Health care is now political

I am amused by the waaaaaaaaambulance (NSFW) needed by the lefty blogosphere over the Stupak amendment.

Guess what, people. If health care is a government function, now every benefit is subject to the political process you love so much, including some you don't want to talk about. This is the way the government works. I do support the Stupak amendment, obviously, but this issue points nicely to one of the major reasons why the approach we're going to get with health care is not the best way. Market solutions don't work perfectly, but they do save our system from being thrown up for grabs into a public choice nightmare.

On Wal-Mart and Big Business

Wal-Mart's decision to join up with Democratic health care reform efforts seems pretty unusual. We even saw Matthew Yglesias writing that it was a blow to the solidarity of the business class. It shouldn't be all that surprising, though, if you think about it in terms of this 1979 WSJ editorial.

Centralizing power over anything, including health care, is likely to lead to special pleading, and even more power in the hands of big institutions that can plead best. Is that really what we want?

Happy Canada Day, and the public option

A happy Canada Day to all of you, particularly the Canadian with whom I'm privileged to share my joys and sorrows every day.

I suppose Canada Day is a good day to talk about health care. The debate about the merits and demerits of the public option, to me, leaves out something important. I'm a little fuzzy about how the public plan is supposed to generate competition and put pressure on private insurers to cut costs. If that's going to work, then why are we in the position we're in? Private insurers are already competing for business, aren't they? If competition isn't working now for some reason, why would it work when you introduce a public option? It seems like whatever mechanism is preventing market forces from working the way they do in other markets will still be working with the public option in place.

By the way, "All the private insurers are just EEEEEVIL people who would deny their grandmother care to save 50 cents" is not an answer to this question. Presumably, if the market worked properly, people would shun health insurance companies that unfairly denied them coverage in favor of ones that paid promptly when they were supposed to. The fact that this doesn't seem to happen suggests that we need to make the individual health insurance market more competitive and give consumers data they need to make good choices, not that we need to hand over the keys to big government. We'll see what form the Health Insurance Exchange ends up taking; that may do more to help than the public plan.

While I disagree with pretty much everything he says about the subject, Ezra Klein at the WaPo is a good source of information on these issues. I particularly recommend this post from today.

Update: Maybe George Newman's op-ed today will spark some more discussion around these issues. I couldn't agree with it more.

Who pays for health care?

While you may not be able to tell from reading this blog, health care is an interest of mine. This article (which is based on a paper in this week's JAMA) takes on the intersection of health care and employer relations.

What does this mean, exactly? Simple: “the common claim that employers, government, and households all pay for health care is false. Employers do not share fiscal responsibility and employers do not pay for health care.” In fact, the “money [for health care] comes from [our] own pockets.”

Well, no kidding. No rational employer gives a rat's behind whether they're spending their compensation dollars on cash, health care, or free donuts in the break room; they do what enables them to keep their employers happy. In today's tax environment, often that's health care. With that said, dollars spent on health care are dollars that come out of somewhere else; they have to. The customers will only pay so much for whatever good or service is being produced; there's only so many dollars to go around. What comes out of one pot necessarily comes out of another.

With that said, the statistics you so often see about the stagnation of middle class wages leave out the dramatically increasing health-care part of the compensation package. The fact that people have chosen to take more health care benefits instead of wages represents the people's choice, not a decline in living standards. I may do a post on that in the future once I dig up some of the stats.

A better way for health care

RIP, Paul Gillmor. A good man and a good Representative. This OH - 5ian will miss you.

For those who are trying to preserve the good of the U.S. health care system and bring more equality, take a look at this story from the Wall Street Journal. (It's on Page 1 today, I believe it's free. If not and you want to see it, let me know.). This seems like an interesting idea. While the U.S. health care system isn't perfect, there's a lot going on that's good, and it would be nice to preserve some it if we're going to monkey with it.