Wednesday, September 4, 2013
The Mother of All Inverse Correlations
The first computers were the size of a small house and cost a million dollars. Today you can fit them in the palm of your hand and they only cost about a couple hundred. This is the private sector at work, folks, and I would really like you to compare that to the track record of the federal government here..............................................................................I mean, just take a look at Medicare, for Christ sakes. The original projection for that program was $12 billion dollars by 1990 and the actual cost was approximately $100 billion. The imbeciles were off by more than 800% and it is currently the biggest driver of all future debt with tens of TRILLIONS in unfunded liability..............................................................................Oh, and if you happen not to like the computer analogy, I could just as readily point you in the direction of those areas of healthcare in which the free market IS allowed to function; lasik eye surgery and cosmetic surgery. In both of those areas the costs have actually been coming down and the quality improving dramatically. We're just going to have to change our mindset on these programs, folks. Free markets - they're the only way to bend the cost curve other than rationing.
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9 comments:
"We're just going to have to change our mindset on these programs, folks" OK, but I'm still not overjoyed with millions of kids texting day and night, inane cellphones everywhere and those weird women addicted to cosmetic surgery.
Tell me about it. Those idiots at the grocery store talking into sheer space I would seriously enjoy going upside.
Good one, Will. All you have to do is look around and see how good the health care is in countries without a functioning government. No hand in healthcare there. And it is the government's fault that medical equipment costs have not fallen like computer costs? Hell, isn't most medical equipment just fancy computers these days? And of course the government and government sponsored research had nothing to do with the development of computers and computer technology.
Maybe if we kept government out of the defense industry, we could buy cruise missles for a buck and a half. Now there is your free market at work!
A red herring, Jerry. I didn't say that the government should have no hand (or that it shouldn't fund research), just that it should facilitate a much more market oriented approach via health savings accounts.......And one of the reasons that the cost of health care is so damn high is because the government subsidizes it. Prior to Medicare, health care spending as a % of GDP was about 5%. As soon as Medicare got into the mix it skyrocketed and now it's 18%. We need to be smarter, Jerry.
Perhaps medicare worked too well, and the burgeoning aging population drives it higher? I
see a 12.5% figure in the national pie chart; the thing I find bothersome is our per captia costs are far higher than any other country and our results are not
spectacular. I tend to agree with
Hayak-
"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supersede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom." to the extent that a total laissez-faire approach would likely trend to the the 1%/99% paradigm: the greater portion either going without or still ultimately covered by gov't at
some level.
Medicare in my estimation is just like OSHA and the unions. It jumped to the front of the parade and then claimed to have started it. Life expectancies were rising well ahead of Medicare and while it may have helped to some degree a more intelligent and thoughtful approach would have also done so and a lot less expensively(Medicare has essentially morphed into a check writing enterprise and as a person who works in the health-care field I can tell you that there is a lot of soft fraud in addition the harder type).............And just for the record, I AM in favor of universal coverage. I just want to do the thing through heath savings accounts (which can accrue starting at a younger age), catastrophic care provisions, and a case-management home health-care approach for the indigent.
Our healthcare is definitely not
healthy .
On that point we concur.
And Obamacare, which contains that provision to force equipment makers to raise prices, definitely makes healthcare unhealthier in regards to the aspect identified in the link.
Obama did the opposite of prudent policy here. Taxes on equipment makers should have been lowered, not increased. There is no good that can come from this punitive overtaxation: the consequences are a combination of lost American jobs, prices raised, and American companies losing ground to foreign ones. How is any of this good?
From the Motley Fool:
"Obamacare has brought on intense debate from impassioned advocates both for and against the historical health care legislation. Yet one rare place where bipartisan support has emerged is in condemnation of a controversial tax on medical-device manufacturers that has threatened a highly innovative industry and put thousands of high-paying jobs at risk.
Last month, the U.S. Senate voted on a nonbinding resolution to call for the repeal of the 2.3% tax on sales of medical devices. Although the vote was 79-20 in favor of the resolution, with 33 Democrats supporting it alongside 46 Republicans, the procedural vagaries of the Senate mean that the tax will remain in effect, and with the opposition of key Senate leaders, even the supermajority favoring the tax's repeal may be powerless to take further action. That's bad news for the companies that have been saddled with paying the tax."
The Obamacare equipment tax is a great idea if you want Americans sicker (as necessary equipment for care will be harder to get), more Americans unemployed, and foreign competitors laughing all the way to the bank.
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