Scott Bond sb@scottbond.net

CBO scored the Kennedy Bill last week at approximately a 30% reduction
for 1 trillion over ten years. Using the ARCOLA model, we found nearly everyone
would be covered if all elements of the Kennedy bill were enacted at a ten year
cost of 4 trillion. That 4 trillion estimate over 10 years assumes a public option
plan with Bronze, Silver and Gold levels in the proposed insurance exchange with
a subsidy for premium support that is income-adjusted and calibrated for assistance
at the Silver level. The Silver level is equivalent of PPO plan with medium levels
of generosity, something with 15% coinsurance rate, manageable copays and
average level of access to physicians and hospitals. We accounted for the public
plan being reimbursed at 10% above Medicare reimbursement, which is also 10%
below commercial insurance premiums.

Parente seems to be particularly critical of President Obama’s claims that expansion of health care is needed to “bend the cost down.” Parente was an advisor to Senator McCain’s health care plan and evidently was considered for a position in the Obama administration. Perhaps someone can answer a question that I don’t understand. Where is President Obama’s plan that he touted while running for office? Is Kennedy Dodd supposed to represent the essence of the plan Obama claimed during the campaign? This question came up for me after viewing the president last night criticizing aspects of McCain’s plan last night on ABC and again while reading Parente’s testimony.

This is a long comment. I include comments from the blog Junkfood Science and recommend her site because of what I see as a very clever systematic attack on liberty by this administration. It seems that all of their efforts interlock to provide an overall program that is at the same time inexorable and invisible if one doesn’t spend all of one’s time tracking it. None of us has the time for that. Hence the inclusion of other applicable references. I hope that the length nor the references offend.

“…We simply can’t have a system where we throw good money after bad habits.”
“…how can we make sure that everybody is benefiting from lower costs and better quality by improving practices…”
“…It means prevention…”

These three items taken together will put the government in your life as nothing before has. Like so much in this administration, major emphasis is put on a list of nostrums and myths prevalent in the nanny world of leftist politics for the past 45 years. The stimulus bill contains a provision for “…about $1.2 million is to be given to the private organization, Institutes of Medicine, for it to recommend the national priorities that will be supported or funded by the government…making its recommendations for what treatments and strategies will be supported, the IOM says, to enable “doctors and patients to make smart health decisions.”( http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/comparative-effective-research-what-it.html). This private outift will provide is findings this month. You can be sure that it will contain all the foolishness about obesity, lack of exercise, sugar consumption, red meat consumption, etc. that we’ve all been bombarded with since they won in the “tobacco wars”. The problem is, they don’t work: “…Today’s preventive health strategies promote certain diet and lifestyle behaviors; as well as screenings, tests and treatments of health risk factors; with little credible evidence they improve outcomes for most people, no matter how intuitively correct they may sound. Prevention is not the slam dunk being marketed to consumers….” (http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/comparative-effective-research-what-it.html)
“We need to realize that prevention is not going to help reduce the growth of medical spending,” said Dr. Russell. “It’s touted as one [a panacea] but it is not. In fact, prevention has contributed to our rising medical costs.”
Most people don’t understand prevention or cost effective analysis, she explained. Prevention rarely saves money when studies examine actual costs. People don’t realize that studies claiming savings aren’t usually looking at medical costs and savings, she said. “You will see studies claiming that a preventive intervention saves five dollars for every one dollar spent,” she said. “What they are doing is valuing every life saved at the future earnings of the person and including those dollars along with medical costs and savings.” (http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/06/comparative-effective-research-what-it.html)
As with the prostitution of “global warming” science, medical intervention science is oriented around one thing and one thing only, to control your life and render you absolutely dependant on the government.
“…It means health IT…”

Health IT, will be used in conjunction with the “treatments and strategies” the government is pushing to control what your doctor is providing to you in terms of information and treatment. It will be the source of “data dumps” and correlation studies to create and sell new government “treatments and strategies” to “…enable “doctors and patients to make smart health decisions.” It will help to make sure that you are still marching in lockstep. And, finally, it will be the source of unending losses of all of your information to hackers just as happens now with way too many government data bases.

“…you can’t preclude people from getting health insurance because of a pre-existing condition…”
“…start providing coverage for people who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured…”

Pure. Unadulterated. Welfare. These alone will swell to unmanageable costs within ten years. Just as did Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and all other federal welfare programs

“Are there antitrust issues or market barriers that necessitate government intervention?”

I have mentioned this before but there is a federal antitrust decision that applies to this. In the late 19th century, insurance companies were numerous and activity was extreme with players entering the market at an ever increasing rate until competition became cutthroat. Many states saw this as a tax windfall and used those powers unmercifully and, at the same time, imposed large numbers of regulations that were highly variable between the states. State supervision was in many cases ignorant and corrupt as well. The companies were trapped between extremely high competition and equally high government-imposed costs and petitioned Congress for relief through a national regulation scheme with basic standards that they could all work under. This was stymied by a Scotus decision (Paul vs, Virginia, 1868) which essentially ruled that insurance was a contract as opposed to commerce and, hence couldn’t be controlled by the national government. The Gordian Knot of state control continued. Again, legislation to eliminate this would seem a useful place to start for the federal government, and a more constitutional application of the purpose of government.

All of the efforts as regards health care would show more promise for the bulk of citizens if they concentrated on getting the feds out of it rather than more solidly imbedded in it. Of course there’s no power payoff in that strategy…

This just goes to show why there needs to be an informed debate on this issue, not just a one-sided infomercial. Even I could have debated that softball.
OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi

This just goes to show why there needs to be an informed debate on this issue, not just a one-sided infomercial. Even I could have debated that softball.

Enjoy these conservative articles and blog posts from around the web: Not seen on ABC last night: Republican…

The health care debate really came home for me this week. I run a small business and our health provider, Oxford, just jacked up our premiums for the plan by 25% year-over-year. That’s just an incredible increase. My response has been to seek out a plan that is geared towards only catastrophic coverage and not towards paying only $15 to see a doctor. I’ve never understood exactly how our conception of “insurance” expanded from protection against injury, accident or chronic condition to the idea that we should never, ever pay a $ our of our own pockets for even basic service. I suppose the answer is that health care (for employees) is a tax free, “invisible” benefit, so they have the incentive to push for heavier coverage as they don’t see the cost.