Couple that with Jon Stewart getting Bill Kristol to admit that Veterans get top-notch health care from a government-run program, and the whole anti-government argument tumbles like a house of cards.

Good work, Mike!

If Douchecritter Number Two thinks the key is that we are free, why can’t our healthcare be free too? Also.

Thanks, Mike, keep up the good work! We went to the moon, we stormed Normandy, we won the war in the Pacific, we cured AIDS and cancer. Why can’t we do healthcare right, too?

Mike, you RULE! You’ve already become the Rethug House members’ worst nightmare.

Great appearance with Tamron Hall and Donnie Deutsch, Mike. You should use sunscreen, though, if you’re gonna spend the next month chasing down birther Congresscritters on the Hill.

I’m thinking there are a number of so-called progressives AND some Blue Dogs that aren’t having sweet dreams at the thought of being confronted by Mike

The Republicans have right wing belief tanks cranking out bogus statistics to support their ideology. They then peddle this junk and no one calls them on it. Republicans are the greatest threat to the health of the nation. Like a cancer they should be excised.

Wanted to ditto Teddy @ 4. Great job Funny how that sunlight thing freaks out some of these rethugs
P.S. A new petition from Leahy, Durbin and Schumer
http://citizensforapublicoption.com/

Yeah we should probably pick up Mike’s sunscreen bill. Definitely worth it.

Thanks, Mike. Awesome job – as always.

Tamryn has been on fire lately. She was all over Deutch for wanting a soda tax to pay for healthcare. I thought she was going to go after him from the right but she said “united health made a billions of dollars last year, why shouldn’t we be taxing them?”

It was pretty awesome.

That is a great, great question. Why DO Republicans hate America so much? It’s inexplicable.

And the fact that they twist statistics to support their arguments is just too much. Who else would do such a thing?

They don’t only twist statistics they make up shit.

Jane – have you seen this yet ?

House GOP Welcomes Overture From Blue Dogs ??

Which underscores the point that Health care is Obama’s Waterloo.

Health care reform, and I write Health Care Reform not Health Insurance Reform, is symptomatic of many of the ills of our Country.

A Prediction: As goes Health Care Reform so will go the United States. Either the corrupt cesspool of Washington and Wall St starts to be cleaned up, and there will be a further descent into poverty for the unfortunate 99%.

What is remarkable is that many companies at their end-of-life strategy of gouging their customers to continue to deliver the impossible, continual growth in earnings. At this point in their life-cycle these institutions turn to protecting senior executive jobs and extracting the last dollar from their customer instead of providing value.

Examples of this are HP (printer ink), banks (fees galore), phone companies (fess and complex billing), and our government (more and more regressive taxation, less progressive taxation).

I think Shuster has lit a fire there.

What difference would it make to idiot Mike Rogers if Public health care was good or middlin’? He would not have to choose it, nor would anyone, it’s an option. What are corporate insurance and pharma afraid of if Public health care sucks?

Yeah someone told me about that this morning, I see someone else tracked it down. I’ll put it up in a bit. I sort of assume people believe that’s already happening but then I’m surprised when they don’t.

They hate America because they are unamerican.

What are corporate insurance and pharma afraid of if Public health care sucks?

I know you weren’t really looking for an answer there, but it never hurts to reiterate my view that they know how powerful a public option would be, and therefore it is to be killed at all costs.

When you think about the money that’s gonna dry up all along K Street if a public option appears, you’ll understand the fervor of the opposition.

Instead I decided to ask about something that really bugs me about Republicans: for so-called patriots, these guys really think the United States sucks. I mean, if we can engineer a ridiculously effective war machine – and spend whatever it takes to do it – why can’t we figure health care out? Surely they don’t believe killing people is more worthy than keeping Americans alive? [Don’t bet on it!]

Right! And they call themselves the “pro-life” party. Maybe the Dems– if they can ever gird their loins well enough to fight back appropriately– could call themselves the pro-health party!

thanks.

Jane… I came to the conclusion last week that they truly do not care about people dying.

The neoliberalist code is tough survival of the fittest stuff… they believe if you’re poor you deserve it, if you’re sick, well then you can die.

That’s one less person to get any of their money.

I really believe this is the way they see it.

And I think we can extrapolate that to the “insurance” companies (read mafia)… another dead person is one less person for them to pay out for… thereby increasing their bottom lines.

