Politicians Talking Gibberish About Health Care
Every minute of every day, Americans are subjected to politicians and media pundits talking gibberish. There really is no other word for it, whether the particular subject is economics, foreign policy, or even climatology. However, the gibberish that is getting the most attention right now concerns health care “reform.” President Obama is leading the Democrats with the familiar socialist model that has failed in every industrialized nation in which it has been tried. The Republicans are answering with gibberish of their own. You have to especially admire the Republicans, because they are not only fomenting nonsense from a discredited, minority position, but are actually trying to suck up to voters by selling their version of government-run, loot-funded health care as a “free market solution.” Only the party of George W. Bush could be capable of gibberish like this.
To truly appreciate how bizarre the arguments are, let’s break down what our ruling class is really saying. Sometimes the music bed, the interruptions by the self-absorbed interviewer, or even the graphics leading into next segment can obscure the gibberishness of some of their assertions.
Let us start by examining the position of the Democrats. They assert that every human being has a right to health care, and that it is the government’s job to provide for those who cannot afford it. There are three key terms here: right, health care, and provide. Let’s define the first two.
Right: that which an individual is entitled to without the consent of or compensation to anyone else. For example, people have a right to life. That is, they do not need anyone’s permission, nor are they obligated to compensate anyone in order to live. It is appropriate for an individual to demand, rather than ask for, their right to life to be respected.
Health care: a service which primarily consists of the labor of health care providers. For example, a physician exerts his mind and body, utilizing his education and experience, to attempt to diagnose and treat a patient’s illness or injury. That physician’s labor is “health care.”
Let us now restate the argument made by the Democrats, using these definitions in place of the terms themselves.
“Every individual is entitled to the labor of health care providers without compensating them or obtaining their consent. It is appropriate for individuals to demand, rather than ask, that health care providers treat them for free.”
Gibberish.
To be fair, although the Democrats repeat their slogan about the “right to healthcare” ad infinitum, they do not actually propose that the government defend this “right” directly. Instead, they use their own peculiar definition of the third term previously cited, “provide.” Americans continue to be bewildered by this parlor trick, whether because they are easily confused or because it is more convenient to be fooled than not. In any case, “provide” to the government means that they will employ the method described by William Graham Sumner where A & B get together to pass a law requiring C to do something for X. So as not to miss the opportunity to describe this plainly, this really means that they are going to use the brute force of government to force some people to pay for health care for others. That is all it is, when you peel away the doubletalk, jingoism, and spin.
Moreover, it is not just your property that the government will take in order to run its program. It will also require another huge portion of your liberty as well. In a recent speech about his health care reform plans, President Obama suggested that “we” must begin encouraging healthier lifestyles, including getting our children away from computer games and back to playing outside. “We” means “the government.” Of course, when it is the government’s responsibility to pay for the health care of other people, the government now claims a right on behalf of taxpayers to see that those people keep themselves as healthy as they can in order to limit the cost. There are already government-imposed exercise programs in Japan. Americans should be aware that the same rules will apply here. One can almost hear the government “instructress” from Orwell’s 1984 screaming from the telescreen.
“Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade.”[1]
Political gibberish often conceals rather horrifying ideas. Thankfully, we have an opposition party that is opposing these heinous proposals, correct? As the people from Hertz say, “Not exactly.”
It is true that Republicans oppose a government-run health care plan. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Republican summary of their “Patient’s Choice Act” argues that “ The government would run a health plan "with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office, and the incompetence of Katrina.”[2] All true, but of course the so-called party of individual liberty and free markets fails to argue the main point: the government – we the people – do not have the right to forcibly take money from one person and give it to another, not even for the purposes of paying for their health care. Nowhere in any report made public nor in any interview with a spokesperson for this “opposition party” will you hear this argument. There is a good reason for that.
Of course, the Republicans will argue that their plan works through the tax system and actually let’s families “keep more of their own money” to spend on health care, but a careful read of the WSJ article reveals that the same redistribution scheme is hidden within the stale “free market” rhetoric. First, the Republican plan would eliminate the tax exemption for employers when they provide health insurance benefits to their employees. This amounts to a tax increase on employers, whether they continue to provide the benefits or whether they eliminate them and merely pay taxes on the extra net income. What would the government do with this new revenue?
