The Health Insurance Mistake We're Going to Make

In any market, there has to be the freedom not to participate. Without that freedom, there is far less downward pressure on prices, and less incentive to compete.

What the Democrats will do instead is to enforce price controls on the market. They will say, as they do now with Medicare and other services, that a doctor must bill the government no more than what they bill other insurers for a given procedure or service.

That will cause doctors to do what every other regulated group has ever done: they will find ways around the regulations. They will find new services to provide -- or new labels for old services -- and bill whatever the market will bear. Prices will zoom out of sight.

In addition, if everyone has insurance, everyone will go to the doctor. People with head colds will line up for treatment, which will not be forthcoming. But they will still show up, and insist on being fixed.

I know this, because I've been to a hospital emergency room.

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Stupid, Treasonous Puns

In Captain Ed's Redefining Hard Intelligence post, he points to a WaPo article in which an Afghan tribal chief is convinced to help our side when a CIA officer gives him Viagra.

Great, WaPo. Now every tribal leader with whom we meet will be the butt of Viagra jokes, followed soon after by Al Qaeda trafficking in pallets of the stuff, probably on trucks emblazend with a Red Crescent banner. Humanitarian medical aid, it is.

And for a CIA officer to give up this tool of the trade? What a treasonous, or at the very least unethical, moron. While it may be immoral, I don't suppose it's unethical for a CIA man to give Viagra to a tired old polygamist. But it's certainly unethical for him to divulge tactics to a reporter.

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Adult Stem Cells Save People; Embryonic Stem Cells, Not So Much

Spanish and British doctors have successfully grown a trachea from a woman's own adult stem cells and replaced her own damaged trachea with it. The team reported their results from the June operation in the Medical Journal Lancet. From the article, emphasis added:

The graft immediately provided the recipient with a functional airway, improved her quality of life, and had a normal appearance and mechanical properties at 4 months. The patient had no anti-donor antibodies and was not on immunosuppressive drugs.

A trachea is not a heart, but the fundamental change in the way twenty-first century medicine will approach first organ failure and then age-related ailments cannot be overstressed.

From The Minority Report and The Independent:

University of Bristol Professor Martin Birchall, who worked with the Spanish team, said, "This is just the beginning. I think it will completely transform the way we think about surgery. In 20 years' time the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."

No children were maimed, harmed, or grown in the lab to be harvested like cattle for the production of this trachea.

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ObamaCare Will Fail, Because It Is Supposed to Fail

First, an aside:

Health care costs have skyrocketed over the last several years because

1. We have separated the doctor from the patient, inserting the insurance company between them
2. Government spending on health care has injected large amounts of taxpayer money into the system
3. Medical malpractice lawsuits have forced all doctors to obtain medical malpractice insurance, practice defensive medicine, and fail to delegate medical decisions to less-trained personnel

Why is medical insurance necessary? To amortize the medical expenses. Yet amortizing those expenses is necessary in part because of medical insurance: it costs only a few dollars in materials and 10 minutes of labor to set a broken bone. Yet because the doctor cannot risk doing it incorrectly, the patient (or his insurance company) may have to pay hundreds of dollars.

Back to ObamaCare.

Obama plans to create or expand government health insurance, covering everyone who doesn't have insurance now. While he says that if you like your current plan, you can keep it, what he doesn't say is that a factor in keeping costs low for those existing plans is the presence of uninsured people. Insurance companies have to compete for business both with other companies and with the zero-cost plan: not having insurance at all.

Insuring the uninsured will raise the rates for the insured.

Obama says he will prevent insurance companies from overcharging for malpractice insurance. That means, of course that some doctors will not be insured at all, or that dangerous doctors will get cheaper insurance than they otherwise could afford. In essence, the plan is to subsidize bad doctors.

All of this will have the effect of raising medical costs. When that happens, wait for the sirens to blare for the government either to nationalize the medical insurance industry, to siphon off its customers, or to finally step in and employ the doctors directly.

What am I saying? That would be socialism.

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Around the Web

I used to do this a lot, but ... well, I did it once, I think.

Rachel Lucas has a girl crush on the insanely crushworthy Megyn Kelly.

Ace tells us that Democrat officials in Ohio probably broke the law trying to gather dirt on Joe the Plumber, but the LA Times won't release a video they have showing Barack Obama and Bill Ayers toasting and praising their mutual buddy Rashid Khalidi.

Frank J 'splains how the 21st century works to Syria.

Gateway Pundit shows Tito the Builder revving up Republicans at a Sarah Palin rally.

Michelle Malkin shows who is post-racial.

Treacher: Sarah Palin is smart. Joe Biden can't take the heat in the kitchen.

Brian Simpson does a fine writeup on health care policy at The Minority Report.

Jeff G at Protein Wisdom points us to the American Standard's timeline on the mortgage paper corruption crisis.

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A pound of prevention barely worth an ounce of cure

Michael F. Cannon has a blog post at Cato.org about preventive medicine.

While I've always thought that prevention of disease would be less costly than treatment, that is only true, when we stop to ponder it, when the total cost per person treated with some preventive measure is less than the savings in cure costs. That means that the total cost per person treated or per preventive measure would have to be lower than the difference between the cure expenditure with and without prevention. Furthermore, those costs have three categories: direct costs, indirect costs, and abstract costs.

You there at the back! Please don't yawn unless you've got enough for the rest of us.

Where was I? Oh, yes. The direct costs are the costs of shots, educational materials, and so on.

The indirect costs include the time off work going to get some preventive treatment, the loss of efficiency when some supposed safety control is implemented, and the added bureaucratic sludge that happens whenever we try to prevent something bad by changing the behavior of everyone.

Abstract costs include the loss of freedom for the individuals who are given the prevention.

Nestled invisibly between the indirect and abstract costs of preventative medicine is what it does to people's opinion. Much of preventative medicine consists of "raising awareness" of the problem, so that people can avoid stepping into open pits and so forth.

But if told too many times about an open pit, or a hot stove, or dangerous intersection, people will be filled with thoughts only of safety and precaution, aftraid to risk opening their eyes lest ultraviolet radiation damage their unprotected corneas. They exist only to be safe.

Alternatively, the more preventive measures we implement, the more jaded the people become and the more difficult it becomes to raise their awareness to a preventive level.

But the key problem is that for prevention to work, the pool of those treated with the preventive measure must be larger than the number cured, in many cases far larger. Taken together, and since prevention must be applied to the wider pool while remediation only to those affected, the cost of the prevention must be very low, and its effectiveness very high, for prevention to make sense.

Depending on the depth of the pit and the type of snakes at the bottom, it may be more cost-effective and indeed more humane to wait for someone to step into the pit and throw them a rope. Put a sign on the pit perhaps, but don't develop a slick ad campaign to tell people to avoid the pit, which will likely draw more people to it anyway.

This all yields the best quote ever on socialized medicine:

The point of the medical-care system is to serve people. It is not the point of people to serve the medical-care system.
-- Louise B. Russell

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