There really is no other way to interpret the neolibs or ins. companies’ behavior.

Pretty scary world alright.

I know, my bad heh…a public health care option would rock. People would be more healthy..Conservatives would hate that.

The Republics don’t hate all of America. Sure, they hate most of the non-rich and most of the non-white parts. But there are parts they do like. It’s just that those parts don’t account for enough votes to elect Republics. They can’t always cheat, so they have to come up with new emotional takes on issues like gay marriage or abortion to get votes. It’s not so easy to do that, election after election. It makes them cranky.

One other thing… nobody commented on this anywhere that I have seen… but Lawrence O’Donnell was on David Shuster (for KO) last week…

And he said what was to me a very depressing thing:

That the way the health reform committees are operating is exactly the way they did in 1994… they are following the same template… and it’s being performed by the same committees.

So it’s deja vu all over again… let’s hope the outcome is different… but frankly, even the two public options in the Senate and House (assuming they survive to see the light of day) are not nearly strong enough because

1) people can’t leave their company assisted health insurance unless the premiums exceed unrealistically high thresholds (11% in the House and 12.5% in the Senate of gross pay). That threshold means far fewer can opt for the public option.

2) So of the remaining Americans, without employer assisted insurance, if you are truly middle class… there will be no subsidies for you… the subsidies are tied to the FPL, which is understandable. But once again the middleclass is screwed. And profit-driven killing machines will continue unfettered.

3) I’ve heard that the elimination of receissions based on pre-existing conditions will be for NEW policies, not existing ones.

So all in all… not exactly robust imho.

In his speech to the AMA in Chicago June 15, 2009, Obama shared his diagnosis, solutions, and justification for healthcare reform: health costs are spiraling out of control and are a threat to the economy, families, businesses, and the federal government. The current system is unsustainable. Costs are increasing faster than they should because we spend money on things that don’t make us healthier. We equate expensive care with better care. We overuse and reimburse for treatments that are not needed and we pay for quantity instead of quality.

We can categorize Obama’s major solutions to the healthcare crisis as follows:

1 – Payment reform. Change how providers are paid by bundling payments so they team up to treat episode of care or illness. Pay for quality outcomes.

2 – Knowledge reform. Invest in examining and disseminating knowledge of what treatments are more cost effective and clinically effective to cut costs.

3 – Information-technology reform. Upgrade medical records from paper to electronic. This will avoid duplication of tests, track information from doctor to doctor, lower administrative costs, improve doctors’ productivity, and reduce medical errors.

4 – Insurance reform. Make the purchase of health insurance mandatory for everyone. Eliminate preexisting-condition waivers and insurance companies’ ability to “cherry-pick” whom to cover. Introduce an affordable public option for individuals in order to inject competition into the marketplace to keep private insurance companies honest.

Obama assures us that this is not government-run healthcare, that this is not a single-payer system, that the only consequence to these reforms is that healthcare will cost less and that anybody who denies this is misleading or does not understand the facts. Without his reform, he insists, costs will grow unsustainably, which will threaten reimbursements and the stability of the healthcare system.

Unfortunately, since Obama uses faulty logic to diagnose the problem, his solutions will only make matters worse faster. The correct framework within which to diagnose the problem is to admit that costs are out of control because they do not reflect prices created by the voluntary exchange between patients and providers, between customers and producers, like every well-functioning industry.

Instead, health costs reflect the distortions that government regulators have introduced through reimbursement mechanisms created by command-and-control bureaucracies at federal and state levels.

Simply put, Medicare, Medicaid, workers compensation, HMOs and even private health-insurance firms that follow Medicare rates, rely on cost reports submitted by providers. This cost data is then pushed through mathematical models and additional data generated by government, such as inflation and regional-labor-cost modifiers, to unilaterally (or in agreement with lobbyists and industry groups) determine what the prices for services should be.

But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The just price of a health service can only be determined by the voluntary exchange of a patient with his hospital, physician, and pharmacist. The relationship between the patient and his private provider has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information.

Given the level of technological advance and capital investment in healthcare of the past 40 years, one would expect quality to increase and prices to come down relative to other goods and services. This is true of other capital-intensive industries like consumer electronics and air travel. But in healthcare we have the opposite phenomenon: higher prices and, at best, equal or slightly improved quality in some locations or, at worst, lower quality in other locations, particularly government owned institutions. And too few consider that perhaps government participation is to blame.

