How to Make Health Care More Efficient
Be careful of whose definition of “efficient” we use; especially if the government’s definition means in reality “too much of”. This seems to imply that if we spend less on a service, like health care, that then it’s usage would be more efficient, when in actuality it’s maximum benefits would just become less available to the greatest number of users.
On Monday June 1st, 2009 President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers released a report called
"The Economic Case for Health Care Reform." The report argues that Americans must curb their consumption of medical care in order to avoid soaring federal deficits, which are unsustainable burdens on family budgets, and damage to the economy. All of these claims are untrue.
Why does the Administration make that calculation? Federal deficits; the White House report makes the argument that there must be controls on what all Americans spend on health care in order to avoid government programs running huge deficits. Wow! How cool is that?
Their theory is that only federal legislation can slow what all Americans spend on health care in order to avoid government programs running huge deficits. That will be the new model for healthcare, and will be the first justification for rationing, but of course it will not be called exactly that. Instead the euphemism of the day will be
efficiency. We already know how that rationing will be done; the viability of medical procedures will be calculated on a cost effectiveness basis; that has already been stated.
And how does the government make that calculation? Personally, I believe one of those calculations will be based on the ability of the patient to be able to pay it back through revenues to the government in the form of future federal income taxes. One group we know who will not be able to do that will be the old who are already in retirement. They obviously have little potential for future income.
The other set of individuals will be the severely handicapped; likewise the same standard also holds true for them . On that basis, who else? Well we already know the “very young” are already expendable; 45 million abortions make that very clear.
How about those who have a low survivability rate? That standard might well apply to certain cancer victims, like colon cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer and many others fitting that description. The costs are high and the benefits are calculably limited to their future earnings, which will be less than the costs of treatment.
As partial proof take one example: take breast cancer, a condition not confined to the elderly: Under the rubric of making our health care system more efficient, we are actually on the road to making it more like Europe’s. Almost no one here on this forum would argue with that statement. But according to the
Concord 2008 Five Continent Study, and the
Commonwealth Fund, women in the U.S. are more likely to have a regular mammogram so their breast cancer is detected sooner and treated faster resulting in higher survival rates here than there. This is a situation which promotes the growth of cancer until it becomes uncurable, or at least economically inefficient to cure.
So now the
NEW first standard for who gets high cost healthcare will be how much harm will produced to the economy, or, on the other hand how much will it enhance the economy to deny services to certain classes of people? These are purely economical considerations removed from the hands of the effected individuals and placed in the hands of the federal government.
In reality, all this tinkering has to take into account that any health care reform will have to confront the fact that the biggest single reason costs keep rising is that the American people keep buying more and more health care services.
