• Tag Archives health care

  • British Courts Won’t Let These Parents Try to Save Their Baby’s Life

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    British Courts Won’t Let These Parents Try to Save Their Baby’s Life

    Writing about the sub-par single-payer healthcare system in the United Kingdom, Paul Krugman infamously claimed that, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors.

    We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”

    I’ve pointed out that there are plenty of “scare stories” about the National Health Service that are completely true. And completely scary.

    But don’t take my word for it.

    Just click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, or here if you want examples.

    To be fair, there surely are horror stories from every health care system. Humans are imperfect, after all.

    But I suspect shoddy care is more common when healthcare providers get a salary from the government. Under such an arrangement, patients are a burden rather than a source of revenue.

    Set that aside, however, because there’s a feature of the U.K.’s single-payer system that is reprehensible and it has nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof) of care.

    A Baby’s Only Chance for Survival

    The UK-based Daily Mail reports on this very disturbing case.

    The parents of terminally-ill baby Charlie Gard are ‘utterly distraught’ and facing fresh heartbreak after losing their final appeal in the European Court of Human Rights. Chris Gard, 32, and Connie Yates, 31, wanted to take their 10-month-old son – who suffers from a rare genetic condition and has brain damage – to the US to undergo a therapy trial.

    …the couple, from Bedfont, west London, raised almost £1.4 million so they could take their son to America but a series of courts ruled in favour of the British doctors. …the ECHR rejected a last-ditch plea and their ‘final’ decision means the baby’s life support machine will be switched off. …It comes after a High Court judge in April ruled against a trip to America and in favour of Great Ormond Street doctors. …Specialists in the US have offered a therapy called nucleoside. …barrister Richard Gordon QC, who leads Charlie’s parents’ legal team, …said parents should be free to make decisions about their children’s treatment unless any proposal poses a risk of significant harm. …Charlie’s parents have raised nearly £1.4 million to pay for therapy in America.

    Ian Tuttle of National Review explains what’s really at stake in this case.

    Any day now, they’ll kill Charlie Gard. …Charlie’s parents have raised enough money from private donations to fund the experimental treatment, but the court decision prohibits his removal to the U.S.

    …successive courts in the United Kingdom and in Europe simultaneously found that Connie Yates and Chris Gard had devoted themselves unhesitatingly to their son’s welfare for ten months, and also that Yates and Gard could not be trusted to act in their son’s best interests. …pertinent to this case, under what circumstances should the tightest bonds of affection — those between parent and child — be subordinated to the judgment of the state?

    The part that astounds me (in a very bad way) is that the courts won’t allow the parents to bring their son to the United States.

    The Worst Kind of Thuggery

    They’re not asking or expecting the taxpayers to pick up the cost. They’ve raised money to cover the experimental treatment. Yet the government won’t let them try to save their son’s life.

    Even if the doctors are right and the experimental treatment fails, why shouldn’t the parents be allowed to do the medical equivalent of throwing a Hail Mary at the end of a football game?

    I can’t even imagine what the parents must be thinking. If some government official said I had to allow one of my kids to die and that I didn’t have the right to try anything and everything to avert that outcome, I don’t even want to think of what I might do.

    I used to think policies such as asset forfeiture or IRS abuses were the worst form of government thuggery. But…

    Reprinted from International Liberty.


    Daniel J. Mitchell

    Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.



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  • California Considers Economic Suicide with Single-Payer Health Care

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    California Considers Economic Suicide with Single-Payer Health Care

    In the Dirty Harry movies, one of Clint Eastwood’s famous lines is “Go ahead, make my day.”

    I’m tempted to say the same thing when I read about politicians proposing economically destructive policies.

    Indeed, I sometimes even relish the opportunity. I endorsed Francois Hollande back in 2012, for instance, because I was confident he would make the awful French tax system even worse, thus giving me lots of additional evidence against class-warfare policies.

    Mission accomplished!

    Now we have another example. Politicians in California, unfazed by the disaster of Obamacare (or the nightmare of the British system), want to create a “single-payer” healthcare scheme for the Golden State.

    This Would Be a Catastrophe

    Here’s a description of the proposal from Sacramento Bee.

    It would cost $400 billion to remake California’s health insurance marketplace and create a publicly funded universal health care system, according to a state financial analysis released Monday. California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee found …Steep projected costs have derailed efforts over the past two decades to establish such a health care system in California. The cost is higher than the $180 billion in proposed general fund and special fund spending for the budget year beginning July 1.

    …Lara and Atkins say they are driven by the belief that health care is a human right and should be guaranteed to everyone, similar to public services like safe roads and clean drinking water. …Business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, have deemed the bill a “job-killer.” …“It will cost employers and taxpayers billions of dollars and result in significant loss of jobs in the state,” the Chamber of Commerce said in its opposition letter.

