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The Truth About SwedenCareLink to The Ludwig von Mises Institute

07/10/13 - Klaus Bernpaintner [edited]

Free healthcare in Sweden was intended only for the poor and supposedly would not affect the practices of existing providers.

When government offered a free alternative, many left their private doctor in favor of the free services. The public system had to be expanded, and private doctors lost patients. Private doctors were forced to take employment within the public system or leave

the profession. The result is a public healthcare monolith.

Are there economies of scale? If so, they are dwarfed by the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy that grew to manage the system.

Very few private practices remain. Most of those are part of the national insurance system. A huge bureaucracy has been erected to take on all the necessary central planning of public and pseudo-private healthcare.

 

Company Paid Health Insurance is Part of Your SalaryMore at EasyOpinions

People are already personally paying for their "employer-paid" insurance. They don't buy it directly so (1) it doesn't attach to them when they change jobs, (2) and they can't shop for the insurance they might want.

Healthcare is now tax-free when purchased indirectly as an employment benefit, but mostly taxable through personal insurance or when purchased directly.

Untangle the tax mess, remove employers from the middle, and salaries would go up in the amount of the "free" healthcare benefit through employers. Then people would have enough take-home pay to buy their own health insurance. That is what healthcare reform should be all about.

Most people already pay for their health insurance, but currently have little choice about what they buy. True reform could put that money and choice into their hands. (M)08/26/12 - AdamSmith.org
If your employer provides to you $6,000 of health care insurance, then you don't get $6,000 of wages. No free lunch.

Quip

Government is the ideal director of medicine. Politicians are thoughtful, caring, and altruistic. They devote their lives to helping others.

Contrast this to physicians, who spend half their lives learning diagnosis and complex, delicate procedures, with the intent of charging sick people for these services.

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Romney/Obama CareLink to Cato at Liberty

Democrat Timothy Cahill was Massachusett's State Treasurer:

[edited] Implementing the MA health insurance reform nationwide will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years.

Our experiment has nearly bankrupted MA. Only federal aid is sustaining our law. We’re being propped up so that Obama can drive a similar plan through Congress.

 

Regulatory ExplosionLink. Professor Cochrane is on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

John Cochrane - 11/07/12 [edited]

New regulation will be the big story. ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank (financial) are not specific, but are mostly authorizations such as "the secretary shall write rules governing xyz" with a timetable that starts today. A metastatic expansion of regulation is already mandated and pending.

New EPA regulations will cost hundreds of billions per year. I'm all for clean air, but there is a question of just how clean and at what cost. A funny (for non-farmers) example is limits on Farm Methane Emissions (cow farts). [See the list]

Obamacare unfolds in the next four years: Medicaid expansion, Exchanges, the insurance mandate, preexisting conditions, and "accountable care organizations”.

Dodd-Frank requires hundreds of rules. Just the three days Dec 31 - Jan 2 requires nine final rules to be published.

Who knows what this means? Certainly, hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. Industries, lawyers, and lobbyists are furiously helping to write all these rules.

We are sitting on a debt bomb. A few warned in 2004 that the huge mortgage debt could default, damaging the banks. Remember how that worked out?

That is our situation now with government debt. Who is now holding 10-30 year treasuries at slightly negative real rates of interest, bearing the risk of increased inflation and interest rates? Not me.

I really, really hope I'm wrong.

 

Under AttackLink to DiploMad

09/17/12 - DiploMad [edited]

The Obamistas are caught in a web of lies. Yes, lies. There is no other word.

If the attack in Benghazi were just a "spontaneous" eruption in response to a 14-minute video clip, then what is it exactly that we are investigating? Why are we apparently going to dispatch the FBI and drones?

What are we looking for? Do we need high-tech spies in the sky to find just "folks" who were outraged? Will our intel and counter-terror efforts now be focused on finding anything that could lead to a "spontaneous" outburst by the "folks" in the Middle East?

Are we going to be dispatching cops to haul in, say, movie makers who do something "offensive" to the "folks" in the Middle East? Nah, that's too extreme . . . we would never do that.

The Obamistas know the attack was planned; that our security in Benghazi was deplorable; that our security procedures, such as they were, were compromised; that the consulate in Benghazi should not have been open on 9/11; and that Ambassador Stevens should not have been there, especially on 9/11, especially after what was happening in Cairo.

In other words, State and NSC screwed up big time. The heads of both of those agencies should be on the chopping block, along with a host of other heads up and down the command chain at State and the NSC.

