The New New Health Care Proposal

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is upping the ante on health care.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage his overhaul of the sector, the president unveiled a $950 billion plan that lays the groundwork for his party to try pushing its legislation through Congress without Republican support.

Instead of paring his ambitions, as some in the White House had recommended, the president proposed a new plan based on what the Senate passed in December, adding more spending, more subsidies and a revised mix of taxes.

They didn’t buy off enough of the citizenry last time. Basically, the politicians will do this for as long as it takes to get the vote passed – just like the bailouts. Look for Scott Brown to praise the new effort.

Here’s a thought. Why not repeal every stinking law designed to shore up the bottom lines of the insurance/medical/legal industrial complex and then let everyone purchase their own medical services as needed?

Comments

[TanGeng]

You wouldn't be hiding the cost of medical care that way. What are you silly? You need to hide the cost of medical care from the consumer. Otherwise they'd make intelligent decisions on how much health care they want.

[Brutus]

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Ooooooooooh.

Youre right... I am silly, but Im trying to learn the
ways of the political mind.

[TanGeng]

I don't know if you've ever taken a course in Health Economics. I went through a vigorous, math-heavy, class at my university. It was very interesting for a while, but quite a ways through the class, I realized something.

Half of the class was about how the consumer is on the aggregate too stupid to consume health care at a socially optimal level. Mostly it centers on how everyone is too shortsighted and thus consumes too little health care. One of the tenets of the class was that government or health insurance companies had to hide the cost of health care from the consumer in order to trick them into consuming at an optimal level. It was quite depressing to see the pervasive dim view that the average academic elite has of the free market and the consumer.

The other half of the class was about the estimating the size of the moral hazard and methods for minimizing it. Naturally, much of the moral hazard is a direct result of efforts to hide the cost of health care from the consumer. It's still amazing how much of health economics is about creating artificial problems to solve.

[Georg Thomas]

Thanks for this fascinating comment, TanGen.

Let us have it (or something of its kind and nature) as a post.

While anthropogenic global warming is becoming a showcase of intellectual fraud and Gleichschaltung ( = everyone being made to think and act as the government demands) along the lines of state deification, much less visibly, economics has been and is one of the main conveyor belts producing worshipers of statism and the concomittant love of unfreedom.