    Yes, you read correctly. In one fell swoop, California politicians would more than double the fiscal burden of government. Without a doubt, the state would take over the bottom spot in fiscal rankings (it’s already close anyhow).

    Part of me hopes they do it. The economic consequences would be so catastrophic that it would serve as a powerful warning about the downside of statism.

    Accelerating their Slow-Motion Suicide

    The Wall Street Journal opines that this is a crazy idea, and wonders if California Democrats are crazy enough to enact it.

    …it’s instructive, if not surprising, that Golden State Democrats are responding to the failure of ObamaCare by embracing single-payer health care. This proves the truism that the liberal solution to every government failure is always more government.

    …California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner to succeed Jerry Brown as Governor next year, is running on single-payer, which shows the idea is going mainstream. At the state Democratic convention last weekend, protesters shouted down speakers who dared to ask about paying for it. The state Senate Appropriations Committee passed a single-payer bill this week, and it has a fair chance of getting to Mr. Brown’s desk.

    I semi-joked that California was committing slow-motion suicide when the top income tax rate was increased to 13.3 percent.

    As the editorial implies, the state’s death will come much faster if this legislation is adopted.

    A $200 billion tax hike would be equivalent to a 15% payroll tax, which would come on top of the current 15.3% federal payroll tax. …The report dryly concludes that “the state-wide economic impacts of such an overall tax increase on employment is beyond the scope of this analysis.”

    California’s forecasting bureaucrats may not be willing to predict the economic fallout from this scheme, but it’s not beyond the scope of my analysis.

    If this legislation is adopted, the migration of taxpayers out of California will accelerate, the costs will be higher than advertised, and I’ll have a powerful new example of why big government is a disaster.

    If Single Payer Gets Enacted

    Ed Morrissey, in a column for The Week, explains why this proposal is bad news. He starts by observing that other states have toyed with the idea and wisely backed away.

    Vermont had to abandon its attempts to impose a single-payer health-care system when its greatest champion, Gov. Peter Shumlin, discovered that it would cost far more than he had anticipated. Similarly, last year Colorado voters resoundingly rejected ColoradoCare when a study discovered that even tripling taxes wouldn’t be enough to keep up with the costs.

    So what happens if single-payer is enacted by a state and costs are higher than projected and revenues are lower than projected (both very safe assumptions)?

    The solutions for…fiscal meltdown in a single-payer system…all unpleasant. One option would be to cut benefits of the universal coverage, and hiking co-pays to provide disincentives for using health care. …The state could raise taxes for the health-care system as deficits increased, which would amount to ironic premium hikes from a system designed to be a response to premium hikes from insurers. Another option: Reduce the payments provided to doctors, clinics, and hospitals for their services, which would almost certainly drive providers to either reduce their access or leave the state for greener pastures.

    By the way, I previously wrote about how Vermont’s leftists wisely backed off single-payer and explained that this was a great example of why federalism is a good idea.

    Simply stated, even left-wing politicians understand that it’s easy to move across state lines to escape extortionary fiscal policy. And that puts pressure on them to be less greedy.

    This is one of the main reasons I want to eliminate DC-based redistribution and let states be in charge of social welfare policy.

    Using the same reasoning, I’ve also explained why it would be good news if California seceded. People tend to be a bit more rational when it’s more obvious that they’re voting to spend their own money.

    Stay Golden

    Though maybe there’s no hope for California. Let’s close by noting that some Democrat politicians in the state want to compensate for the possible repeal of the federal death tax by imposing a huge state death tax.

    In a column for Forbes, Robert Wood has some of the sordid details.

    California…sure does like tax increases. …The latest is a move by the Golden State to tax estates, even if the feds do not. …A bill was introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), asking voters to keep the estate tax after all. …if the feds repeal it, and California enacts its own estate tax replacement, will all the billionaires remain, or will high California taxes spark an exodus? It isn’t a silly question.

    Of course billionaires will leave the state. And so will many millionaires. Yes, the weather and scenery are nice, but at some point rich people will do a cost-benefit analysis and decide it’s time to move.

    And lots of middle-class jobs will move as well. That’s the inevitable consequence of class-warfare policy. Politicians say they’re targeting the rich, but the rest of us are the ones who suffer.

    Will California politicians actually move forward with this crazy idea? Again, just as part of me hopes the state adopts single-payer, part of me hopes California imposes a confiscatory death tax. It’s useful to have examples of what not to do.

    The Golden State already is in trouble. If it becomes an American version of Greece or Venezuela, bad news will become horrible news and I’ll have lots of material for future columns.

