Abortion, Third-Party Payer, and the Cost of Health Care

Abortion, Third-Party Payer, and the Cost of Health Care:

A major problem with America’s health care system, both before and after Obamacare, is the fact that consumers very rarely spend their own money when obtaining health care. Known as third-party payer, this problem exists in part because government directly finances almost 50 percent of health care expenditures. But even a majority of supposedly private health care spending is financed by employer-provided policies that are heavily distorted by a preference in the tax code that encourages insurance payments even for routine expenses. According to government data, only 12 percent of health care costs are financed directly by consumers. And since consumers almost always are buying health care with somebody else’s money, it should come as no surprise that this system results in rising costs and inefficiency. This is why repealing Obamacare is just the first step that is needed if policymakers genuinely want to restore a free market health care system...

I've said this before, I know, but it's the kind of thing that cannot be said often enough. I have insurance on my house, but when I need to re-shingle the roof or replace a window, I don't file a claim. The insurance is there for catastrophic events. I have insurance on my car, but if I get the oil changed or replace the battery or the tires or the alternator, I don't file a claim. The insurance is there for catastrophic events.

Well, why is health insurance different? Why, when I go in to have my yearly physical, doesn't the doctor just charge me a price that we negotiate beforehand, and have me pay it? Why is an insurance company involved? Why, when my child has strep throat and needs an antibiotic, is the insurance company involved? The insurance should be there for things that are, well, catastrophic. The stuff that requires big expenses, the conditions that most people don't get most of the time.

The disconnect between the consumer of services and the actual cost of services is one of the largest drivers, if not the single largest driver, of rising costs in the American health care system. The people who supported Obamacare due to fear of "spiraling costs" supported the worst thing that could happen to health care costs.

Big wheel, keep on turnin'...

This isn't a problem, is it?

The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It's time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

You know what we need? What will make everything better?

A new multi-trillion dollar ENTITLEMENT PROGRAM!!! YAY!!!

Government run health care? Socialized medicine? It's got to work at least as well as Medicare. And Social Security. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the Post Office. Right?

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

You get what you "pay" for

There really is, unfortunately, no shortage of this kind of story. And it's tragic that we're barreling down the road toward this just as fast the Democrats can take us.

An Iraq war veteran died after receiving cancerous lungs from a heavy smoker in a transplant.

Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen’s Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable respiratory condition.

But the organs were from a donor who was believed to have smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day. A tumour was found after the transplant, and its growth was accelerated by the drugs that Mr Millington took to prevent his body rejecting the organs.

Because he was a cancer patient, he was not allowed to receive a further pair of lungs, under hospital rules. The soldier had radiotherapy but died at home in Stoke-on-Trent in February last year.

Hey, at least his health care was "free,"¹ right? He got what he paid for...






¹ - Obviously, "free" isn't "free." It's just a system in which the payers of health care costs are disconnected from the consumers of health care. Those that pay more don't get more, or use more, they just pay more. Those that use less don't pay less, they just use less. Under those circumstances, "demand" increases dramatically (as there is no "cost" associated with consumption) and "supply" plummets (as no one profits from providing it). What could possibly go wrong?

No death panels here, nothing to see, better just move along...

Here's an example of how the British NHS (National Health System) is saving money.

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

No worry here, of course - obviously, Obamacare will find cost savings without ever performing that kind of rationing. And he won't raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000. And the oceans will recede.

And don't even think that there are going to be "death panels!"