Liberty is Best Prescription for Health Care
At the recent Colorado Health Care Summit, Barack Obama’s Cabinet pick Tom Daschle said his boss’s “commitment to changing the health-care system remains strong and focused.” But in the wrong direction.
How to Provide Health Insurance for All
Providing health insurance for everyone who wants it doesn’t have to come with a high price tag. It doesn’t have to come with increased government control of your medical decisions, or less personal choice when it comes to choosing physicians or deciding on medical treatments, either.
Health care: Unions lie; choice dies.
Who would support a self-serving political agenda at the expense of your health, wealth, and job mobility? AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Colorado executive director Mike Cerbo.
Legislative Business As Usual: Take Money from Roads to Increase Health Care Costs
Colorado legislators say they want to fix the roads and cut health care costs. What they actually do is divert money from roads to increase health care costs.
This strategy is good for government but bad for people. It allows government and its fellow travelers to create new programs and to campaign for more tax money to support them. Government officials like having more tax money to spend, but they do not like to spend it on invisible maintenance. It is far more fun to promise new programs and spend time with stakeholders who are grateful that you helped them get their hands on other people’s money.
Colorado Health Care Reform: Reincarnating Failed Policies
It’s back to the drawing board for certain Colorado health care reform advocates. Cambridge Health Alliance, a major Boston areas safety-net health care provider has just reported that the Massachusetts health care reform plan is saddling it with large losses.
The Massachusetts plan requires everyone to buy health insurance. The reform plans from Colorado’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform and Club 20 copy key elements of it. If everyone is insured, advocates say, safety-net providers will need far less support. Needless to say, Colorado hospitals and health plans eager to get paid have no qualms about lobbying lawmakers to make their fellow citizens pay for coverage designed by a government committee and legislators are happy to believe that less safety-net care translates into reduced state payments.
Universal Health Care: the Wrong Prescription
What good is having medical insurance if you cannot get medical care? Peddlers of “universal health care” – from Hillary, Obama, to 2nd Congressional democratic candidate Jared Polis – don’t get this.
Minority Report
This document offers an alternative to the recommendations approved by the Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission for Health Care Reform (the 208 Commission or Commission) at its meeting on November 19, 2007. Its authors are among the Commissioners who voted against that set of recommendations. On November 7, 2007, the Commission passed a rule requiring any commissioner who wished to submit a minority report to vote against the entire package of recommendations. Although the authors voted against the entire package, they do agree with some of the recommendations contained in the set.
Health care "reform" in Colorado: Go home and die; it's cheaper.
On September 8, 2006, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) told patients with advanced gastrointestinal cancer to go home and die. Some Colorado health reformers want to be able to say the same thing. They want a Scottish Medicines Consortium for Colorado, yet another group of “stakeholders” empowered to give “patient-centered” advice that tells people what to while denying health care to all in the name of controlling costs.
Ritter's health care cure would prove more crippling to Coloradans
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter does not want does not want health care reforms that “throw more money at a problem without addressing the root causes of the crisis.” Unfortunately, the state’s 208 Commission does exactly that.
Cheap medicine proves costly in patients’ lives
Because it is cheaper to let people die than to treat them, an obvious conflict of interest occurs when a single organization has the absolute power to both pay for health care and define it. Monopoly providers like the Canadian provincial health plans, the National Health Service, Medicare, and certain HMOs routinely use cheap medicine in order to save money. Their cost cutting strategies often emphasize older, less effective, pharmaceuticals, longer waits for care, dated equipment, and less training for personnel. Cheap medicine can cut costs, but it generally does so by delaying diagnosis, slowing recoveries, increasing morbidity, and hastening mortality.
SCHIP: Why Pay When You Can Get It For Free?
People supporting substantial expansions in government health entitlement programs like SCHIP, Medicaid, and state run insurance pools should be interested in some new results on crowd-out, the term used to describe the fact that expansions in government health programs encourage people to stop paying their own way.
Warning: Medicaid is hazardous to your health
Warning: Medicaid is hazardous to your health by Brian T. Schwartz, Ph.D. Colorado’s 208 Commission has released detailed evaluations of its four favored health care reform proposals. The Commission’s goals include improving access, encouraging personal responsibility, and supporting a “financially viable, sustainable and fair” system. Yet these proposals preserve or expand Medicaid, which fails to meet these goals. This is documented in my free-market proposal, FAIR, and “Medicaid’s Unseen Costs,” a Cato Institute policy analysis.
