Health Care Politics

An interesting policy analysis from John Goodman: There is just one problem with the flurry of news about hospitals. No one is pointing out that all these problems are the result of government intervention in the marketplace. They are not the result of a free market for medical care. In health care, we have so [...]

A compelling rant by a surgeon who sees the damage government intervention has done and is doing to the medical profession. Named the Resource-Based Relative Value System (RBRVS), each procedure code was assigned a specific value, by a panel of experts, based supposedly upon the amount of time and labor it required. It didn’t matter [...]

A radical idea: More than half of every dollar goes to cover the cost of litigation, rather than to the injured and their families. Ironically, the medical malpractice system is inordinately focused on whether someone was at fault when an injury or accident occurs. Of the estimated 187,000 deaths and 6 million injuries that occur [...]

From NRO, worth reading: In short, the system created by this ill-advised law would prevent the emergence of normally functioning markets in medical services and health insurance. Instead, it establishes a top-down system of price controls and subsidies that will discourage healthy people from buying insurance in the first place, reward those who exploit the [...]

Mona Charen The pre-Obamacare health-care system was not a free market for health care at all but a peculiar hybrid with distorting incentives created by bad government policy…Because it was a form of compensation and not true insurance, health coverage became ever more expansive and expensive. Employees were shielded from the true cost of what [...]

From NRO: ‘What we’ve learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health-care system to be run.” via Obamacare’s Predictable Problems – Jonah Goldberg – National Review Online. A listing of some of the issues that are arising as ACA (Affordable Care Act) is put [...]

From a Time Magazine article: The hospital administrators quoted in the piece are particularly candid about how heavily the threat of a lawsuit weighs on a physician’s decision to order tests or treatment… — we do it to be safe. We can’t be sued for doing too much.” via February 2013 Newsletter | Protect Patients Now. [...]