Obama suggests that Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for the cost spiral because they pay for quantity rather than quality, because they do not differentiate between services that make people healthier and those that do not, because they pay for services that are not needed, etc. But he is stating the obvious. Government bureaucrats, physicians, patients, and hospitals have known that for as long as these federal programs have existed. In fact, these reimbursement mechanisms have been modified over the years to attempt to resolve these very deficiencies in the same way that Soviet and Cuban planners attempted to cure the weaknesses of their resource-allocation formulas.

Contrary to Obama’s suggestion that knowledge of clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness can be obtained and disseminated, there is no rational way to evaluate cost effectiveness outside of the free market. Central health planners cannot compare and recommend the best option between two different combinations of drugs, hospitals, and physicians to treat a particular ailment. It is not just a matter of figuring out which combination offers better outcomes and lower costs. In fact, the bureaucrat actually needs prices to make that comparison! This is also why Obama’s ideas on payment reform to change how Medicare pays providers, and knowledge reform to investigate which treatments are most cost effective will never work and will increase costs and reduce quality. We have explored this argument in detail here.

Obama also proposes to reduce the cost of health care by upgrading medical records from paper to electronic. While the benefits of health information technology (HIT) are undeniable, the industry is nowhere near the level of development required to have a material impact in productivity and quality of care. It is truly in its infancy. We have different manufacturers with different systems, and different silos of solutions to particular problems even within the same manufacturer — silos that at best communicate clumsily with each other and at worst make the physician’s access to meaningful timely clinical information a nightmare.

Billions of dollars have already been invested in HIT. Some systems have worked, while others have not. Billions more will need to be allocated until the best systems are adopted. But the idea that somehow a government agency with no shareholders at risk will help us better coordinate the allocation of capital and the experimentation necessary to develop these solutions is laughable, especially when one of its agents, the Department of Veterans Affairs, in all likelihood has the record for the most expensive failed HIT experiment to date, the $467 million computer system at its Bay Pines hospital in Florida.

The true drive behind government’s interest in electronic medical records is the desire to acquire as much clinical and cost information as possible to further control care delivery and health resources. But this is a futile effort as we have seen above. In addition, the effort runs counter to the logical problem that computer systems at millions of local provider-patient levels are capable of generating more data than can be processed expeditiously and meaningfully by a central control agency and its computer system. Any information produced by this central planner will be erroneous and old by the time it is used to guide central bureaucratic decision making.

Obama’s plan also includes a reform of our private health-insurance market. He would like, first, to make health insurance mandatory for all Americans, second, to offer an affordable public option, and third, to eliminate the ability of insurance companies to “cherry-pick” which services to cover and which to deny. These changes, he believes, will reduce cost shifting — the practice that providers use to subsidize charity, bad debt, and unprofitable government programs by charging more to insurance companies and private payers and patients — and will spread the risks of the insurance company to healthy individuals, thereby reducing the costs to everyone.

These insurance reforms ideas are flawed. They are based on the assumption that health insurance companies can charge premiums to a pool of policyholders, predict and pay for a large loss triggered by an event outside the control of the policyholder, and make a profit. But sickness combines risks that are uncontrollable with risks that are indeed controllable by the policyholder (eating, exercise, preventative habits, and adherence to treatment plans, for example) and the provider (selection of diagnostic tests, specialists and hospitals, for example). As a result, insurance companies are left with tools of rationing via higher premiums, deductibles, copayments and utilization controls placed on providers, which have a tendency to create nonrandom groups of policyholders and providers. Health insurance companies are more instruments of income redistribution than risk managers, and they are left with only one option: to charge healthy individuals enough to subsidize sick individuals. Eventually, when the impact of the redistribution on individuals is high enough, many either opt out or are priced out of the market, creating the 50 million uninsured individuals.

Obama explicitly states that he wants to force the redistribution of income from healthy to unhealthy individuals but with the illogical belief that somehow this scheme will reduce the costs to everyone. But we have seen that even if the size of the risk pool is extended to the whole population of the United States by mandating every American to have health insurance and hence fixing the size and selection of the risk pool to the whole population, this does not address the fundamental flaw of mixing controllable with uncontrollable risks. Any sensible insurance reform should separate these risks and only cover uncontrollable risks, allow individual underwriting (the practice of insurance companies assessing each individual’s pricing and eligibility) move away from community rating (the practice of offering the same price to large groups of individuals regardless of each individual’s age, sex, health status, and risk level) so that healthy people pay lower premiums and sick people pay higher premiums, exactly the current model for life insurance. In other words, we should allow and encourage “cherry-picking,” not ban it.

