The Growing Movement to Nullify National Health Care | Tenth Amendment Center

Although I don't necessarily agree with states' rights, as we fought a war over it, this particular article is interesting enough to share:

The Growing Movement to Nullify National Health Care | Tenth Amendment Center

In their efforts to formulate a plan that covered everybody, the plan left a lot of people unhappy. If the final reconciliation bill between the House and Senate comes anywhere near the one passed on 12/24 by the Senate, it will succeed to do only one thing - treat insurance companies like public utilities.

Exorbitant profits by insurance companies is only part of the sick care that characterizes "health care" in this country. The other is excessive costs with no way to control the growth of spending. Our health care, even among the insured, is paid for by someone else. This distorts the true cost of health care; so much that the consumer no longer knows what treatments cost; health care providers have no idea what the true cost of delivering their services are. Meanwhile, insurance companies could care less whether we as a nation are healthier; as with most for-profit business entities, the cheapest, most efficient way of maximizing profits drives business decisions.

So we end up with a system where nobody knows the true cost and nobody cares what the true cost is. What would have to happen in order for the reconciliation bill to really reform health care:

• Merge the payer and payee. In other words, and this is heresy, get rid of 3rd party reimbursement: whether its Aetna, Medicare, or Medicaid. Now the payment for services are tied to what services are needed rather than which middleman can make the most profit. It also means that employers can get out of the business of providing health care and use the money saved to do something constructive like create more jobs.
  
• IF the government wants a Single Payer System, it MUST divorce the collections from the General Fund. In other words, the government can't dip its hands into the fund every time it does not want to go through a painful process, such as an actual declaration of war and be forced to raise revenues to wage the war. Now every undeclared war dips into Social Security and the hypocrites in Washington have the nerve to blame Boomers, who collectively as a group put trillions into Social Security.
• Tell Big Pharma to take a hike. Quit whining and play according to the rules of capitalism that it expects everybody else to do. Along with this comes with actual reform of watchdog agencies like the FDA or USDA, so they become real consumer protection agencies instead of a gateway for drug companies to push their synthetic pills on an unsuspecting public. The problem with our current approach is that ONCE you take a prescription medication, you need several others to deal with the side effects. And this cascades with every pill you take.
• Implement Any Willing provider laws to prevent payment discrimination by insurance companies. Of course, if we got rid of 3rd party payments, then the market decides who the best provider is for a particular syndrome. (Note the use of the word SYNDROME rather than disease).

Now liberal skeptics might say that getting rid of health insurance would make health care unaffordable. To see the fallacy in this argument, lets take a look at a similar distortion in the housing market - rent control. Cities that have rent control and got rid of it noticed a big jump in rents. But over time, sometimes a period as short as four months, rents dropped! Not only that, rents dropped below the controlled rates. Why? Because rent controlled units were not that well maintained and in a market where consumers have a choice, the better maintained units go first.

Like other distortions, rent control is supposed to keep rents low. What ends up happening is that slum lords have a guaranteed profit, because rent control is always in areas where housing demand exceeds supply, like San Francisco. There is a decrease in the market rate housing stock, so the prices far exceed the value of land and improvements, which is what the fair market value would be. With a guaranteed profit, slum lords have no incentive to keep up their properties, so housing stock quality declines. In most rent controlled cities, "going out of business" is the only legitimate way to decontrol properties. Landlords who wish to sell their properties go out of business and "wait it out"; waiting it out, of course, means that the landlord has a spare $40,000-$50,000 (or more) lying around, and of course, landlords are able to write this off if he /she takes a modicum of interest in the property so it no longer qualifies as "passive income".

I bring this up as an example of an artificial market distortion, which is perpetrated by legislation that is supposedly designed to help people. But as we saw, the poor people stuck in the slumlord buildings live in housing stock, whose quality deteriorates over time and with the housing market distortions, which fall into the rental market, means they can never seek better housing. Of course, if they move out and live in a cheaper area, they essentially did what the slum lord wanted them to do from the very beginning. Only now, the slumlord does not have to pay anything for their move, since they were not evicted. With health care, our system of reimbursements isolate the true cost of delivering care from those who pay creating price distortions. With market based reforms, such as getting rid of 3rd party payment altogether, consumers can decide if they really need this procedure or that test and over time useless procedures with low efficacy or tests with high rates of either false negatives or false positives will disappear from the health care delivery system, and with this a fall in the actual cost of delivering sick care. And if people wanted to cut costs even further, they can live healthier lives.

Here is the system at work: I have a high deductible plan with an HSA. In the course of an examination, something strange showed up. Like a dutiful patient I went in for an imaging test which was negative. The doctor wanted me to go in for further testing; after doing a little bit of research, I decided to take my chances; I was after all training for a half marathon at the time and the imaging test was considered the "gold" standard for the body part in question. As a consumer I made the choice to stop after the first round of testing. It's that simple. Of course, it does mean that we all have to be a little more informed about what we spend our health care dollars on. If we all paid for our health care, with subsidies given to those who have a demonstrable need, I bet that the cost of health care would decline dramatically and we may actually have real health care instead of sick care masquerading as health care.

