The Pause That Refreshes
Harry Reid has said there won't be any health care vote before August recess. Some have seen this as a serious defeat for the President, who'd been insisting something be passed, and soon.
Ultimately, I don't think it makes any difference. A number of factors have combined to give the Democrats a huge lead in Congress, and that's not going away. I don't see what's going to stop them from passing some sort of health care reform. And once the government can start competing with private insurance, they'll be able to do whatever is needed after the fact to take over all health insurance, no matter what "compromise" the centrists have signed onto.
The only way this pause can cause trouble is if the public continues to turn against the proposals, in ever stronger number, so much so that the Democrats lose their nerve. But having no health care bill would be such a black eye--not to mention a certain amount of Democrats believe it's so important that government take over our health care--that I can't see even public disapproval stopping this.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:22 AM
9 Comments:
That would be great if the public did so. Because last time folks took a step back to think about whether this was a good idea, 15 years (during which health care costs rose at a rate double that of GDP) passed.
is QueensGuy being ironic? It truly is a great thing that the people rejected it last time, but regardless of that, can he really object to having Congress actually, you know, read the bill before they pass it, or does he think Obama's insistence that something being passed no matter what it is sounds good to him? Does he share Obama's disease that any health care bill must be better than no health care bill?
Let's leave aside the argument that it's important to do something with no forethought because the last time we tried to reason things out, it made some (but not most) people unhappy. And let's ignore the President's bizarre insults that opposition to his health care plans derive from the wish to deliver a political blow to him--that happened to Nixon, but the opposition to Obama's plans are principled.
Instead, let's look at the chart that shows over the last quarter century, spending on veterinary services have been tracking almost exactly with health care expenditures. Since people pay vets out of pocket, this suggests that they're willingly (if not necessarily happily) spending a larger percentage of their money--as it's freed up by other things costing less--on health-related issues.
Have billions of people benefitted from the advances we've gotten from spending so much on health care? Probably. (Pets have been helped too, I bet.) But even if you don't think this is so, anyone should at least admit the expense argument isn't so easily resolved.
The greatest, ever-rising expense in health has been Medicare, which we can't afford. Why would anyone think getting government even more involved is the solution?
The expense argument is not easily resolved. However, I wonder if all could agree on certain fundamentals:
1. health care costs are rising at a rate that eventually would become unsustainable; and
2. health care results on a nationwide basis remain worse here than in many other countries.
If you agree with those two premises, how can it be better to have retained the same system for the past 15 years than a better alternative, if one exists?
Point 2 is false. We have better survival rates for cancer and other diseases, and if you want top-notch tricky work done, you come to this nation. (Also, average lifespan is not a measure of the success of health care.) Also, other nations are free-riding on all the medicines and diagnostic tools we create. It didn't used to be this way, but it's become ever more so since Europe nationalized its care.
Then you left out point #3: The greatest health care cost which makes it totally unsustainable is government-run healthcare, in particular Medicare.
So why should we want government to take over all of it? Let them reform Medicare first, then we'll talk.
Given a choice between cancer survival rates vs. overall average longevity, I take the latter every time. By that measure, we suck.
Similarly, given a choice between the availability of top-notch tricky work for rare cases and superior treatment of the vast majority of run-of-the-mill chronic illnesses that run up everyone else's bills, I choose the latter.
Screw costly innovations in microsurgery -- I want a system that rewards diabetics, smokers, heart disease patients and their doctors for doing the easy, routine stuff all the time. If you have a non-government suggestion, I'm all ears.
Longevity doesn't measure health care so much as lifestyle. Americans have more car crashes and violent deaths. They're also fatter and more sedentary. Changing our health care system won't solve this, though no matter how much true this is, the health care nuts keep saying "no, this time health care is going to manage something we haven't been able to get with a lot of trying for the past fifty years." Sure, health care might cut down on our freedom, but it can't make us healthier these ways.
Health care is actually pretty crappy for a lot of Europeans and Canadians. Many of them actually don't know it, because their government doesn't want them to know it, but then when they find out certain common treatments for Americans aren't available for them, they get pretty mad. How can the government "hide" this? Easy. 99% of the time 99% of the people don't need much more than take two aspirin and drink lots of water. So they figure hey, it's "free," and I feel good, so thank goodness I'm not in the American system (which they only hear propaganda about). But then when they have to wait a long time for common if serious problems in ways that Americans wouldn't put up with, it's not so funny. And if you ever have to wait months for treatment of a serious illness, you'll see how much it matters.
Furthermore, once the American system goes away, all these innovations you laugh at--you know, MRIs, and pills that almost everyone takes or knows someone who takes--will either go away or be far less common. This will mean negative effects for billions of people in the future, including maybe me, certainly my kids. I'm not willing to chance it, even if this is the easiest kind of damage the government can "hide."
Re foreign systems, unless you tell me you've lived abroad, you're just drinking the kool aid. I know plenty of folks who've lived in Canada and the US, or various European countries and the US. Other than the very rich folks, they all prefer the non-US systems.
I'm not willing to chance it, even if this is the easiest kind of damage the government can "hide."
So, innovate at any cost. We're at 14.8% of GDP today. You willing to go to 20%? 25%? Or would you instead suppose that the rest of the world might have an incentive to pick up some of the slack if we quit "subsidizing" them?
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