Assumptions are the heart of government health care plans. Assumptions that standardizing treatments will lead to lower costs, assumptions that electronic medical records will lower costs, that preventive care will lower costs. It goes on and on as Democrats and Health Care Experts assure us they have a better way of doing things. In reality these cost saving measures may not come to pass and the Times this morning has an article on the only state that actually put a health care program into place, Massachusetts.
In any effort to restructure American health care, two interconnected goals inevitably compete for primacy. One is providing health coverage to the uninsured, counted in 2007 at 46 million, or 15 percent of the population, and almost certainly more now. The other is slowing the relentless and unsustainable growth of health costs, which threaten virtually every family, in imagination if not in fact.
For starters many of the people without health insurance choose not to have it. Now this is a difficult thing since if they get hurt we as the taxpayer can end up paying the bill. These so called invincibles have often made a rational economic choice. I am young and in good health and its worth the savings by not paying for insurance.
Now the President has allegedly said costs must be contained as part of covering everyone, but remember this is Obama, when he says something your just as likely to get the opposite. In Massachusetts they decided cover first pay later with predictable results:
But there is only one real-life model in this country for the kind of sweeping change being considered in Washington, and that is in Massachusetts, where a landmark law signed in April 2006 has achieved near-universal coverage. And in that state, leaders decided from the outset to decouple access and cost, and to deal first with covering the uninsured.
Predictably, rising costs now threaten the viability of the Massachusetts plan, leaving Gov. Deval Patrick and his Legislature to play catch-up. Mr. Patrick has warned he might try to regulate insurance premiums if insurers and hospitals do not demonstrate self-discipline. And lawmakers are awaiting recommendations from a state commission charged with reinventing the payment system so doctors and hospitals are rewarded for preventive care rather than the quantity of treatment they provide.
The most laughable part of this?
Yet, even now, the lawmakers and strategists behind the Massachusetts plan strongly defend their incremental approach. Only by deferring the big decisions on cost containment, they said in recent interviews, was it possible to build a consensus among doctors, hospitals, insurers, consumers, employers and workers for the requirement that all residents have health insurance.
The coalition held last year, when Mr. Patrick and the Legislature spread the pain in filling a deficit in the state’s new subsidized insurance program. It will now be more seriously tested by attempts to change the payment system, but the gamble is that stakeholders are now so invested they cannot back away.
Get that, hook people into the system and they get can't away, which means government has people over the barrel. Imagine that on a Federal level. So what happens now? The Democrats and Obama are desperate for health care "reform" and the insurance companies are willing to strike a deal to prevent a full government takeover, the result:
Although health reformers in Massachusetts acknowledge that the fiscal and political landscape in Washington is profoundly different, there is broad agreement among them about the importance of mandating coverage for adults. That provision is supported on the federal level by Democratic leaders like Senators Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who leads the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.The insurance lobby has said that if Washington required coverage for all, it would end the practice of denying coverage to those with pre-existing health conditions. To sweeten the pot, major insurers announced last week they also would be willing to not base premiums on a patient’s health status.
In a nutshell the invincible would be forced into programs and insurance companies would use the extra profit to open up their programs to people who will most likely increase their costs. By the way how would you force people to sign up for insurance? If I remember correctly Obama attacked Clinton for threatening to garnish the wages of people who didn't sign up, would Obama break a campaign pledge?
Oh and by the way Massachusetts did end up with waiting lists:
AMHERST, Mass. — Once they discover that she is Dr. Kate, the supplicants line up to approach at dinner parties and ballet recitals. Surely, they suggest to Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson, a family physician here, she might find a way to move them up her lengthy waiting list for new patients.
Of course the politicians, the wealthy, and the elite will not be on a waiting list, but the middle and working class will. Now the greatest assumption of all, what if people don't want to be doctors because the government has taken away the incentive to endure the troubles of medical school and residency, what happens then?
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