The Republican Proposals Versus Obama Care

GUEST COMMENT
Mookie March 22nd, 2010 1:35 pm
What Republican plans? The absolutely only thing Republicans harped on was tort reform. Yeh, let's let the existing poor health care system in the United States continue to kill 200,000 a year through malpractice and unclean medical care.

No one who thinks Republicans are worth a frack is worth listening to.

UNITY PROGRESS
Laugh out loud, I don't agree with Republicans very often and I suppose I am playing the novelty of the moment for all it's worth, but I do agree with them regarding how bad Obama Care is. I mean, it may never happen again so I have to enjoy the novelty of it now.

Seriously though, if you want specifics, the Republicans' allowance of interstate health insurance purchasing and their proposal for allowance of a very low cost but limited insurance policy, useful for full out health/financial catastrophes only, are economically well grounded proposals within the context of the current bad system and would slightly (or marginally if you prefer) improve it.

Although a few Republican ideas were included in the thousands of pages of new laws, I do not believe the two I just mentioned, which were among their best, were included. If I were a Republican economist (laugh out loud at the thought) I would know enough to be able to tell you definitively whether or not it is generally true that the best or at least the biggest Republican ideas were not included while the lesser and not so good ones were included. But I do suspect this is true.

Moreover, the mandate is so extremely regressive that the mere absence of it in the Republican proposals means that they are much more progressive than Obama Care (or much less regressive, to put it more accurately).

So of course I stand by my rankings. Technically the Republican proposals are more progressive than Obama Care despite the fact they are still overall quite regressive by world standards and doomed to eventual total failure as is Obama Care. And then we don’t know whether the Republicans would actually vote for them or whether they are just for public relations.

The truth is neither the Republican plans nor Obama Care are really worth even discussing if your objective is a truly good working system. No serious person in most other countries of the world who had any say in system design would take either very seriously. On my ranking scale, the Chinese system is much better than the Republican modifications of the US status quo while the distance between the Republican proposals and Obama Care is less than that.

The issue of Republican proposals versus Obama Care is only a side issue by world standards and amounts to just a matter of deciding which would be better among two very bad health systems. But for the record, the Republican system would be a little better than Obama Care if both economics and health care are taken into account. If ONLY health care is taken into account without regard to costs and economics, I suppose Obama Care is better than Republican proposals. But only in Wonderland can you support one health system over another while totally ignoring costs and economics, especially in the current context of labor market collapse.

The above was in response to this article.

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Obama Care: A new low in Health Care Systems; A Very bad System Gets Even Worse

Just to make sure everyone who visits here understands exactly where this Site is coming from, here, based on tried and true economics and health care theory, is a rank order of health care systems from best to worst:

1. Single Payer with insurance companies eliminated for everything except for luxury types of care intended for rich people. (For example, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Canada.)

2. Modified or indirect Single Payer with people required to sign up with a heavily regulated but technically private insurance company. The company "selling" the insurance at the bequest of the government is strictly not allowed to make a profit on the insurance package that the government requires people to buy: they get reasonable costs only. Moreover, low income people pay only token amounts or nothing (beyond anything they already pay in other taxation) since the subsidies are huge and are much larger relative to income than proposed American subsidies for people to buy grossly expensive private US policies. (Examples of countries that most closely represent this system would be Switzerland and The Netherlands.)

3. The (mainland) Chinese Plan (a work in progress): heavy subsidies of community based health providers and other various interventions, provisions, and system organization plans to keep health care prices low enough for most people in diverse situations to afford. Note that at least for most people in China, for profit health care insurance is a totally foreign concept. Due to not being tied down to the concept of for-profit insurance (which fails for health care) the Chinese in effect get a big head start in their quest to design a good system for their country with its gigantic population.

4. Various Republican plans existing in 2009 and 2010 to modify and slightly improve the status quo.

5. The U.S. status quo as of March 21, 2010 (outside Massachusetts which already had drunk the kool-aid). There were actually progressive features in the status quo, backdoor as they were. Most notably, you had a small ( much smaller than claimed by the Democrats, however) subsidy of poor people lacking insurance by those with it, brought about by the 1986 Act which mandates that those without insurance be treated in emergency rooms of hospitals. Technically this backdoor progressive subsidy will apparently continue on, although now the amount will be even smaller than before.

6. Obama Care.

Yes it’s true; Obama Care is virtually the worst possible system and represents a new low in humanities’ efforts in the area. It not only maintains but reinforces and gives new official backing to all of the bad elements of the existing system and also makes things worse in many ways, for example, by subsidizing items that are drowning not only the health care system but the economy as a whole, particularly health insurance. When you subsidize something you raise the cost of it. It has been downright amusing to see Democrats claim that health insurance prices will be restrained or even go down going forward when roughly 15 million new people (a good number of them sicker than dogs) suddenly buy the product. (Do Democrats never take any economics courses?)

In other words, the Democrats’ new system digs the hole deeper cost wise and sooner or later health care wise as well. And now the hole is deeper still because now the new authoritarianism in the US system is unprecedented among such systems.

The Americans' refusal to follow the rest of the world into a single payer approach (and to end their unhealthy obsession with for-profit health insurance) has caused them to end up very, very deep in the health care hole indeed. They now have:

--By far the most expensive system

--By far the most unfair system

--By far the most dysfunctional system (many get care they don't really need and many more don't get care they really do need.)

--By far the most authoritarian and regressive system: the system with the least freedom, the most needless bureaucracy, and the most regressivity.

The last one is added into the toxic mix by Obama Care. How ironic is it that the country that supposedly has the most people obsessed with freedom from authoritarian, heavy handed government now has the most authoritarian health care system among advanced countries? Very ironic indeed.

Laugh out loud. They always say truth is stranger than fiction. Indeed, I couldn’t with a straight face have written a fiction book about how the Americans would make their health system even worse after having an election driven by fear of massive unemployment. I would have laughed myself out of the room at the thought of writing such a work of fiction (but it would now be fact, so laugh out loud.)

And I told you the Americans will never get health care right. I guess hell will freeze over before they get it right. The same would appear to be true about unemployment (despite the motivations of voters in the most recent presidential election): hell will freeze over before the Americans take real action to get unemployment down now and keep unemployment in check in the future.

READING LIST
The Health Care Hindenberg has Landed

The Hindenberg has landed indeed (a very sharp analogy). I can't wait until it blows up. And I have a folder ready for downloading 2010, 2012, and 2014 concession speeches of Democrats who voted for this and then lose their re-election. This folder will hopefully include Obama's 2012 concession speech.

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The “pages” currently are:

--Health System News
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The first four are mostly links to the latest news, commentary, and research on the health front. The Penalties and Enforcement page will be custom designed by Unity Progress and will be a vital and unique consumer aid for those facing the authoritarian ravages of Obama Care. Here the penalties and the enforcement will be objectively and in detail explained. Commentary and context about the penalties and enforcement will continue to appear in various postings on the main page.

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