Current Health Care Reform Bill - Opposing Views

The December 20, 2009 issue of the St. Petersburg Times had dueling editorial articles from two NY Times writers, David Brooks and Paul Krugman, who had opposite views on whether to pass the Senate's current version of health care reform. Mr. Brooks gave the following reasons for not passing the bill:

• The bill does not fundamentally reform health care in this country. The status quo regarding the cost structure will not be affected by the current legislation. According to Mr. Brooks, the experts he spoke to and the Congressional Budget Office agree that this bill will not change the cost curve.
• The bill centralizes health care power with just 500 people in Washington (Congress) without changing the cost structure. Given the insanity and wasteful spending we have witnessed by Congress over the past few years, does anyone really think this is a good idea? Remember, this was a group that could not build a simple visitors' center in DC without going 50% over budget.
• In the short term the bill creates a huge jump in demand for health care without a growth in the supply of health care. Without new, sensible cost structures, simple economics will take over: more demand, constant supply will result in health care higher prices and costs.
• Medical innovation will slow in Mr. Brooks opinion since those 500 people and their staffs, controlling 17% of the economy, have never been known for innovative thinking and acting.
• The insurance of the uninsured is the dessert in Mr. Brooks view. The imperative for a reformed cost structure and reformed incentive system is the vegetables. Thus, the Senate wants the dessert of health care reform without taking the harsh steps of eating our vegetables. Now that the dessert has been eaten, the political class will never go back to eat the veggies.

Thus, Mr. Brooks does not think the current effort is worth passing since it does more damage than good and does not address the ROOT CAUSE of high health care costs. We have been screaming about this lack of understanding or the will to understand the root causes of escalating health care costs. Mr. Brooks is in agreement with this view.

Mr. Krugman thinks the current health care reform should be approved for the following reasons:

• The Senate bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net in a very long time.
• Those who have been denied coverage for a preexisting condition and those that could not afford health care costs would be covered under the Senate bill.
• Other social programs started out highly flawed but got better over time.
• It's okay to pay ransom to individual Senators who held out for special deals for their states and voters as long as the legislation gets passed.

While Mr. Krugman truly wants something passed, I do not see anywhere in his article of the merits of passing THIS bill, just the need to pass something. He does not discuss the costs of this bill, how health care economic power will become dangerously centralized in Washington, subject to the whims of the political class, he does not identify the true causes of escalating costs and how to deal with them, he does not question why tort reform was not included in this bill even though several states have proven that health care tort reform can result in double digit cost reductions, he does not address how to rein in fraud and criminal activity on existing government health care programs even before a significant expansion in these programs, he does not address the heavy-handedness of the bill that forces millions of young Americans to buy health insurance they do not need, and he does not question the ability of the political class to even pull this meager bill off, given that they cannot do anything else efficiently or effectively. He just wants a bill passed.

I would refer Mr.. Krugman to a paraphrased Spiderman quote: "Just because you can do something does not mean you should do it." This current effort at health care reform is an abomination and needs to start over as outlined in Step 28 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." This Step would involve having real subject matter experts craft the solutions and not the political class and would do it in the absence of lobbyists. Mr. Brooks understands that this bill is a sham, Mr. Krugman is whistling past the grave yard and hoping to get something, anything done now with the quaint hope that the political class can fix it in the future.

I will leave you with the following statistic from an article in Business Week magazine that was reprinted in the December 25, 2009 issue of The Week magazine. Currently, the U.S. government handles 4.4 million Medicare claims each day, but reviews less than 3% for accuracy and legitimacy before paying them. Thus, if you wanted to create fraud and rip off the taxpayer under the current system, your odds of getting caught are 97 to 3 or about 32 to 1. Excellent odds regardless of whatever process you are talking about. Can you imagine how much more fraud opportunities will occur when this bill, if it is passed, injects at least another trillion dollars into the payment flow? No one who supports the current Senate bill, including Mr. Klugman, seems to think this is a problem.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.

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