Negative Space: health care
- Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father
-
David Goldhill, inspired by the unnecessary death of his father in a hospital surrounded by great doctors, nurses, and technology, describes in detail why health care today kills people—and then charges for it. In no other industry could a business fail so miserably, and then send a bill for having failed.
He also argues persuasively that the ACA took all the bad parts of our health care system—and made them worse.
- Community health acts to improve Obamacare
-
Democrats now want to talk about how to improve Obamacare. Here’s how to do it.
- COVID Lessons: The Health Care Shutdown
-
It’s fortunate that COVID-19 was not as bad as the experts said, because our response was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, including health care for co-morbidities. We locked the healthy and the sick together, and cut people off from routine care. Most of the deaths “from” COVID-19 were probably due more to our response than to the virus itself.
- The dark side of bureaucratic health care
- The death panel comes in many forms, and is a natural outgrowth of health care managed by government bureaucracy.
- The Democrat’s anti-health health-care plan
- The new Kennedy health care plan supported by the Obama administration appears to be designed to reduce consumer choice and increase consumer costs.
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- Everybody gets $7,000 a year
- Charles Murray argues that we can vastly reduce the cost of the welfare system and social security simply by giving everyone $7,000 a year plus a health plan.
- Exchanging the market for high prices and corruption
- The Democratic health insurance exchange looks like it’s going to make many of the same mistakes politicians made in California when they tried to choke electrical power through a power exchange.
- Government food courts
- Imagine there’s no grocery… it isn’t hard to do… nothing to grill or fry for…… and no bacon too…
- Gravity-driven health care
- All government programs are market-driven, just like all government buildings are gravity-driven. We cannot escape the laws of nature simply by adding the word “government” to the beginning of a phrase.
- Health care for prisoners
- Our criminal justice system must account for the possibility that it is wrong. Decent health care is one of the most obvious ways it should do this.
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
-
The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Health care the Chicago way
- You can’t fight the law of supply and demand. All you can do is increase the costs of compliance.
- June 2: Mitt Romney’s Day
- “Onward my brave Morons! Let this be known forever as Mitt Romney’s Day!”
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
- The left’s hatred of business is a lie
-
The left doesn’t hate business. They hate you and me.
- Phase 1: Reforming health care
- Our current health care system works so poorly we want to expand it: instead of a bunch of huge organizations vying for the attention of multiple employers, we’re going to have a few (at best) even bigger organizations vying for the attention of government bureaucrats. Why not come up with some reform that actually reforms?
- The precarious value of middlemen
- In a world of choice, a middleman must add value (lower prices, ease of delivery) in addition to their added costs (fewer choices, lower quality, etc.) But the costs are always there. Once a middleman is mandated, there is no longer any need to add value.
- Private Health Care in Jails Can Be a Death Sentence
- Paul von Zielbauer at the New York Times writes about the piss-poor health care available to prisoners.
- Removing any motive to help patients
- “Removing the profit motive” from health care removes the motive to help patients.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
-
Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- S-CHIP redux
- Yeah, remember that? Both sides wanted to spend more. And yet their examples were all people who had insurance under the current system.
- San Francisco-style budgeting
- The health “reform” bill appears to be bringing San Francisco-style budgeting to Washington.
- Strangling the iPhone of health care
-
We have no idea what great improvements in health care we have strangled through our current system of government regulations, subsidies, and tax incentives.
- Universal Health Care
- Should I quit my job and rely on public health care? Why do we rely on employers to provide something as important as our health care?
- When You’ve Got Health, You’ve Got Everything
- Freedom? Five bucks. Health? Five bucks. Inciteful Fiction? Free!
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
-
With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
- Why government-funded cancer research is dangerously unlike the Manhattan Project
-
A “Manhattan Project” for cancer is likely to delay cancer cures, and make what cancer cures we find more expensive—like the Epipen. And kill people, like the original Manhattan Project.
- Why we must not ration health care
- Rationing health care means fewer cures.
More Information
- Defensive Plaintiffs
-
Dafydd again demonstrates why Big Lizards is on my blogroll. The effects of lawsuit mentality on health care costs:
“Doctors pay stunning premiums for malpractice insurance, in some cases more than $200,000 annually for physicians in certain specialties, such as obstetrics or anaesthesiology—and far more for hospitals—even for doctors and hospitals with excellent records.”
“Virtually every doctor and hospital is guaranteed to be sued several times in his career… no matter how good and careful a doctor he is. Several estimates have found that the cost of malpractice insurance alone is about 10% of the total cost of doctor and…”
- Good Intentions Aren’t Enough with Health Care Reform
-
The bill prohibits insurance companies from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and from charging sick people higher premiums. It attempts to offset the costs this will impose on insurance companies by requiring everyone to purchase coverage, which in theory would expand the pool of paying policy holders.
However, the maximum fine for those who refuse to purchase health insurance is $750. The result: many people, especially the young and healthy, will simply not buy coverage, choosing to pay the fine instead. They’ll wait until they’re sick to buy health insurance, confident that insurance companies can’t deny…