“Instead, it would give an annual tax credit of $2,300 to each individual and $5,700 to each family that they could use to offset the cost of their health insurance. Low-income families would get extra money to buy into private insurance plans.” [emphasis added]
So, in an effort to appear to be protecting the property rights of their more affluent base but at the same time buy the votes of those who cannot afford health care, the Republicans will simply tax those whom they think they can get away with taxing and call their own version of wealth redistribution a “tax cut,” much like George Bush’s “tax refunds” of the past decade. Of course, there is only one word for the suggestion that you can “cut” or “refund” taxes for people who are not paying taxes.
Gibberish.
As usual, the American public is served up a carefully framed debate that attempts to appear to have two sides but doesn’t. In either case, we are getting “reform” of the health care system in the only way that any government can “provide” anything. They are going to forcibly take away the property (taxes) of one group of people and use it to provide property (health care) to another group. Lest anyone mistakes this brutal practice as “the wrong means to a compassionate end,” let us remember the only reason that politicians from either party suggest this: to buy the votes of those who believe that they will benefit from it. Since there are more who would receive benefits in the voting base of the Democratic Party, they are more open about what they are really doing. Since there are more of those who will be forced to pay in the base of the Republican Party, they try to spin their redistribution scheme as a “free market solution.” However, it is dressed up, it amounts to one thing; stealing.
In addition to ignoring the fundamental violation of rights that is part and parcel of any government provided service, both the Republicans and Democrats seem completely unaware of the root cause of the problem: health care is only so expensive because government already provides so much of it. This is the other elephant sitting in the corner whenever politicians from either party start talking about health care reform.
Last year, total health care spending in the United States amounted to roughly $2.4 trillion dollars. Medicare and Medicaid alone accounted for over $800 billion, or 33% of that. Add the Veteran’s Administration and other smaller government health care programs, and government is directly providing almost half of all health care delivered in this country. What does this have to do with the price? Any first-year economics student can tell you.
Price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Demand has two components: the desire to buy a good or service and the ability to buy that good or service. Let us assume that the desire for health care services is unlimited, as it is for many other goods or services. In that case, the only factor that can limit demand for health care services is ability to pay. This is the factor that most influences the price of every other good or service provided in the marketplace, including food, clothing, and shelter, which are even more vital to human life than health care. It is the finite amount of money that the buyers have to spend which keeps the price down and makes most goods affordable to those on limited budgets.
However, when government makes something an entitlement, demand suddenly becomes unlimited. Since the government now must provide the benefit and they have the option of taxing or printing what money they need to provide it, there is no longer anything holding down the price. This is the reason that we have seen health care prices skyrocket in recent decades. They will continue to rise until all resources are consumed trying to provide them.
State and local governments have already been experiencing this for years because of the exploding cost of their shares of the Medicaid programs (half of Medicaid benefits are paid by the states, some of which require their local governments to pay a percentage as well). They cannot print their own money, so they have instead cut their police forces and other legitimate functions of government in order to divert money to the insatiable Medicaid beast. In one local county in upstate New York, 100% of the property taxes collected in that county and $40 million dollars of sales tax revenue – the county’s only other revenue source – went to pay that county’s share of the Medicaid bill for their recipients. Now, it has been reported that the majority of the TARP funds that were supposed to go to “shovel-ready infrastructure projects” are instead being earmarked for “existing state social programs.” An audit of these payments would undoubtedly reveal that the bulk will go to Medicaid.
Economic laws are like the forces of nature. They can be held off, as a levy holds off a flood, but they will eventually overwhelm any attempt to violate them. The most fundamental economic law is this: you cannot consume more than you produce without taking the difference from someone else. Government produces nothing. Therefore, any health care benefit that government provides must be funded with money taken by force from someone else. There is no political theory, mathematical equation, or black magic incantation that can change this.
However, even if we are able to put aside the moral repugnancy of this practice, we cannot do so forever. Once voluntary exchange is abolished, market forces are suspended and the price of providing health care will rise until the government is no longer able even to steal enough to pay for it. That day was only a few decades away for the existing government health care programs before the economic crisis we find ourselves in now (which was similarly caused by government for all of the same reasons). If government attempts to provide everyone with health care, the end will come much sooner.
This sheds light on a fundamental misconception that underlies all of the societal problems that American society faces today: the belief that there is a conflict between individual rights and the “needs of society.” This conflict doesn’t exist. Protecting the rights of every individual serves the needs of society. Violating those rights, for whatever purpose, destroys society. In fact, it is by violating the individual rights of its constituents that government causes nearly every societal problem we face. The high price of health care is just one example.
