Congressional Issues 2010
MORALITY
AND CULTURE
Health Care
The 112th
Congress should:
take the following steps along a path leading
to the complete separation of
medicine and state:
Begin with individual ownership of
insurance policies. The tax deduction
that allows employers to own your insurance
should instead be given to the individual.
Leverage health savings accounts (HSAs).
HSAs empower individuals to monitor their health
care costs and create incentives for individuals
to use only those services that are necessary.
Offer a simplified set of flexible medical
savings account options to all
Americans;
Allow interstate purchasing of
insurance. Policies in some states are
more affordable because they include fewer bells
and whistles; consumers should be empowered to
decide which benefits they need and what prices
they are willing to pay.
Reduce the number of mandated benefits
that insurers are required to cover.
Empowering consumers to choose which benefits
they need is effective only if insurers are able
to fill these needs.
Reallocate the majority of Medicaid
spending into simple vouchers for low-income
individuals to purchase their own insurance.
An income-based sliding scale voucher program
would eliminate much of the massive bureaucracy
needed to implement today’s complex and
burdensome Medicaid system. It would also
produce considerable cost savings.
Eliminate unnecessary
scope-of-practice laws and allow non-physician
health care professionals to practice to the
extent of their education and training.
Retail clinics have shown that increasing the
provider pool safely increases competition and
access to care, and empowers patients to decide
from whom they receive their care.
Reform tort liability laws.
Defensive medicine needlessly drives up medical
costs and creates an adversarial relationship
between doctors and patients.
Abolish the FDA, which
unnecessarily raises R&D costs for new drugs
and lethally denies health choices to consumers
provide a fixed-dollar tax credit option to
taxpayers who purchase health insurance;
expand consumer choices that increase
market-based accountability by health plans,
instead of enacting a patients’ bill of
rights;
reform Patent law to
increase competition and choice;
fundamentally restructure Medicare to expand
competitive private health plan choices.
not add
comprehensive prescription drug benefits to
Medicare unless and until it enacts structural
reform of the entire program;
encourage
states to adjust Medicaid eligibility criteria
and covered benefits to serve fewer nondisabled,
lower-income individuals—but then provide
remaining beneficiaries with higher-quality core
health services and make greater use of
cost-sharing incentives;
facilitate
state efforts to adapt
defined-contribution-style financing as an
option for Medicaid beneficiaries;
provide
a tax credit option for taxpayers who choose to
purchase health insurance that is not sponsored
by their employers;
expand
consumer choices that increase market-based
accountability of health plans; and
improve
access to health care through incentives to
purchase less-comprehensive
insurance, expand high-risk pool coverage,
finance charitable safety net care, and
deregulate state insurance regulation.
What
YOU Can Do:
Restore
consumer-controlled health care The politicians tell us free market health care
doesn't work, but we haven't had a free market in
decades:
The government
already pays for nearly half of all health care.
This means we're half-socialized already.
Starting with
depression era wage and price controls, and
continuing with government tax policies, the
politicians have made Americans dependent on
their jobs to get health insurance.
State government
policies have made insurance too expensive by
piling on special interest mandates dictating
specific types of coverage.
Medicare and
Medicaid have fixed the prices we pay for health
care, causing the extraordinary paradox of both
price inflation and shortages in areas like
primary care.
Anyone who signed the Declaration of Independence
would think we have the greatest healthcare system
there could ever be. He would be astonished that
anyone would say we have a "healthcare
crisis." After all, we have:
antibiotics
smallpox, polio, and other vaccines
anesthesia
Medical imaging: X-rays;
computed tomography (CT scans), positron
emission (PET scans), magnetic resonance imaging
(MRIs), and ultrasound help diagnose diseases
that would have remained untreated generations
ago.
DDT, which has saved
millions of lives and hundreds of millions of
people from the horrors of malaria.
All of these things would have been available
only to the super-rich a few decades ago. They are
available to the ordinary working American today,
and charitable hospitals make them available to the
poor. Congress can be credited with inventing
precisely zero of these inventions. Congress
can be credited with manufacturing exactly none
of these inventions. Congress can be credited with
raising the prices of all of them -- just not
as much as "greedy capitalists" have lowered
the prices in an effort to sell them to a larger
number of consumers and make larger profits.
The
Trouble With Science
It's no god, despite what its worshippers claim.
Article by Bill Sardi.
Heroic
Oregano Oil
Unlike antibiotics, it's effective against
drug-resistant bacteria.
