Here is a short video from proponents of single payer revealing a core contempt for the principal of profit– imagine removing profit from 20% of the economy!

The left is salivating and fortunately their arrogance may be their downfall.

http://www.letfreedomringblog.com/?p=4905

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-tom-coburn/a-better-way-to-reform-he_b_213109.html?page=6

We may yet come to the same point! I haven’t had time to read your last comment with any real thought, but I will. In the meantime…

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/06/calling-democrat-socialized-medicine.html

Heh!

Chris Ewin, MD Says:

June 22nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Simple solution:

Patients need:
1. High Deductible Health plan (like car insurance)
2. Health Savings Account (Medical IRA)
3. Accident Insurance
4. Primary Care Physician with a direct practice model
(we take care of 85% of your needs and function like a gas station with unlimited
gas, tire changes, tune-ups…etc)

Primary care physicians need:
1. Change their business model to a direct practice
2. Pass the Ryan/Coburn bill (Patient Choice Act)

If passed, it will allow pre-paid physician fees to be included in the definition of “medical care” under the IRS Code of 1986. This will allow Direct Practice fees to be qualified medical expenses on Health Savings Accounts. One fee, once a year for unlimited access to primary care.

The only way we can resuscitate primary care is to change the business model.

News article about the Patient Choice Act:

Wall Street Journal –
May 21, 2009

Republicans Offer Health-Care Plan
By JANET ADAMY
WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers stepped up their opposition to Democrats’ plans for overhauling the nation’s health-care system, introducing legislation on Wednesday that would give Americans tax credits to pay for health insurance.

The plan, backed by some Republicans in the House and Senate, offers a glimpse into how the GOP is mobilizing against Democrats’ effort to create a public insurance plan and to require companies to provide or otherwise pay for health-insurance coverage for workers. Republican lawmakers say such measures would bureaucratize the nation’s health system and stifle job creation.

Given the Democrats’ control of Congress, the Republican plan has little chance of passage. But it reflects some Republican lawmakers’ growing dissatisfaction with a bipartisan effort to fix the health-care system. Congressional leaders hope to pass a health-care overhaul this summer.

The government would run a health plan “with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office, and the incompetence of Katrina,” according to a summary of the Republicans’ plan unveiled on Wednesday. Called the Patients’ Choice Act, it would eliminate the tax break that employers receive for providing health-insurance benefits to their workers. Instead, it would give an annual tax credit of $2,300 to each individual and $5,700 to each family that they could use to offset the cost of their health insurance. Low-income families would get extra money to buy into private insurance plans.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) said the system of employer-based coverage is becoming “a 21st century relic” as companies become less generous with benefits.

President Barack Obama has tasked Congress with drawing up legislation to reduce health-care costs and expand health-insurance coverage. He and many Democrats want to create a new public insurance plan to help cover the uninsured and create competition for private insurers.

The Republican plan introduced Wednesday shares some things in common with measures Democrats are pushing. Both parties want to create insurance exchanges that make it easier to comparison-shop for health-care plans. They also want to shift health-care dollars toward preventing chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes, not just because it will make Americans healthier, but because prevention is cheaper than treating people once they get really sick.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.), who is leading the effort to draft a health overhaul, said that while this Republican measure meets many of his goals, eliminating the tax incentives for employer-provided health benefits “would destroy the employer-based health-care system we have today.”

Karen Davenport, director of health policy at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, said the Republican plan’s tax subsidy wouldn’t cover half of the cost of the average family’s health-care premiums.

Rep. Ryan introduced the legislation with Sens. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) and Richard Burr (R., N.C.), and Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.).

Many Democrats are backing the idea of curbing the health-care tax exclusion, which exempts employer health-care benefits from taxation. Under proposed changes, wealthy individuals and people with particularly generous benefits could pay some taxes on their benefits. But most Democrats don’t want the exemption eliminated altogether, as called for under the Republican plan.

For the bulk of its history, Medicare has operated as a single insurance pool, spreading the costs of any individual’s illness across the full population. By contrast, a system of competing health plans threatens to fragment the pool, separating the healthy from the sick. The easiest way for insurers to keep premiums low, and thereby win more enrollees, is to attract the healthy and avoid people who are sick and will run up heavy claims. Not only insurance plans, but also healthy beneficiaries have a short-term stake in this separation since they pay less until they need health care. But this fragmentation or risk selection undermines the pooling of risk that insurance is supposed to provide. It leaves sick people in a smaller pool with higher costs.- From The American Prospect, 1999

I’m coming to the conclusion that the mantra of insuring the uninsured is a diversion to protect the second jewel of the progressive utopian vision- Medicare.