There is only one moral and practical answer to the high cost of health care: we must get government out of the health care business entirely. That includes rejecting new programs proposed by either major party and figuring out a humane way to get our children out of the existing entitlement system without cutting off those presently dependent upon the benefits. The only lucid argument I’ve heard so far has been put forth by former presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul. He suggests that we dismantle our $1 trillion per year overseas military empire and use that money to pay Medicare and Social Security benefits while our children are allowed to enter the workforce without enrolling in the system themselves.
What do you know? A politician moved his lips and something besides gibberish came out.
[1] Orwell, George 1984 Part I Ch. 3
[2] Adamy, Janet “Republicans Offer Health-Care Plan” The Wall Street Journal May 21, 2009
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Here was a paragraph I found interesting,
"It is true that Republicans oppose a government-run health care plan... but of course the so-called party of individual liberty and free markets fails to argue the main point: the government – we the people – do not have the right to forcibly take money from one person and give it to another, not even for the purposes of paying for their health care."
There is another "main point": the United States Constitution does not allow Congress to involve itself in health care, except as part of their own or their employees' salary package. Every health-care or other entitlement program presently "authorized" by Congress is patently unconstitutional and therefore illegal. The President is not given ANY legislative powers by the Constitution so he cannot simply impose his will on us.
Either the Constitution is the Supreme Law of our Land, or the federal government is. In theory it is the former. In practice, quite the opposite.
There's lots of US Constitutionsl out there, which one are you talking about.
1. What the Courts will say about the Health Reform bill. It probably will be challenged and will probably be found constitutional based on the commerce clause. Go to the Volkoh Conspircacy and poke around.
2. What the Constitution meant at the time it was written. That probably wouldn't support health care --- but it wouldn't support an awful lot of what the federal government does--- drug control, etc.
As for the right of government to take money from A and give to B--- hard to see how in principle that is unConst. I go to you and say that I need 94 per cent of your income to fight a war and I'm giving that money to everyone in the unorganized militia who have been called to duty by the state and federalized --- there's nothing unconstitutional or illegal about that.
I struggle with this issue, I lived in europe for a bit a couple years back and was amazed at the availability of free health and dental care yet I know fundamentally "free" healthcare is against freedom because it is stealing. There are a few other problems I have with it, I don't trust our fed gov is organized and trustworthy enough to take something as important as healthcare on,I am pretty sure there will not be access to "free" holistic/naturepathic medicine and I would get pissed everytime I seeing lazy people practice unhealthy living habits whilst getting "free" health care thanks to all the hardworking suckers.
Is there any libertarian proposals for any kind of healthcare system?
"free thinkers are dangerous, and beautiful"
They pay a VAT (Value Added Tax) on top of their income taxes to fund it and also pay in other way: high unemployment, inflation, lower standard of living: there is a universal law of economics that cannot be violated: you cannot consume more than you produce. When people don't bear the cost of their own consumption, it has to be transferred somewhere. I spend a lot of time in Germany and have many friends there: they have become wise to this government nonsense. Their last elections prove it.
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
Author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America
I usually put free in " "'s for that reason. I wonder how hard it would be for a group of people that have a great health record and refrain from drug abuse and fast food to have a cheap group insurance coverage? you know, kinda like what they do with some car insurances?hmm
Still there is the problem of way overpriced care, how do we dismantle the restrictions and bureaucracy involved with healthcare??
"free thinkers are dangerous, and beautiful"
Here is my favorite line "You have to especially admire the Republicans, because they are not only fomenting nonsense from a discredited, minority position, but are actually trying to suck up to voters by selling their version of government-run, loot-funded health care as a “free market solution.” Only the party of George W. Bush could be capable of gibberish like this."
Amen brother! And the remaining Republicorp dimwits will support the Republicorp plan over the Democorp plan never knowing that they are the same plan.
As usual, Dr. Paul has the only real solutions and they make so much sense they are widely ignored.
Here is a terrific article I just finished reading that sums up what will go wrong if Obama has his way with health care. I hope you will forgive me for this long post, but the article was just so great that I felt compelled to cut and paste it here:
June 23, 2009
ObamaCare: Kiss Your Access Goodbye
By Scott Atlas
President Obama and the Democratic Congress repeat a mantra so often that it has become a truism: America's health care system is a scandalous failure, and it is absolutely urgent that we fix it now. The mainstream media nod their agreement, and yet, the polls tell us something else: Eighty percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the quality of their health care. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans, about three-fourths, are happy with their current health care coverage. (CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, March 2009; Gallup poll, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001; Quinnipiac University poll, October 2007).