Take
Vitamin D
And save more than $1,300 a year in
sickness costs.
Wrecking
Your Genes
Bill Sardi on what some common
pharmaceuticals can do to you.
So
what would a libertarian approach to health care
policy look like? At a minimum it would have to
include:
1. Repealing laws
that have the effect of cartelising the medical
industry (e.g., the licensure monopoly
granted to the A.M.A.), thus artificially boosting
the cost of medical care.
2. Repealing laws
that have the effect of rendering the labour
market oligopsonistic,
thus artificially lowering people’s ability to
pay for (and collectively negotiate for) medical
care.
4. Repealing laws
that transfer the power to make medical decisions
for individuals from those individuals to
centralised bodies, thus increasing the impact and
scope of fatally bad decisions and suppressing the
competitive signals that allow the identification
of better and worse policies.
5. Repealing laws
that wiped out the old mutual-insurance
systems (basically HMOs run by the patients
instead of by corporations) and empowered
insurance companies at the expense of patients.
6 Simple Ways to
Dramatically Cut Costs of Medical Care - at Zero
Expense to Taxpayers
by Michael Cloud
Imagine that the federal and state governments
imposed laws, regulations, restrictions, and
mandates on medical care that drastically increased
the cost - without improving medical care.
What if it were possible to
cut your medical care costs by 20% or 30% or even
50% now - while keeping current levels of quality
and service - by repealing and removing these
government-created burdens and barriers?
If this were possible,
would you want it?
Would you want the U.S.
Congress to repeal and remove these laws,
regulations, restrictions, and mandates?
Would you want your state
legislature to do the same?
Yes? Well, these
government-imposed burdens and barriers DO exist -
and your federal and state legislators CAN repeal
and remove them.
Would you like to see a
small sample? 1. Allow price advertising. Let pharmacies,
doctors, hospitals, and laboratories to publish
their prices for goods and services. Eliminate all
laws, regulations, and government provisions that
hinder or prevent medical providers from posting
their prices.
Charges for the same
medical procedure can vary 30% to 300% within a
100-mile radius. But without price information,
patients can't shop for the best value.
In the 1970's, U.C.L.A.
Economist Sam Peltzman compared the costs of
eyeglasses in states that allowed price advertising
and states that outlawed it. Results? Much lower
prices in states that allowed price advertising. 2. Let all Americans buy prescription drugs
outside the United States. Do NOT force them to
travel abroad. Allow them to have the prescription
drugs shipped to their homes.
I've seen the 30% to 60%
savings in prices of prescription drugs purchased in
Mexico.
International competition
for prescription drugs will drive down domestic
prescription prices. 3. Let all people buy medical insurance across
state lines. In New Jersey, a single man would
pay $4,000 for medical insurance. If he lived in
Pennsylvania, he'd pay $1,500. If the New Jersey man
could buy medical insurance from a Pennsylvania
provider, he'd save $2,500 a year.
Imagine this all across
America.
This would cut medical
insurance costs for millions who already have
needlessly overpriced premiums.
AND, if the American
Enterprise Institute study is correct, this would
make medical insurance affordable for 12 million
uninsured Americans. 4. Let doctors and patients negotiate discounts
for paying cash. If a patient saves a doctor the
time, trouble, delay and cost of dealing with
insurance companies, Medicare, or Medicaid - let the
doctor and patient share the savings. 5. Let patients, doctors, and hospitals enter
into into legally binding, limited-liability
contracts. This would reduce the cost of medical
treatment by reducing the cost of malpractice
insurance.
Just as Prenuptial
Agreements limit marital risk, limited-liability
contracts will limit medical risk. 6. End all government mandates that require
businesses or individuals to buy medical insurance.
End all government mandates that punish and tax
those who do NOT buy medical insurance. Make
insurance companies earn our business with lower
prices and better quality - rather than lobby
government to compel us to buy medical insurance by
force of law.
*Note:
Since original publication of this column on April
13, 2006, it was learned that Tennessee is
relatively lax about permitting the operation of
free medical care clinics. However, free clinics
appear to remain effectively prohibited throughout
most of the United States. If you find a clinic that
is neither sanctioned by government nor free of
government subsidies, i.e., an unencumbered health
care clinic charity, please let us know by
contacting the Center For Small Government.
It is worth
noting that while free clinics unaffiliated with
government are largely prohibited, many individual
medical professionals generously donate their
services and/or give price breaks to those in need
who lack financial means.
