Want to help the poor? Promote a free market in health care. That’s the argument made by John C. Goodman, author of the new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.
Timothy Dalrymple recently talked with Goodman about the best approach for restoring free-market pricing mechanisms into the market for medical care and health insurance:
Read more on Want to Help the Poor? Promote a Free Market in Health Care…
The Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as “Obamacare”, is a strange law from the perspective of economic theories of insurance markets. Still, one can see where its designers were starting from. The individual mandate may be onerous from a liberty standpoint, but it makes sense if you understand that insurance markets are vulnerable to a phenomenon known as the “death spiral.”
The idea behind the death spiral is based on the recognition that insurance is a risk management scheme. Insurance companies, despite their best efforts, are less knowledgeable about its customers’ health than are their customers. As such, the prices an insurance company charges are based on the average risk that a customer will need care. Read more on The Tortured Logic of the Obamacare Law…
Both the original and compromise versions of the Obama administration’s health insurance mandate (the HHS mandate) coerce people into paying, either directly or indirectly, for other people’s contraception. The policy may have been pushed along by exigencies of Democratic Party constituency politics, but I suspect there’s also a worldview dimension to the mandate, one embodied in one of President Obama’s more controversial appointments—Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren.
In an Acton Commentary last month, Jordan Ballor presented a helpful explanation of the differences between “capitalism” and “corporatism”, a capitalist system that has been corrupted:
Read more on Where Corporatism and Crony Contraceptives Collide…
I just completed a very short interview on Vatican Radio to discuss the current battle between the Obama administration and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It didn’t permit me to say more than that the Obama administration is making a political mistake, so I’d like to say a bit more about the serious consequences that will likely result and how we ended up with this Church-State conundrum in the first place.
At the most recent GOP presidential debate, there was a famous exchange between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Rep. Ron Paul, and the partisan crowd. Blitzer asked Paul about a hypothetical 30-year-old man who refused to purchase health insurance, got sick, and needed extensive medical treatment. Blitzer asked “Who pays?”
Many politicians have talked of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). Mitt Romney has said nullifying the healthcare law would be one of his first actions if he was elected president. However, rather than just repealing the law and going back to the status-quo, with minor changes, the American people should demand true reform.
Despite a promise of “complete and fair coverage of health care for everyone for free,” the Greek state-controlled system is broken and corrupt, the Athens daily ekathimerini.com reports. Predictably, Greeks have taken it upon themselves to build a private health care sector:
Read more on Free Universal Health Care is Expensive, Tricky…
With health care moving back to center stage in Washington, we’re publishing Dr. Donald Condit’s Acton monograph A Prescription for Health Care Reform as a free eBook readable in a variety of formats. This excellent work continues to be available for $6 (paperback) in the Acton Bookshoppe.
Read more on Free eBook: A Prescription for Health Care Reform…
From the Jan. 5 Acton News & Commentary. This is an edited excerpt of “Health-Care Counter-Reform,” a longer piece Dr. Condit wrote for the November 2010 issue of the Linacre Quarterly, published by the Catholic Medical Association. For more on this important issue, see the Acton special report on Christians and Health Care. Dr. Condit is also the author of the 2009 Acton monograph, A Prescription for Health Care Reform, available in the Book Shoppe.
By Dr. Donald P. Condit
Since President Obama signed the Patient Protection Act into law in March 2010, the acrimonious debate on this far-reaching legislation has persisted. For many, the concerns over the Obama administration’s health care reform effort are based on both moral and fiscal grounds. Now, with House Republicans scheduling a vote to repeal “Obamacare” in the days ahead, the debate is once again ratcheting up.
Perceived threats to the sanctity of life have been at the heart of moral objections to the new law. Despite a March 2010 executive order elaborating the Patient Protection Act’s “Consistency with Longstanding Restrictions on the Use of Federal Funds for Abortion,” many pro-life advocates fear a judicial order could reverse long-standing Hyde amendment restrictions on the use of federal tax dollars for abortion. Impending Medicare insolvency and the Patient Protection Act’s establishment of an “independent payment advisory board” to address treatment effectiveness and cost suggest bureaucratic restrictions on the horizon for medical care of the elderly and disabled.
The objections made on fiscal grounds are serious. Prior to the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama voiced concern for 47 million Americans without health insurance. More recently, supporters of this legislation focused on 32 million Americans, with 15 million immigrants and others left out of the equation, yet still requiring care in United States emergency rooms. The Patient Protection Act increases eligibility for Medicaid recipients, yet state budgets are severely strained with their current underfunded medical obligations. Moreover, doctors struggle to provide health-care access to Medicaid patients when reimbursed below the overhead costs of delivering care.
Who Should Pay?
The perception among consumers of third-party responsibility for health, including payment for health-care resource consumption, is the major factor for unsustainable escalation of medical spending in the United States. Yet the Patient Protection Act augments third-party authority and threatens doctor-patient relationship autonomy, by increasing responsibility of government and employers for health care. Patients and physicians will face increasing involvement of third parties in decision making in exam rooms and at the bedside. Read more on Obamacare and the Threat to Human Dignity…
