Category: Politics

Marco Arment uses anecdotal evidence as a lead in to his predictions as to the future of America’s healthcare system. I hope that we will soon be able to add “healthcare” to the list of wrong predictions he has made recently[^fn1].

I can provide a counter anecdote to the one Mr. Arment cites: I believe that if Obamacare was in place 14 years ago, my mother might not be alive today. Furthermore, if the so-called *public option* or *universal payer* system was in place, my mother almost certainly would not be alive. The medical system, pre-Obamacare, allowed her to have surgery only a few days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. That type of turn around is [far below the mean wait time in places like Canada that have a universal payer system](http://www.fraserinstitute.org/publicationdisplay.aspx?id=2147484002). If my mother would have had to wait 14 weeks to get her surgery, she probably would not have survived.

The obvious response to that anecdote is that my mother must have “good” health insurance. That is true. It is not, however, some kind of “magical” health insurance that is impossible to receive. It is the health insurance that public school teachers get in the state of Maine.

[^fn1]: The list includes Textmate 2 post-open-source and whether or not [App.net](http://alpha.app.net) would get funded. Neither one of these has the potential to impact lives as much as the *charliefoxtrot* that is Obamacare.

> There are two tiers of men with advanced prostate cancer in Ontario: Those who get access to a remarkable drug through private insurance, and those who get a death sentence.

> The grim news is often delivered at the London Regional Cancer Program to men whose shoulders sag and jaws drop when told Ontario’s Health Ministry has for 15 months refused to pay for a medication covered by every other Canadian province.

> “There’s shock, fury and dismay,” said oncologist Kylea Potvin. “Everyone thinks we have this wonderful universal health care system, but this is absolutely not the case. We’ve increasingly become a two-tier health care system where if you have money, you have access.”

This is exactly why I have always been against Obamacare and other attempts at socialized medicine. Imagine the class warfare when those who can not afford to get additional health insurance *on top* of their government provided insurance are handed down a death sentence. Furthermore, imagine having to go to the equivalent of a healthcare “DMV” to get approval to have a certain procedure or to have medicine paid for. I want everyone to have access to the medical care they need to survive, but socialized medicine is not the way to do it.

> The average annual salary of a health benefits exchange employee would exceed $125,000 under the plan.

Well that makes sense. It will take a lot of work for these particular bureaucrats to determine what procedures people will actually be able to get.

(via [Dan Mitchell](http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/in-addition-to-its-many-other-flaws-obamacare-is-becoming-a-racket-for-overpaid-government-bureaucrats/))

> Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice. They’ll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.

> …

> But Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter. (And Paul Ryan’s Medicare projections are unrealistic?)

> No registered provider is allowed to make “any material change to its operations or governance structure,” the bill says, without the commission’s approval. The commission can also rewrite the terms of provider contracts with insurers and payment levels and methods if they are “deemed to be excessive.”

Of course this is the next step. There is no way the system can support itself unless it exerts more control over the doctors (i.e. the suppliers) prices. It will be interesting to see if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can explain this to the American people, especially with Governor Romney’s involvement in setting up the Massachusetts law looming in the background.