If we can do that for cars, which are also complicated, now that most are computerized, we can do it for our own bodies.

White House Animal Liaison

The Humane Society of US is circulating a petition asking Congress to approve an appointed position that advises the White House on Animal Affairs. The purpose is to raise the awareness of animal issues at the highest levels of government; it will not only apply to companion animal abuse like Atlanta Falcon football player Mike Vick’s dog fighting ring. It will also advise or raise awareness of the plight of lab animals and ostensibly practices like overfeeding geese for foie gras. While all these are real issues that have to be addressed at some level of government, do these practices need a federal position?

Much of the companion animal abuse stems from lack of enforcement at the appropriate levels of government. Anti-dog fighting legislation exists in almost every state and municipality. The fact that these abuses are uncovered regularly implies that the laws are not enforced. It is not clear whether more laws will lessen companion animal abuse. Some practices, like foie gras, are unlikely to be in any legislation, as legislation will also have to outlaw chickens raised in cages crammed with other chickens with little or no exercise. Raising chickens like this is about as controversial a practice as fattening geese for foie gras. Whether we want to admit or not, factory farms with little or no concern for the animals is one reason why chicken prices are relatively low. Overmilking cows is one reason why milk prices are relatively low. Rather than legislating these out of existence, perhaps, we as consumers need to think about the ecological implications of eating meat.

The government in its infinite wisdom often create solutions that are worse than the problem. Since this is a blog about companion animals, lets think of a couple of scenarios that are disastrous for companion animal ownership. It is not inconceivable that one result of the Animal Czar would be the designation of “caretaker” instead of “Owner”, in a misguided attempt to make people more aware of responsible pet ownership. As a caretaker, the government can legislate an Animal Bill of Rights, where the caretaker promises to keep their pets up to date on their vaccines, take the animal to the veterinarian whenever the animal is not feeling well, force people to buy Pet Insurance to help defray the cost, feed the animal a minimum number of calories per day, with so many grams of protein depending upon the size of the animal.

As laudable as these goals are, consider what would happen if the government forced municipalities to fund an Animal Protective Services, much like they are required to have a Child Protective Services; states could be required to fund these new departments. As with children, the Animal Protective Service can confiscate a pet if the owner is deemed negligent or abusive. For children, lack of jackets in cold weather and wearing worn out clothing are a pretty good sign of negligent parents. How would one judge a negligent caretaker with regards to a dog or cat? Leaving the animal tethered outside in a fenced backyard? Walking a big dog, like a bull mastiff, with a choke chain instead of a straight collar? What about long toenails? Would that be a sign of lack of good grooming or lack of exercise, both of which can result in long toenails.

Unlike children, where accepted standards of care are what governments use to decide whether a child is abused or not, no such standard exists for dogs or cats. Consider collars and leashes. Choke chain collars are the subject of quite a bit of controversy, for a couple of reasons. They are associated with older training methods that fell out of favor years ago, so they have a bad reputation. But it is true that people use them because dogs do respond to them far more quickly than they do with a straight collar. To prohibit them creates a practical problem – how would people who aren’t so strong control an exuberant dog that decides to dash after a squirrel? Just like not every parent knows how to raise children, not every dog owner knows how to effectively train dogs. I am not an advocate of choke chains because people do NOT know how to use them effectively and end up hurting smaller dogs. It is doubtful that a large dog with big thick neck muscles are affected the same way with these collars. But to create a policy that prohibits their use and an Animal Protective Service to enforce it does mean that exuberant friendly Labs can only be owned by big guys.

Another example of an arbitrary Animal Protective Service policy that does more harm than good is one designed to make sure the dog has adequate exercise. Some dogs, like Labs or pit bulls require exercise to stay out of “trouble”. The knee jerk reaction to a policy like this is to deny apartment or condominium dwellers the ability to obtain these very good companion animals based upon the misguided assumption that only a house with a fenced yard can provide the proper environment. An apartment dweller who exercises every day with his / her dog does more good than a dog stuck outside in a fenced backyard. First the apartment dweller who takes the time to exercise the dog is also interacting with the dog and providing some level of socialization. The dog barking in a fenced yard has no interaction and only a minimum amount of exercise.

While these are just “What If” scenarios, experience with a government solution to a problem suggests that the cure may be worse than the disease. If the laws on the books are enforced, we would see much less animal abuse. And of course giving Mike Vick a stiffer sentence would help too. This is not to suggest that I do not see the need for better laws or higher visibility of animals at some levels of governments, perhaps a better solution would be to educate would be pet owners on canine psychology so people do not need things like choke chains to control their dogs. If the government really wants to do something about improving the lives of companion animals, a massive education campaign like they did for smoking, would be a better use of taxpayer dollars rather than another bureaucracy that requires taxpayer funding at every level of government.