So why, then, does a savvy politician like Barack Obama believe he has room to push for a radical overhaul of health care? The polls also show that the same majority of Americans who rate their own health care consistently join the critics when questioned about the "quality of the system" as an abstract whole. It is this unacknowledged inconsistency of American opinion that gives President Obama the opening he needs to push for what is, at heart, a plan for government-run health care. Perhaps it would concentrate our minds wonderfully, then, if we paused to consider the greatest consequence of ObamaCare: Rationed or restricted access to doctors, therapies and care. To see why, you need look no further than other nations with government-centralized health systems that our President and Congress are intent on emulating.
With ObamaCare, access is sure to be reduced in six major ways.
Number 1: Less access to timely health care, especially by trained specialists
Independent, peer-reviewed studies document that patients seeking care from physicians with specialty training-cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and neurologists-must wait far longer for those services under government-run health systems.
* Patients in Canada and the UK wait months longer than U.S. patients for knee or hip replacement surgery, cataract surgery, and radiation treatment.
* In fact, Canadian patients must wait weeks, months, or even more than a year longer just for referral for such care.
Ironically, while Americans contemplate moving toward these sluggish systems, the Canadian and British governments are spending vast sums studying how to reduce their scandalous waitlists.
Number 2: Less access to state-of-the-art drugs that are proven to cure serious diseases, like cancer
Americans-men and women, adults and children-consistently have the world's best survival rates from cancer, both common and rare cancers.
The documented superiority of the U.S. health care system for cancer outcomes is most dramatic when comparing U.S. sur¬vival rates to the most centralized systems, like the government-run universal National Health System of Britain or Canada's wholly government-controlled universal health system.
Why is this so? One critical factor is a lack of access to new drugs proven to prolong survival, and often even cure, these otherwise lethal diseases.
* Nils Wilking from Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, an author of a widely reported publication that compares international cancer survivals, recently explained that nearly half the improvement in cancer survival rates in the United States in the 1990s was due to "the introduction of new oncology drugs." He writes: "No country on the globe does as good a job overall as the United States. Thus, the U.S. government should focus on ensuring that all cancer patients receive timely care, rather than radically over¬hauling the current system."
Why are government-run systems so far behind in cancer therapies?
* The prestigious journal Nature Reviews recently noted that government price controls were key to the lag in availability of cancer-fighting drugs in Europe. Of the 71 drugs receiving marketing clearance both in the European Union and the United States between 2000 and 2005, 73% received approval first from the U.S. FDA. On average, the FDA approval came one year ahead of clearance by the European Medicines Agency. To those who would charge the FDA with rushing its research, the fact is that both agencies have an identical mean approval time of 15.7 months.
When, then, were new drugs available first in the United States? It is because drug developers chose to submit them here first. The lack of government price controls in America allows private companies to recoup and ultimately profit from their huge R&D investments.
Number 3: Less access to modern medical technologies that lead to earlier diagnoses, safer treatments, and better outcomes
Technology innovation to improve health has been the defining characteristic of medical advancement. Scientists expect even more remarkable advances in medicine with the emergence of molecular biology in clinical care. And the high value of medical technology has not been lost on the American public: Eighty percent of Americans say that being able to get the most advanced tests, drugs, and medical procedures and equipment is "very important" or "absolutely essential."
In stark contrast to the United States, countries with government-controlled systems show severe deficiencies in medical technologies, both in their availability and in what is a truly scandalous usage of antiquated versions often operating at substandard levels of function.
Quantity, not just quantity, is an issue. Published data comparing the availability of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) Scanners in the United States against Canada other OECD countries is striking.
* The gap between Canada and the United States is very large-32 CTs per million people in the United States versus 11.3 per million in Canada; and 27 per million MRIs in the United States versus 5.5 per million in Canada.
* In the UK, the House of Commons itself recently reported a severe underutilization of modern medical technologies in their 60-year-old National Health System, lamenting that their system is "slow to adopt and diffuse new technologies" resulting in it "lagging behind many other countries."
