Obama to Elderly Mom: Die

When Obama talks about “cost savings” under a nationalized health care plan, he must be talking about something like this. Indeed, the leftist policy wonks who have been pushing socialized medicine (most of them not runing for office) had been quite frank about what they want. If you are old, if the care doesn’t promise a lot of additional years of life, then die.

H/T Grim’s Hall.

Mayo Clinic Condemns Obama Socialized Medicine Plan

From the Washington Times:

A world-renowned clinic that President Obama held up as an example of good medicine said Monday that the American people would be “losers” under the House’s health care proposal, joining the growing chorus of critics the Obama administration is trying to fend off as the debate intensifies from Capitol Hill to Main Street.

Minnesota’s not-for-profit Mayo Clinic, which Mr. Obama has repeatedly hailed as offering top quality care at affordable costs, blasted the House Democrats’ version of the health care plan as lawmakers continue to grapple with several bills from each chamber and multiple committees.

The Mayo Clinic said there are some positive elements of the bill, but overall “the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher quality, more affordable health care for patients.”

“In fact, it will do the opposite,” clinic officials said, because the proposals aren’t patient-focused or results-oriented. “The real losers will be the citizens of the United States.”

Note for Marquette readers: one of the authors of this article (Jennifer Haberkorn) is the former Editor of the Marquette Tribune.

Would a Government Health Monopoly Reduce Administrative Costs?

From Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics, an debunking of statistics that claim to show that government health care has lower administrative costs than does private insurance.

In fact, President Obama has made this claim several times. This statistic about Medicare’s low administrative costs has become one of the linchpins in the argument for a “public option” on health care. The only problem, not surprisingly, is that it’s hogwash.

The explanation is really quite simple, and it’s provided here by Robert Book of the Heritage Foundation. The statistic cited by [liberal columnists] Alter and Krugman uses administrative costs calculated as a percentage of total health care costs (For Medicare it’s roughly 3 percent and for private insurers it’s roughly 12 percent).

But here’s the catch: because Medicare is devoted to serving a population that is elderly, and therefore in need of greater levels of medical care, it generates significantly higher expenditures than private insurance plans, thus making administrative costs smaller as a percentage of total costs. This creates the appearance that Medicare is a model of administrative efficiency. What Jon Alter sees as a “miracle” is really just a statistical sleight of hand.

Furthermore, Book notes that private insurers have a number of additional expenditures which fall into the category of “administrative costs” (like state health insurance premium taxes of 2-4%, marketing costs, etc) that Medicare does not have, further inflating the apparent differences in cost.

But, as you might expect, when you compare administrative costs on a per-person basis, Medicare is dramatically less efficient than private insurance plans. As you can see here, between 2001-2005, Medicare’s administrative costs on a per-person basis were 24.8% higher, on average, than private insurers.

So, contrary to claims of Alter, Krugman, and President Obama, moving tens of millions of Americans into a government run health care option won’t generate any costs savings through lower administrative costs. Just the opposite.

This confirms two things most Americans already know: 1) government is rarely, if ever, more efficient than the private sector, and 2) if something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

Of course, this sort of static analysis ignores other efficiency advantages of a competitive market. Competition in the market drives costs down and quality up, creating benefits that Medicare reaps, in spite of it being a government monopoly. Take away the competition, and there isn’t much incentive to produce health care more efficiently. There also isn’t much reason to provide better care, or use new technologies, since government can be guaranteed to be slow to allow or pay for them.

So even if the administrative cost differential was what liberals say it is, it would not be nearly enough to justify a government monopoly.

But it’s not what liberals say it is.

The Kind of Health Care Obama Wants To Impose on the Nation

Via Modern Commentaries, an article from the Wall Street Journal on what socialized medicine has meant in Canada. Some tidbits:

• In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.
  
  Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life. He’s challenging Ontario’s government-run monopoly health-insurance system, claiming it violates the right to life and security of the person guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
  
  
• Shona Holmes, another Ontario court challenger, endured a similarly harrowing struggle. In March of 2005, Ms. Holmes began losing her vision and experienced headaches, anxiety attacks, extreme fatigue and weight gain. Despite an MRI scan showing a brain tumor, Ms. Holmes was told she would have to wait months to see a specialist. In June, her vision deteriorating rapidly, Ms. Holmes went to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where she found that immediate surgery was required to prevent permanent vision loss and potentially death. Again, the government system in Ontario required more appointments and more tests along with more wait times. Ms. Holmes returned to the Mayo Clinic and paid for her surgery.
  
  
• On the other side of the country in Alberta, Bill Murray waited in pain for more than a year to see a specialist for his arthritic hip. The specialist recommended a “Birmingham” hip resurfacing surgery (a state-of-the-art procedure that gives better results than basic hip replacement) as the best medical option. But government bureaucrats determined that Mr. Murray, who was 57, was “too old” to enjoy the benefits of this procedure and said no. In the end, he was also denied the opportunity to pay for the procedure himself in Alberta. He’s heading to court claiming a violation of Charter rights as well.

Of course, one might argue that the liberals and leftists who favor socialized medicine are themselves at risk in the same way as ordinary citizens.

But they are not.

In any massive bureaucratic system there are enclaves that provide decent service for people who know how to play the bureaucratic game, who have connections and also have the ability to raise hell if they get poor quality care.

Thus, socialized medicine is really something that they want to impose on us.

In principle, it’s just like forcing people to have a smaller “carbon footprint,” while the liberal elitists are using a massive amount of electricity and jetting around the country in private jets.

Politics in America really has resolved itself into a battle between the liberal New Class that wants to dictate peoples’ lifestyles and ordinary Americans who still hold to the notion that they live in a free country.