The logical tendency of Obama’s insurance reforms, despite his explicit denial, will be an inexorable movement towards a single-payer system as his reforms will not control costs or utilization, and the only alternative left will be to enhance the control of the plan via explicit rationing, by a bureaucrat, of the care delivered. The central authority must then decide which health services are provided and which denied, who should receive them and who should not, when they should be given, all in addition to its current function of attempting to determine prices. Such a centralized system must logically retrograde into chaos because pricing signals to patients, doctors, and hospitals will be so distorted that they cannot guide resource allocation.

Obama concludes his speech by stating, “we’re a nation that cares for its citizens. We look out for one another. That’s what makes us the United States of America. We need to get this done.”

Besides the obvious demagoguery to justify accelerating further control of healthcare by the federal government, we should ask ourselves how we have devolved from a collection of independent states founded by a war of secession from a central government power into one nation with a powerful central state. The justification for independence from the rule of King George III that these states gave was based on the doctrine of natural human rights, that all men are created equally free & independent, & have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they cannot, by any Compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the Enjoyment of Life & Liberty, with the Means of acquiring & possessing property, & pursuing & obtaining Happiness & Safety.

These words are from the original draft written by George Mason for the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Nowhere in this document or in successive drafts by Mason and Thomas Jefferson do we read words that could lead the reader to conclude that the federal government ought to care for its citizens or that we ought to look out for one another or that a central government ought to violate our individual natural rights to freedom, independence, and property to achieve the absurdity of mandatory equal access, equal price, equal quantity, and equal quality of health care for all.

I

http://mises.org/story/3543

Mike, good job!
I’ve often thought the same thing. We sent a man to the moon, and they’re telling me we can’t do a health care program?
The thing is, we didn’t expect the moon program to be “revenue neutral.” Imagine cutting highway funds or military expenditures in order to be revenue neutral so we could have a space program? Ridiculous.
No, we thought it was imperative so we just did it.

critter #2 bloviates sweet nothings like “this country has the best standard of living…” well, that’s true in certain zip codes, and it used to be true of most zip codes, but not any more. I’m truly concerned about the way our country is deteriorating right before our very eyes and they continue to be blinded by campaign money.

I love our country and that’s why I want better health care.

who farted?

Something put a block on my ‘favorites’ blogsites…seems like this would be illegal as hell. It’s the fourth time in a couple of years.

Much has been written about the prison for profit system here in America.

Just out of general interest, does anybody know who provides the health care to these millions of prisoners?

Surely in Federal penitentaries, the Government would most likely be laible, But in prisons for profit-wonder how that factors into health reform.

There are millions in prisons.

Food for thought when one considers that convicted criminals may have access to better health care than hardworking folks , and ,retired citizens do.

….Representative Mike Rogers (Michigan) was expounding at length about death rates for cancer patients under “socialized medicine” vs. death rates here in the United States….

Hmmmmm…..

Where have I heard about that kind of slicin’ and dicin’ of numbers that have nothing ‘technically’ to do with actual death rates due to cancer whatsoever?

Why, yes…..now I remember…..It was codswallop originally thrown down by one of Rudy Giuliani’s shameless shillophants back in the primaries (and thoroughly disredited by folks of little standing in the field like those from, say, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine).

But, you may be wondering….

Who was the original shameless shillophant in question?

Why, it was another one of those extremely rare homegrown members of the Canadian Healthcare Haters Club, Inc.

A fine fellow by the name of Dr. David Gratzer.

You do remember Dr. Gratzer don’t you?

No?

Well you probably do remember his petulant sneer.

Why?

Because he’s that very fine oncologist….errrrr….psychiatrist….that was recently eviscerated for all the world to see by Dennis Kucinich.

.

But but but – I’m confused. Isn’t Mike Rogers part of the government? Why is he so lousy at his job? Maybe if government sucks at doing things, we should elect Congresspeople who can actually do better? Maybe that should be the follow up question next time.