* In Canada, a 2008 study found that its national health care system relies on old and outdated medical technologies for cancer care, diagnostic services, cardiovascular care, neurology, urology, genetics, and general hospital and surgical services.
* According to the Fraser Institute's annual Waiting Your Turn report, the median wait times in 2007 for Canada as a whole were 4.8 weeks for a CT scan, 10.1 weeks for an MRI, and 3.9 weeks for an ultrasound.
Number 4: Less access to choice of doctor and choice of treatments for patients and families
We don't have to only look outside the United States to understand how access to choice is impacted when government controls the system. In a 2006 report from the non-profit Center for Studying Health System Change, nearly half of all U.S. doctors polled said they had stopped accepting or limited the number of new Medicaid patients.
Again, no mystery about why . . . when government dictates prices on services, those services become unavailable. And because of inappropriate government dictates on medical care coverage, it is the patient who suffers most. Directly or indirectly, choice becomes limited, and health care becomes rationed.
And yet the rhetoric of the Obama Administration is eerily similar to the language of Canada's government Medicare program, which baldly asserts that Canadians get "medically necessary services." The administration also sounds much like the UK's House of Commons Task Force, which recommended "techniques for determining the cost-effectiveness of new technologies" with "nationally approved standards for the commissioning of new technologies." Like his nationalist counterparts, President Obama also has plans for a Federal Health Board to set "evidence-based standards" for benefits of insurance and quality for medical procedures, as well as a federally directed development of health IT standards, rather than allowing private sector innovation to yield what is best in a competitive marketplace.
ObamaCare will likely sacrifice another key differentiator of our medical care, the excellence of the American physician. As our government dominates insurers, will the best and the brightest continue to choose to endure the years of training and sacrifices for a career in medicine? Will they want to pursue a career where wages are defined by government, and where medically naïve government employees with the sole mission of lowering costs dictate medical care options to physicians and their patients?
Number 5: Less access to choice of health insurance coverage
A key component of the Administration's proposal is expected to include a "public option" for insurance for those presently not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP or the various government health insurance plans. This "new option" would actually reduce access and choice of health insurance coverage to Americans. This will happen even though there will be no requirement to drop current private coverage.
Why? The answer is an effect known as "crowd-out." Recent experience shows that public insurance expansions mainly crowd out private insurance coverage, rather than provide coverage to those otherwise uninsured.
* Dr. Jonathan Gruber illustrated crowd-out in a 2007 NBER report showing that the numbers of the privately insured falls by about 60% as much as the number of publicly insured rises (and is much larger when family-wide effects of eligibility are considered).
* The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed that crowd-out raises the costs of expanding coverage. It is more likely to occur among people with moderate incomes who have greater access to employer coverage and ability to pay for it.
* Dr. Lara Shore-Sheppard reported that public health insurance expansions increased the likelihood that small business employers will limit their coverage.
There are other reasons why Americans should care about crowd-out of private insurance.
First, while intended as a means to reduce insurance costs, costs to the government (meaning the taxpayer) end up dramatically increasing.
* Consider the very recent experience in Hawaii. Only seven months after offering the only statewide universal child health care insurance program in the country, Hawaii had to end the program. Why? Because public funds had essentially replaced private coverage that children already had. In fact, over 80 percent of those taking up the state health insurance for children were already covered by private insurance.
Second, the Administration plans to devise a Federal Board to determine the "appropriate" insurance benefits for Americans. Government bureaucrats will decide by government mandate what insurance must cover. Ironically, government-defined insurance mandates themselves are a primary cause of expensive health insurance.
Similar government mandates requiring specific benefits have grown from only a handful in the 1960s to around 2,000 at present, according to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance. Mandated benefits currently increase the cost of basic health coverage from a little less than 20% to more than 50%, depending on the state.
You might wonder why all Americans would be forced by their government to pay for benefits many don't want or value, like massage therapy, acupuncture, in vitro fertilization, and chiropractor care. With government insurance becoming more dominant as crowd-out occurs, it will be far easier for politicians to add even more mandates to what they consider "necessary" coverage for our families.
Number 6: Less access to the leading innovators and innovations in health care
By virtually all accounts, the vast majority of all the innovation in health care in the world comes out of the U.S. health-care system, whether you judge it by the number of clinical trials, or the sources of the most important medical advances in recent history, or the number of patents, or the number of scientific journal publications, or the home of Nobel Prize winners.
American excellence is at risk with government-centralized health care.