The principle of "Liberty
Under God" is a defense of your
ownership of your health. You should have the liberty to choose
the best medical advice for yourself, with or without the approval of
politicians.
One of today's great ironies is liberals who extend a woman's ownership
of her own body to include the right to kill other people's bodies (the
unborn), but then propose "National Healthcare" systems in
which bureaucrats will make all other decisions for the
woman, including whether or not she can get a mammogram or other tests,
procedures or surgeries which a woman might want for her body.
Health care also involves seeing the healing arts as a "work of
mercy" that should be motivated by true
religion:
Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to
visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself
unspotted from the world. James
1:27
Healing
the sick is a Christian "work of mercy."
Hospitals are the product of a Christian worldview.
When Muslims copied the work of the Red Cross, they felt
compelled to change the symbol to a Crescent.
Today's health care debate centers around the government. Should health
care be motivated and controlled by people of faith, or should it be
controlled by bureaucrats answerable to lobbyists for special interests?
Would it be too extravagant for a political candidate to promise a
healthcare system in which:
low-cost health insurance is available to virtually everyone --
including people with existing medical problems;
doctors have the time to understand your problems and know you
personally -- and even make house calls;
a hospital stay costs only a few days' pay, rather than many months
of your income;
charity hospitals are available to take care of families that can't
afford the low-cost hospitals; and
free clinics take care of the everyday medical problems of people
too poor to afford regular doctors.
This is exactly the healthcare system we had in America until the
mid-1960s. It was then that the federal government moved in -- with
Medicare, Medicaid, the HMO Act, and tens of thousands of regulations on
doctors, hospitals, and health-insurance companies. That's when health
care started going downhill.
If a child skins his knee, whose responsibility is
it to put on a band-aid: a parent, or the government? If your child gets
brain cancer, who would you trust to heal him, 435 Congressmen, or a
cancer clinic set up by greedy capitalists who make millions of dollars a
year successfully treating brain cancer? If your neighbor can't afford to
take his child to the capitalistic brain cancer clinic, whose
responsibility is it to help him get the money he needs? The IRS and the
Government healthcare police, or your church?
“If American Christians simply gave a tithe rather than the current
one-quarter of a tithe, there would be enough private Christian
dollars to provide basic health care and education to all the poor of
the earth. And we would still have an extra $60-70 billion left over for
evangelism around the world.” Book
Review: The Scandal Of The Evangelical Conscience - Acton
Institute PowerBlog
Do
No Harm
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.
"If government forces us all into a bureaucratically managed system,
we will still have something called “health care,” delivered by
persons called “health care providers.” But such a system will have no
place for ethical physicians, whose Oath forbids them to accept a
situation of conflict of interest with their patients."
Drugs
by Dr. Mary Ruwart
The good doctor answers tough questions on illegal drugs in a free
society.
The
Economics of Medical Care
by George Yossif, M.D.
"In voluntary markets, private medicine included, the key knowledge
necessary for trade is conveyed by freely fluctuating prices. The price
system conveys knowledge of the personal and subjective utilities of the
actors, that is, of the supply and demand of various commodities and
services, which cannot be compared otherwise. Demand for ordinary medical
care in voluntary markets is highly elastic and medical care by physicians
is largely optional, except for some categories of life-threatening
conditions, few in number and low in incidence, sometimes known as “catastrophic
illness.” As history shows, medical care in essentially voluntary
markets tends to be accessible and affordable. Sustained price inflation
in medical care is always a result of direct or indirect political
intervention. The lately much-touted competition between providers is not
the genuine competitive bidding for the satisfaction of the actual
consumer of care, the patient, as a free market would have it. On the
contrary, this politically created competition will further enhance and
centralize the bureaucratic controls on medical care, thus compounding,
instead of reducing, the inflationary effects of the multiple and
pervasive political interventions already in operation."
For-Profit
Medicine and the Compassion Motive
by Tom G. Palmer
"Profits earned in the context of well-defined and enforced legal
rights (as distinguished from the profits that accrue to being a brilliant
thief) may provide the foundation not of coldness, but of compassion. The
search for profit requires that the doctor consider the interests of the
patient by putting himself or herself into the patient’s position, to
imagine the suffering of others, to have compassion. In a free-market
economy, the profit motive may be but another name for the compassion
motive."
A
Four-Step Health-Care Solution
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"To cure the problem requires not different or more government
regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to
believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls."
