On the Health Care Front

It looks like the US Government is planning on taking over the health insurance industry regardless of what the people of the US think about it. The most recent plan is for the entire health “reform” bill as an amendment to another bill that has already passed, and pushing it through the reconciliation process (between the two houses of Congress) without needing any debate. The full details of the current plan can be found at The Foundry, with links from here to various parts of the story. Reporters aren’t allowed to sit in meetings where the bill is being discussed, either.

If we want to see the future of health care if this “reform” plan is actually passed, we just need to look at the various States where this type of health care has already been tried. The Wall Street Journal examines the results of States with various types of state run health insurance, including New York, Washington State, and Massachusetts, to see how they have fared. The general answer is, “not very good.” Part of the problem, of course, is the level of fraud within public health insurance systems, such as Medicaid. CNS News has a report on a recent study showing Medicare fraud amounted to more than $63 million in just 5 states in 2008. The future of American health care is contained in this story from Britain, where the National Health Service is being sued because they would not provide breast augmentation for a woman who was once a man.

Mr. Obama currently has two groups of people in his sights, specialists and the insurance companies. The Wall Street Journal has a story about the likely impact of health insurance “reform” will have on medical specialists. The theory is that if we can cut down on the number and use of specialists, we can save a lot of money in health care. Mr. Obama seems quite happy at the impending demise of the private health insurance companies.

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday that the drop in the health insurance stocks this week was a sign the industry has become nervous that a healthcare reform bill may pass. “This is when the insurance companies are really going to start gearing up,” Obama told a town-hall event in New Orleans. “Their stock went down when the Senate Finance Committee voted out that bill. Now they’re getting nervous and, by they way, they have been wildly profitable over the last decade.” -via Gateway Pundit

One of the key components of health insurance reform is to force healthy people to buy health insurance, essentially to force them so subsidize everyone else. The problem with this idea is that what is meant by health insurance isn’t really insurance.

Requiring health insurance to pay for preventive screenings is like mandating that auto insurance must pay for oil changes and new tires. Only in health care do we forget that insurance was designed to pay for unforeseen catastrophes, not for predictable events for which we should plan and budget. -Townhall

You might have heard that the US ranks 37th in the world for health care. The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article debunking this claim, it’s well worth reading.

Finally, a couple of videos worth watching about the entire health insurance “reform” mess.

Related posts:

1. Universal Health Care
2. On Health Care “Reform”
3. News From The Health Care Front