 

Fair Distribution of Life-YearsLink to Mises.org

Yuri N. Maltsev - 06/22/12 [edited]

Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of ObamaCare. His brother is Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former Chief of staff.

Ezekiel Emanuel wrote in The Lancet medical journal Jan 2009 [edited]:

Allocation of healthcare by age is fair, unlike allocation by sex or race. Even if people aged 25 receive priority over those aged 65, everyone who is now 65 was previously 25.

It would be ageist to treat 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods. It is fair to treat them differently because they have already received more life-years.

 

‘True Science’ vs ‘Cargo-Cult Science’Link to PajamasMedia

Professor Frank J. Tipler - 07/27/10  [edited]

The great Nobel Prize particle physicist Richard Feynman defined science in bold type, in his article “What is Science?”

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Feynman: “When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does science show it?

How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It should not be ‘science has shown.’ And, you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments and after hearing all the evidence, to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”

Feynman also observedFrom his 1974 commencement address at The California Institute of Technology, CalTech. that real science was a method for discovering facts about our world, and required bending over backwards not to fool others, and especially not to fool oneself. He said it was particularly easy to fool oneself, and so required the greatest dilligence and openness to criticism and disproof to avoid being that fool.

 

Daily MailLink to this British newspaper:  [edited] £30 million are available to NHS trusts (National Health Service) which put patients on the Liverpool Care Pathway. The goal is 66% of deaths on the LCP. These financial incentives could influence doctors.

The LCP withdraws life-saving treatment. Patients are sedated, and most are denied nutrition and fluids by tube. The average LCP patient dies within 29 hours.

The NHS is a model for the implementation of ObamaCare.

See InsureBlogMore about the British National Health Service for more.

 


Quote Box ArchiveGo to Past Quote Boxes

Jan 31, 2009

Healthcare: They will pretend to pay - We will pretend to treat

Blogo-HealthCare
01/31/09 - ChicagoBoyz by Carl from Chicago

The people of the Soviet Union had a slogan about their government jobs. "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work". That is what is coming in health care. There is no free lunch. When the lunch is truly free, then there is no lunch.

[edited] In speech after speech Gov. Blagojevich hammered home the “fact” that he had granted insurance coverage to so many in Illinois, through various means. How has this actually been implemented? State payments to medical providers has been dramatically slowed.

I have personal experience with the State of Illinois delaying payments, but the situation is worse than ever for health care providers. Many legislators say that they intervened to expedite payments to some of their local hospitals on the verge of major financial distress.

Delaying payments has the same effect as reducing payments, since the state doesn’t catch up for a long time. The payment delays ensure that providers need to hold a big “rainy day” fund, since their employees want to be paid cash rather than IOU’s.

Medical providers can do little except complain to their local legislators. They can’t sue the State to speed up payments, and if they did, the state wouldn't care. Unlike insurance, which may be popularly perceived as unfair, there are no avenues of appeal if you feel the state is killing your business.

The US will likely move to a backwards program of medical socialism by increasing coverage and then squeezing providers with reduced and slowed payments. Federal transfers to states will not make up the cost for unfunded mandates.

A version of this will unfold in Illinois and other states that increase insurance coverage at state expense. Medical providers will begin to crumble financially and move away from treating state and federally insured patients, or do it in the most bare-bones and cheap manner possible.

++++++++++
Political Contributions for Medicare Reimbursement
Blogojevich withheld Medicaid reimbursement to Children's Memorial Hospital to get a campaign contribution from its CEO.

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Crisis Is Building in Illinois Finances
10/06/09 - CBS2 Chicago - by Mike Flannery

What are the priorities in Illiniois? Clearly the poor and sick are not at the top of the list. It is not compassionate to promise more than you can deliver.

The state is not a good social insurance company. It makes no investments to pay off its future promises. Instead, it tends to spend whatever is available on whatever serves politicians at the moment.

[edited] Tax receipts are down, and Illinois is not paying its social wellfare bills. The typical creditor must now wait three months to be paid, compared to two months at this time last year.

A Chicago Meals on Wheels nutrition center can't purchase food and is facing eviction. A large Lake County disabled program can't make insurance or mortgage payments.

2,600 creditors call the state each week, desperate to be paid.

The General Assembly will reconvene next week in Springfield. No one is even pretending to offer a comprehensive solution to the unprecedented budget disaster. The governor and legislative leaders all insist that must wait until next year.

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Never Events
Medicaid is already squeezing doctors by finding ways to avoid paying them.

By Andrew_M_Garland - 1/31/2009
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