Obama Talks Health Care Reform
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Health Care, Obama, VideoWe’ve been hearing a lot about the new health care bill that’s set to drop soon, and now Obama talks about the road ahead.
My hope is that, with the health care providers at the table, this doesn’t turn into a partisan bloodbath. Because this reform is way too important to get bogged down in petty fights.
More as it develops…
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Health Care, Obama, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 7th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
ROFLMAO.
It’s a mathematical certainty, comprehendable even by gradeschoolers, that adding more money to a system is categorically incapable of REDUCING the cost of the system.
Claiming to “attack rising health care costs” by putting more money into the sytem is something even a child should scoff at. When A and B are positive numbers, A + B is not less than A. NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.
It’s somewhat akin to the old joke about losing a little on every unit sold, but making it up on volume….
Where systemic efficiencies can be realized without leaving anyone worse off, we should exploit them. Any “reform” that does not consist of reducing systemic inefiiciencies is at best political sleight-of-hand, and should be roundly mocked until the ACTUAL effects are explained, including who’s getting screwed and who’s being rearded in the political money-shuffling.
June 7th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
it is money shuffling, but the video doesn’t work for me. neither does the other post. I would say that if our money was going to the gov for coverage as opposed to private companies, that’s not necesarily throwing more money at the problem.
June 7th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
chris, if the government can actually reform the very programs it runs, why doesn’t it go right ahead and do so with Medicare? After all, it already has a captive system on which to try out “reforms.” One would think that Medicare was the perfect laboratory for experimenting, rather than cramming untested dictates onto the entire system at once. So why is the gov’t not using Medicare for a testbed?
The answer, of course, is that Medicare itself is already a big part of the problem in its offloading of costs onto the private sector of health care, and their plans for “saving money” if applied only to Medicare would simply increase the rate of cost growth in the private sector even more. If the entire system was converted to Medicare, onto whom would they offload their excess costs? Nothin’ left but the taxpayers.
Health care is a supply/demand market like any other. Supply is limited, demand is unlimited and inelastic. In such a market, health care costs will always grow faster than disposable income. Axiomatic: Boosting supply costs money, and while the increase in supply might make some individual procedures cost a bit less, overall the system would STILL be using more money than previous. The ONLY way to hold overall system cost steady or shrink it is to RATION SUPPLY and live with shortages. Consume less.
Are there some systemic efficiencies to be gained? No doubt. You can realize some one-time system savings (or at least lower cost growth rates) through increased efficiencies, but once those efficiencies are absorbed, costs resume rising at excess rates. We saw that already with the advent of managed care. We’ve seen it in every other industrialized nation, regardless of whether they have private, pubic, or mixed systems. It happens in the UK, in France, etc., just as it happens here.
No magic bullets.