Health Care

Why We Think We Can’t Afford Health Care

by

In 1900, most people walked to work, school, shopping and socializing. The percentage of the average household’s budget devoted to transportation was so low that the Census bureau didn’t even bother to collect data on it. Today, the average household spends 21% of its budget on transportation. It’s the second biggest single cost after housing yet people take such spending for granted and easily factor it in to their personal budgets. We do so because transportation costs rose slowly over the course of the last half century while other costs, such as food, decreased. Decade after decade we gradually became used to spending more and more for transportation till now the average middle-class family easily accepts spending several thousand dollars a year in transportation costs.

As a thought experiment, imagine that for some reason people never had to individually pay the cost of their own transportation.

Read more

Some Substantive Review of the Obamacare Bill

by

We get told that opposition to the Bill is “hysterical”. Yet I get emails like what I have put below the fold all the time. People who are going to have to live with this thing are reading it, understanding it, and very sensibly, getting alarmed by it. That is not hysteria, it is rationality.

This thing is a pig in a poke. Obama and Pelosi and Reid are trying to rush it through before anyone can figure out how bad it is.

The longer people have to read and understand this thing, the more they are going to oppose it.

Take a look and decide if you like what you see.

[To be absolutely clear, the analysis below the fold was not prepared by me. I received it as an email. It was prepared by a gentleman named John David Lewis.]

UPDATE: And of course Gov. Palin is correct about the Death Panels.

UPDATE 2: Is President Obama telling lies about surgical care in America because he (1) knows the facts but is dishonest, (2) does not know the facts because he ignorant and inept, (3) is desperate and hysterical about the disintegration of political support for his Plan? (Hat tip The Corner.)

Read more

The Dangers of Decompartmentalized Health Care Spending

by

So the Democrats have a problem convincing senior citizens that socialized medicine won’t diminish the already dubious quality of care they receive through Medicare. [h/t Instapundit]

Seniors no doubt base this suspicion in large part on their 50+ adult years of watching politicians over-promise and under-deliver. They probably remember back to 1965 when Medicare itself was sold as a cost-saving measure, and today we’re told it’s going to bankrupt the government unless we socialize 15% of the economy. They no doubt wonder how long it will be before Obama’s ideological descendants will tell us that Obama’s miracle plan is a disaster than can only be solved by more socialism.

Seniors have another reason to be nervous. Obama’s plan will put them in direct competition with everyone else for health care spending.

Read more

Rationing Versus Allocation

by

Economists commonly talk about the entire economy as a “rationing” system because all resources are finite and human desire is infinite. In terms of standard dictionary terminology, the day-to-day economy does not ration. We use the term rationing only to describe situations when an individual gets a fixed amount of something regardless of price. For example, during a mass evacuation, we stop using a price mechanism to control an individual’s access to gasoline and instead set a fixed limit of gallons per vehicle.

When opponents of politically-managed health care claim that politically-managed health care will lead to rationing, they use the term in the ordinary sense. Proponents of politically-managed health care have dishonestly tried to obscure the debate by substituting the specialized definition that economists use for the standard definition, so they can claim the current system already “rations” care so nothing will change.

It’s thinly possible that some proponents of politically-managed health care are honestly confused and aren’t just intentionally employing rhetorical tricks to hide the real consequences of the policies they advocate. For those people, I offer the following explanation that uses the common definition of rationing.

It involves tires.

Read more