    Reprinted from International Liberty.


    Daniel J. Mitchell

    Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.



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  • Whatever You Call This Health Care Mess, It’s Not Insurance

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Whatever You Call This Health Care Mess, It’s Not Insurance

    The House of Representatives has just passed a statute it represents as “repealing and replacing Obamacare.” This legislation, now awaiting what promises to be major challenges in gaining the Senate’s approval, does amend certain aspects of the Obamacare setup, but all in all the changes are less than earth-shaking, and the previous system will continue in important regards even if the House version should gain approval in the Senate.

    Preexisting Conditions



    One critical aspect of the continuity is the requirement that, absent certain state-level options that might but need not be implemented, health-care insurers will still be forbidden to deny coverage to anyone because of a preexisting condition.

    Under Obamacare, insurers had to charge people the same amount, regardless of their health status. The AHCA [American Health Care Act] would change that, allowing states to apply for waivers to charge sicker people more if those people had a gap in their insurance coverage. Those states would then get $138 billion over 10 years to help defray costs for sick people by creating high-risk pools, among other things.

    The idea behind this provision is that it would make health insurance cheaper for people who are relatively healthy, while sick people would be in their own, subsidized risk pool. As they debated on the House floor Thursday, Republican members consistently assured their audience that their bill would still protect preexisting conditions. (source)

    As many knowledgeable commentators have noted over the years, forbidding insurers to discriminate among people according to their health condition (e.g., according to what types of illnesses, injuries, and risk factors they have had in the past or have currently) flies in the face of the insurance principle.

    The Insurance Principle

    Insurance is a means of pooling risks. Subscribers of an insurance policy all pay a regular premium for coverage. In the event that a subscriber happens to fall victim to a covered contingency – for example, someone develops lung cancer – that person will be eligible to make a benefit claim against the insurance to pay for care of the cancer.

    Such coverage can be actuarially sound because even though any one person’s coming down with lung cancer is unpredictable, the probability of someone’s coming down with this disease in a large population can be determined with a high degree of accuracy, and premiums can be set so that for the group as a whole, the premiums will suffice to cover the plan’s promised pay-outs and leave enough for the insurer to cover its costs and earn a normal return on its investment in the insurance business.

    If, however, people who had not been insured could, upon being diagnosed with a particular disease, then apply for insurance covering treatment of this condition, the insurance principle would be cast into the trash bin. This feature would be similar to letting people on their death bed purchase life insurance at the same rate as healthy people, or letting people whose houses had just caught fire purchase homeowner’s insurance at the same rate as people whose houses are in sound condition.

    In short, requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions at the same premium paid by covered subscribers who do not have those conditions transforms insurance into an arrangement for making healthy people pay too much for coverage in order to subsidize people who pay too little – because the law forbids insurers to charge them according to the risk of the covered contingency they actually present.

    Likewise, requiring insurers to cover a wide range of conditions against which some subscribers do not wish to insure – indeed, against certain contingencies that cannot apply to them in any event (e.g., costs associated with pregnancy for male subscribers) – turns the insurance system into a complex system of overcharges and cross-subsidies, that is, turns the system into a legally prescribed welfare system rather than an insurance system.

    Stop Calling It ‘Insurance’

    The federal government and the state governments have intervened haphazardly in the health-care insurance business so pervasively and for so long that by now the whole setup is nothing but a gigantic mess that flies in the face of the insurance principle and dictates a host of requirements that make no sense except as answers to the prayers of special-interest groups and rent seekers.

    Once a net benefit has been created, however, each beneficiary group will scream to the heavens if reforms should threaten to remove its privilege, and legislators will be reluctant to buck such organized political insistence on continued subsidies and privileges no matter how irrational these interventionist distortions are as components of an insurance system.

    This sort of “transitional-gains trap,” which Gordon Tullock analyzed astutely in an article published almost fifty years ago, produces an inertia in the political process that makes it practically impossible to make substantial changes even as the overall system sinks into financial ruin and drags down much of the related economy with it.

    A helpful first step toward actually remedying the whole ungodly mess would be to change the language we use to talk about it and to propose reforms. People would be well advised to stop using the word “insurance” to talk about what amounts to prepaid care for one and all, and to stop regarding every special-interest subsidy and privilege as if, having once been blessed by legislators, it has become an eternal “right.”

    If people cannot forthrightly recognize gifts financed from the public trough as distinct from real insurance payouts, there is little chance that any reforms can ever make economic sense or bring about a viable system for financing health-care expenses.

    Reprinted from the Independent Institute.


    Robert Higgs

    Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review.

    He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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