No Facts Please, We're Leftists!

John H. Cochrane: What to Do About Pre-existing Conditions - WSJ.com: "Health care and insurance are service-oriented, retail businesses. There is only one way to reduce costs in such a business: intense competition for every customer. The idea that the federal government can reduce costs by negotiating harder or telling businesses what to do is a triumph of hope over centuries of experience."

Private, competitive insurance markets are a superior way to solve the pre-existing-conditions problem, and the only hope to lower costs.

In this column the author, a University of Chicago professor (not a mere lecturer) explains how the means to handle the difficult problem of "pre-existing conditions" is already available in the private health insurance marketplace.

The Crux of the Matter - Give Patients A Stake In Decisions

In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains - WSJ.com: "doctors and patients, left to themselves, often order unnecessary and costly treatments, contributing to soaring national health costs."

The above statement is the health care cost issue in a nutshell. The closest thing to a solution is to design insurance plans that don't make patients and doctors accomplices in unnecessary health spending. If the patient were to question each expenditure, many times a lower cost alternative would be identified. The patient, however, will only do this if he has an economic incentive to do so.

Such economic incentives cannot address all of the challenges of allocating health care. To some degree, there will alway need to be limits imposed from above. Which then begs the question, "who do you want imposing those limits?" The choices are:

1) a government monopoly, under constant pressure from special interests, and perpetually underfunded
2) a choice of insurance companies and plans that compete for your business, and who, in many cases, have to lay out for you in advance what their criteria are going to be for limiting spending.

I can't believe anyone has to pause over such a choice.

Yesterday at a Tea Party Rally, I met a fifty year old four time survivor of breast cancer. Were she a ward of the British NHS, she'd be dead today. The very drugs that have kept her alive here in the US have been declared too expensive for British breast cancer patients.

Real Health Care Reform

Charles Krauthammer - A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com: "Defensive medicine, estimates the libertarian/conservative Pacific Research Institute, wastes more than $200 billion a year. Just half that sum could provide a $5,000 health insurance grant -- $20,000 for a family of four -- to the uninsured poor (U.S. citizens ineligible for other government health assistance)."

Krauthammer has a simple, two-point plan to reform health care:

1) Tort Reform
2) Real insurance reform, including ending the subsidization of employer-provided health care and giving the tax deduction/credit to the individual

I've advocated the same policies in prvious posts on this blog. Until such reforms are tried, the Left can't truly claim that the free market has been tried and found wanting.