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Dr. Benjamin Carson Addresses National Prayer Breakfast, Criticizes Obamacare - Real Clear Politics
DR. CARSON: Here's my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth
certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account
to which money can be contributed -- pretax -- from the time you're born
'til the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family
members, so that when you're 85 years old and you got six diseases,
you're not trying to spend up everything. You're happy to pass it on and
there's nobody talking about death panels.
Annals of Government Medicine - John Hinderaker
An investigation reveals that under socialized medicine in the U.K., the death panel process has been delegated to hospital staff who designate patients “do not resuscitate” without the knowledge of the patient or his family and occasionally through clerical error:
Elderly patients are being condemned to an early death by hospitals making secret use of “do not resuscitate” orders, an investigation has found.
Obama’s Medicare Appointee Has Accidental Encounter with Reality, Learns Nothing - Dan Mitchell
To explain, let’s start by looking at why relative prices are falling for computers, cars, TVs and telephones. This isn’t because the companies that make these products are motivated by selflessness. Like all producers, they would love to charge high prices and get enormous profits. But because they must compete for consumers who are very careful about getting the most value for their money, the only way companies can earn profits is to be more and more efficient so they can charge low prices.
So why isn’t this happening in health care? The answer, at least in part, is that consumers aren’t spending their own money so they don’t really care how much things cost. As this chart illustrates (click to enlarge), only 12 percent of every healthcare dollar is paid directly by consumers. The rest comes from third-party payers, mostly government but also insurance companies.
In other words, Berwick’s column accidentally teaches us an important lesson. When consumers are in charge and responsible for paying their own bills, markets are very efficient and costs come down. But when government policies cause third-party payer, consumers have little if any incentive to spend money wisely – leading to high costs and inefficiency.
The Reality of Death Panels - Mike Stopa
SUPPORTERS OF President Obama’s health care reform law have relentlessly derided Sarah Palin’s notion of “death panels’’ as a vulgar rhetorical technique, with no basis in reality, devised merely to scare a gullible, uneducated citizenry into rallying to repeal the law. The death panel notion persists, however, because it denotes, in a pithy way, the economic realities of scarcity inherent in nationalizing a rapidly developing, high-technology industry on which people’s lives depend in a rather immediate way. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that vulgar notions (and jokes) invariably contain a “subtle and spiritual idea.’’ The subtle and spiritual idea behind “death panels’’ is that life-prolonging medical technology is an expensive, limited commodity and if the market doesn’t determine who gets it, someone else will.
...
To the extent that ObamaCare ultimately succeeds in imposing uniformity on basic health care, it will likely lead to the creation of secondary markets for providing insurance against various health eventualities and access to “heroic’’ procedures to extend life. Water runs downhill and it’s a good thing that it does. First, we need to have people buy the expensive medicines and experimental technologies. Europe has discovered this as its regulated system of medicine has driven its pharmaceutical industry farther and farther behind that of the United States. Capping costs kills innovation.
But, in addition, Palin is right. Death panels are an inevitable consequence of socialized medicine. The law of scarcity demands them.
A mature discussion of health care must recognize basic economics so that we can think ahead on how to satisfy the demands of those who are not satisfied with base-level care.