First, access to innovative care will be stifled by the centralization of government power in a Federal Health Board, where government employed bureaucrats are empowered to assess what is "appropriate" medical care. This unprecedented intervention by our government, interposing bureaucrats whose goal is reigning in costs directly between doctors and patients, is specifically and openly intended to limit choices on new diagnostic methods and recently developed treatments.
Second, heavy handed government has been shown to stifle innovation in medicine (as we have seen in access to new drugs, medical imaging technology, and safer medical devices in Europe, Canada, and other countries where government controls health care). Just a decade ago, more than two-thirds of all drug research was conducted in Europe. Now, 60% is conducted in the United States. Because Europe's government-dominated health care systems dictate prices, there is a serious negative impact on innovation. From 1998 to 2002 there were only 44 new drugs launched in Europe, compared to 85 in the United States.
Third, with government as the overriding, dominant payer to doctors, the already announced plan to shift payments from highly trained specialists to family physicians and other generalists will undoubtedly dissuade many of the best and brightest - the source of those innovations - from even pursuing such rigorous subspecialty fields.
After repeated lecturing about our disastrous health care system, the message is clear: This is a rescue of the highest priority, a full scale emergency, "code blue" ... and it must be implemented stat, as my medical colleagues might say. What really is urgent is careful deliberation before costly changes are made that could force Americans to lose precious access to what most of the world envies.
Our government should best heed the principal maxim taught to all doctors everywhere--primum non nocere--first, do no harm.
Scott W. Atlas is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a Professor at Stanford University Medical Center.
Health care is a huge national concern. There's a lot of talk about health care reform, and the industry does need it, especially since so many people that are only after the most basic of care have to get emergency cash loans to cover something as simple as a simple antibiotics script, and a full third of the nation is without health insurance. The lead researcher for the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, Elliot Fisher, a practitioner for over 20 years, has pointed out that areas that spend more on health care interestingly spend more on unnecessary procedures, and have higher mortality rates. So why do we need payday cash advances for health care that is worse when more expensive?
Then no one will be able to afford it, that is until the mandatory vaccines come around.
The article you refer to states that in order to keep costs down "we" have to prevent doctors from ordering unnecessary tests and performing unnecessary procedures. But there is NO WAY our government or any central authority can make this happen without drastically reducing the quality of care, as doctors find ways to work the system to their advantage now that certain procedures are no longer permitted. You only have to look at how our survival rates for diseases such as cancer, where timely and sometimes expensive treatment is essential, compare with those of a country with nationalized health care such as Canada and the EU countries to understand that a top-down approach would be a very bad idea. Here's a chart. Remember, these are the rates for EVERY case of cancer in the US, whether the patient is insured or not. Also keep in mind that many of the cancer treatments used around the world were developed in the US, where prior to this national health care idiocy there were still incentives to come up with new and better treatments:
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2007/10/closer-look-at-cancer-...
Cancer survival rates are lower in England than in most other EU countries (they are on par with Poland), and costs are higher. 5 year survival rates for men in England are 44.8 compared to 66.3 in the US. Why is that? Because people in England have to wait too long for diagnosis and treatment. And why is that? Could it have anything to do with the fact that England was the first country in the EU to institute national health care? Here's an article about it from a British newspaper:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560849/UK-cancer-survival-rate-l...
The best way, the ONLY way to keep costs down without sacrificing quality is for doctors to be competing with one another in a free market, where, as Tom says, demand is limited by people's ability and desire to pay. 300 million people spending their own money in their own best interest is a far more likely to cut unnecessary costs without sacrificing quality than are a handful of bureaucrats looking at statistics. Oh, they'll cut the procedures all right, but health care costs will still go up, and don't expect that MRI anytime soon if your doctor suspects you may have a tumor in your abdomen. A lot of MRI scans are unnecessary, you see.
Yes, the money is going to run out, but not before the quality of health care plummets to third world levels, bright young people stop enrolling in medical schools and medical innovation grinds to a halt. Perhaps the Americans who are supporting Obama today are happy contemplating a miserable, shortened old age. I'm not.
It's so unnecessary. If we had a free market for health care, not only would it be affordable for the average person, but many doctors, unhampered by government regulation and high taxes, would be willing to provide free or reduced-cost care for the truly indigent. That is what doctors used to do before this Medicare and Medicaid madness began. In a free market system EVERYONE would be so much better off.