{"id":387,"date":"2009-01-09T06:59:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T14:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=387"},"modified":"2009-01-15T08:52:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T16:52:00","slug":"poisoning-our-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/poisoning-our-health-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Poisoning our health care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, the Commonwealth Fund report was summarized under the headline “Health care overhaul needn’t break bank:\u00a0 study.<\/a>”\u00a0 OK.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course health care overhaul doesn’t need<\/em> to break the bank.\u00a0 Private sector firms overhaul their operations all the time, and it usually leads to some combination of improved service or lower costs.\u00a0 But the government is not a private sector entity.\u00a0 Social Security didn’t need<\/em> to break the bank, but it has, several times.\u00a0 After two major overhauls, it’s liabilities still exceed its assets by nearly $9 trillion.\u00a0 We can’t even count that high on every finger and toe of every human that has ever lived.\u00a0 Medicare didn’t need<\/em> to break the bank, yet it’s liabilities now exceed its assets by over $31 trillion.<\/p>\n

If a company kept promising viable businesses, and kept going bankrupt, what weight would an economist accord to the idea that its next business idea did not need<\/em> to go bankrupt?<\/p>\n

The Federal government, of course, is not bankrupt yet.\u00a0 Unlike a bad business, the government can continue to take money from it’s “customers” by bundling bad businesses with social necessities, such as law and order.\u00a0 The government can take away our choice about which services we wish to pay for from this bundle and, in an increasing number of cases, which services we wish to use.\u00a0 If a private company had that kind of power, what would be the odds that it would even try to run its business efficiently?\u00a0 But such considerations are credulously left out of the assessment that a huge new government program “doesn’t need to break the bank.”<\/p>\n

The worst part of this study, proffered by a supposedly economically sophisticated firm, is not even its ignorance of public choice<\/a> constraints, but that it’s just bad economics.\u00a0 It’s not an economic analysis to say that if John pays Karen $90 instead of $100, then Karen will continue to offer the same benefit to John in the future.\u00a0 No health care proposal is complete, or even meaningful, without addressing all three major health care trade-offs:\u00a0 accessibility, cost, and quality.<\/p>\n

The Commonwealth Fund’s report only addresses the trade-off between cost and access.\u00a0 The impact on quality is ignored.\u00a0 Personally, I would like to think that cancer treatments will be better as I get older, rather than the same or worse than now.\u00a0 That will almost certainly not be the case when the world’s last bastion of innovation is throttled by mandates that increase access without raising costs.\u00a0 The laws of economics are not subject to legislative amendment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, the Commonwealth Fund report was summarized under the headline “Health care overhaul needn’t break bank:\u00a0 study.”\u00a0 OK. Of course health care overhaul doesn’t need to break the bank.\u00a0 Private sector firms overhaul their operations all the time, and it usually leads to some combination of improved service or lower costs.\u00a0 But the government is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":410,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions\/410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}