Reports poll of 500 likely Massachusetts voters, taken in April, also found only 10 percent said the quality of health care is getting better under the reform law rules here.

For more read Rasmussen Reports.

Ron Paul on Health Care

The man was a doctor, people!

HT: Liberty Pen

Milton Friedman--Socialized Medicine

HT: Liberty Pen

Competing With The Government

Cato's Michael Cannon on what the public health care option would do to the private health care market:

The Art of Spin In The Health Care Debate

Last week I decided to challenge a liberal blogger on some assertions he made regarding a survey he posted on his blog. The survey compared Medicare and private insurance providers; it measured how satisfied enrollees' were with their plans. I immediately noticed that the survey was conducted by The Commonwealth Fund, a group that strongly advocates the expansion of Medicare and that the conclusions of the survey were misleading. Essentially by comparing Medicare to a basket of private insurance companies The Commonwealth Fund had pulled a little statistical trick--by comparing all manner of private insurance companies--the good, the average, the bad, they had essentially kept the average scores for the private insurance company much lower than if they had taken the best insurance company scores and compared it to Medicare. My rationale is that if you are going to advocate that Medicare is the best public option than it should be measured against the best private option. Needless to say, my criticisms of The Commonwealth Fund’s tactics were not happily received. My last post was deleted from the site by its owner, a fellow that didn't understand what "rationing" means in economics and yet claimed that he was an adherent of Austrian economics many years ago. But worst of all, if you read his responses to my comments, this is a man who is the true embodiment of a technocrat; a person that believes in the soundness of bureaucratic systems and the technicians that run them. If we do get Obama Care, I expect just this sort to make decisions for the rest of us. And we will all be much maligned indeed as our economy is dragged down by the balloning cost of a massive public health care plan.

Socialized Medical Slaughter

From Copious Dissent.

Health care in Canada

Here is another short film by Stuart Browning on Health Care in Canada. All of his clips are worth watching (YouTube) even if you don’t agree with his argument. I think that we really need to have a sober discussion on health care before we leap onto what seems like an easy solution.

Universal Healthcare Pitfalls.

You better hope that you don't need brain surgery in Canada. It seems that universal health care in Canada isn't a panacea. Why do we want it here again?

Who is REALLY uninsured in America?

Some more stuff that Michael Moore's movie forgot to include. When liberal Democrats say 45-48 million uninsured they are not giving you the full story.

One More Problem With National Healthcare.

From The Christian Science Monitor

“Healthcare expenditures in the US rose 6.7 percent in 2006 to $2.1 trillion, or 16.1 percent of the nation's total output of goods and services, government economists reported last month. (Last week, the government predicted the nation's healthcare expenditures will reach $4 trillion by 2017.) Most other rich industrial nations, with universal care, spend only 11 to 12 percent of their gross domestic product on healthcare. Canada spends even less, a bit more than 9 percent of GDP, on a single-payer government insurance system for all its people.”

“US health costs have doubled in the past decade. Yet nearly 48 million Americans have no health insurance.”

Comment: Those individuals that wax poetically about the myriad benefits of universal health care seem to be missing a key fiscal issue that looms large in our national future: As baby boomers start to retire en masse, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries will go from four to one to roughly two to one. The shock to future tax revenue should be cause for some alarm if not rapid action.

Currently, Medicare and Medicaid federal spending is larger that what we spend on national defense. And it is a sure bet that medical costs will continue to rise faster than the rate of inflation. The portion of the federal budget allocated as an entitlement for seniors and the poor as medical care will become a larger percentage of our GDP: According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending will essentially double from 2007 levels in 10 years and Medicaid spending will nearly do the same. Both programs will consume 12 percent of GDP by 2030. (See CBO study here.)

Now, knowing that we have a looming fiscal storm looming on the horizon, does it make sense to call for a national health care plan right about now? If we provided health care for everybody in this country, we would expand the federal expenditure to health care far beyond our current and future revenues from tax receipts. We would have to raise taxes so high to cover future expenses that it would surely be a detriment to our economy. Any purported savings that is usually mentioned by universal healthcare advocates from having national health care would hardly matter in an economy that was hamstrung by extremely high taxes.

The true cost of a national health care plan has not really been brought to light this election year. We keep hearing populist rhetoric as presidential candidates try to garner votes from a public that wants easy and quick answers. Most people just want the surface details but none of the dirty underlying economic facts. Too complicated, too many graphs and besides government built the highways and sent a man to the moon. And as usual, we may end up with the government bureaucracy and all of the nasty cost we deserve.

What "Sicko" didn't show you.