It isn’t rocket science to understand that if the risk pool is the elderly, premiums either need to reflect that or subsidies from the treasury need to increase geometrically with an aging population.

The left continues to hang their hopes of Medicare’s survival on a single payer plan (the government) with the American population as its pool. That alone won’t solve the problem though, since even adding those who can afford insurance but avoid coverage won’t make up the shortfall.

From the liberal The American Prospect:

…Despite budget pressures, President Obama to his credit has not backed off his commitment to universal health reform. But the devil is in the details. And if he is not careful he could end up with a reform that is worse than nothing.
A crucial question is whether the law will include a public, Medicare-style plan. This public plan could be used by people who otherwise lack good insurance, or by employers who conclude that the public plan is a better deal for themselves and their workers.

The public plan would be the gold standard of both good coverage and cost-containment. Without the public option, a system to cover everyone by relying on the existing private insurance industry will realize few cost savings. The result would be increased pressures over time to cut care and shift out-of-pocket costs from insurers to consumers.

The administration’s projections have relied heavily on the supposed savings of better use of computerized medical records and an end to the extreme variation on treatment patterns and costs. However, absent a single unified system, or a strong public option, neither better computerization nor voluntary pledges to cuts costs will realize major savings.

In a meeting with Democratic senators midweek, Obama pledged his support for the public option. But given his desire to work with the insurance companies and get some Republican support as well, the real question is whether he will put his prestige on the line to keep the public option in the bill. He pointedly did not say that he’d veto a bill without a public option…

…Obama’s plan is a variant of an astute strategy first proposed by the political scientist Jacob Hacker as solution to two political obstacles to health reform. First, how to enlist the uninsured and the anxious insured in the same coalition? Second, how to build momentum for a single-payer system recognizing that there are not the votes to legislate it all at once?

Hacker’s insight was that if the government offered a public insurance option, people who liked their present private insurance could keep it, while others could elect the public plan. Coalition problem solved. And the superior efficiencies of the public plan would gradually and inexorably overtake the rival private plans over time. Momentum problem solved.- The American Prospect, June 5, 2009

The left realizes that any plan including a public alternative will drive the private sector from the market, and their goals of single pay universal health care hinge on that component, despite protestations from Barack himself.

CBO estimates of a ten year cost of $1 trillion dollars will only cover 16 million uninsured (which is probably a total closer to the actual number), leaving 36 million still uninsured (if you believe the figures). Which I think, exposes the true motive behind all this– salvaging some form of public health care insurance–Medicare, even if the plan never was and never will be sustainable.

The left also hangs its hat on cost savings because of Medicare billing efficiences, but those savings my be illusion due to the fact that most of the accounting costs are born by the private sector. Of the supposed 25% cost savings to be wrung from the switch from private to public financing, almost half of that may represent salaries of bookkeepers, billers, etc. What would happen to those newly unemployed workers?
Well I guess they would have a government health care plan to enjoy along with their unemployment check.

http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/2006/06/lunchtime-phone-call-from-godson.html

This link is specially for you:

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/06/cold-chills-why-every-senior-should.html

I also want to ask…are there any private alternatives to Medicare and Medicaid?

If not, why do you think that is?

Health Savings Accounts, initiated in 2003, could be a piece of the solution.

If I understand it correctly, Medicare spending is 3% of GDP currently, will rise to 6.3% by 2030 and 10% of GDP in 75 years.

Here’s one proposal:
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/recommend/archive/2008/medicare_reform.ncpa.html

In the 1990′s a bipartisan commission was formed to reform Medicare chaired by John Breaux and Bill Thomas. The commission disolved without a recommendation, but a proposal by Breaux and Thomas (two unlikely allies) was submitted to the senate.
Here’s an article about Bill Clinton’s alternative and the debate surrounding it:
http://www.cagw.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reports_trojanhorse

The politics of this eventually led to the 2003 prescription drug coverage under Medicare (part D), but none of the structural reform Bush was seeking.
http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/Campbell/Shifting%20Line.pdf