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.