A
Free Market in Kidneys?
by Walter Block
"There is no doubt that those presently responsible for preventing a
free market in kidneys act with the noblest of motives. To them,
legalizing the purchase and sale of human organs would be degrading. Far
better, from their viewpoint, that people donate their bodily parts for
free so that thousands of kidney disease sufferers might live normal
lives. However, no matter how benevolent the intentions of the
prohibitionists, it cannot be denied that the effect of their actions has
been to render it less likely that those in need will be served."
Free-Market
Medicine
by Larry Van Heerden
"The health-care market has failed to produce high-quality, low-cost
medicine for two reasons: Consumers are insulated from the cost of medical
care by third-party payers, and information on the performance of
competing physicians is not available. Fixing the incentives and providing
consumers with physician performance data will cause unnecessary surgery
to decline, physician performance to improve, disease prevention to
increase, and health-care efficiency to rise."
Free Market
Medicine
by James W. Brook
"I am actually a part of a small, but growing, movement of doctors
who have "opted out" of the third-party payment system and
simply charge patients directly. No insurance contracts, no medicare, no
medicaid, just direct payment at the time of service, from the person who
receives the service."
Harming Our Health
by Mary J. Ruwart
"Licensing of health care services gives us the illusion that we are
protected against selfish others who would defraud us. Instead, our
aggression boomerangs back to us, costing us our wealth, our health, and
our very lives."
Health
Care
by Dr. Mary Ruwart
The good doctor answers tough questions about health care in a free
society.
The
Home-Birth Controversy
by Hannah Lapp
"Modern America has much to say about rights and opportunities for
women, even down to the right to terminate a pregnancy. However, when it
comes to nurturing and bringing their offspring safely to birth, American
women often find their options severely restricted."
The
Immorality of Government-Mandated Health Care
by Paul A. Cleveland
"National health-care insurance, or its mandated provision, is
unjust. It is nothing more than a forced charity, which is no charity at
all. In this vein we might flatter ourselves into believing that we are
doing good works, but it simply is not true. True mercy is extended as a
matter of voluntary choice. It is not forced. Government mandates which
require some to provide for others is false philanthropy. It is
fundamentally selfishness unleashed and it will thwart future
prosperity."
Increasing
Access to Pharmaceuticals
by Doug Bandow
"Paternalism remains a powerful influence in Washington. But it is
time for patients and doctors, insurers and hospitals, pharmaceutical
firms and device manufacturers, senior citizens and healthy young people
to together say 'No more.'”
National
Health Insurance: A Medical Disaster
by Jarret B. Wollstein
"Throughout the world the story is the same: socialized medicine
results in skyrocketing demand for nominally “free” health care,
doctors are overburdened, medical services steadily deteriorate, and there
are endless waiting lists for health care. In the Soviet Union before the
collapse of Communism, anesthetics, painkillers, and most drugs were
rationed; 57 percent of hospitals had no hot running water; and it was
standard practice to clean needles with steel wool and reuse them."
New
Legal Organ Market
by David Undis
"LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ and tissue
donors. Membership is free, and anybody can join at www.lifesharers.com.
Members agree to donate their organs and tissue when they die, but only to
fellow LifeSharers members (unless no member is a suitable match).
LifeSharers members say, in effect, “You can have first dibs on my
organs, but only if you agree to donate yours.” By directing their
donations in this way, LifeSharers members create a pool of organs that
are potentially available only to fellow members."
Our
Own Silent Spring
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"It is estimated that 800,000 children in Africa die from the disease
every year, and as many as three million people altogether every year. We
know how people contract it: from mosquitoes. We know how to control it:
kill the carrier mosquitoes. And we know what kills them: DDT. So why has
the war on malaria failed? Because governments banned the cure. Now they
claim to wonder why people are sick and dying."
Philosophy
of Immunization
by Mark Moyers, D.C.
"Ninety-eight percent of all persons immunized under compulsory
immunization laws never object! They don't know how! They don't know that
they can! They don't know that they might want to, or why!"
Private is
Better Than Public
by David G. Green
"It is in this sense of de-politicisation that privatisation is a
good thing in itself. It allows the objectives of producers of goods and
services to be self-chosen not politically-chosen."
Protecting Ourselves
to Death
by Mary J. Ruwart
"By using aggression to avoid medications that harm us, we lose
access to life-saving drugs."
The
Right to Medical Care
by Sheldon Richman
"All of this is a rather roundabout way of identifying the worst
aspect of the “right to medical care”: the tethering of the citizen to
the state. For all the criticism that is leveled at Medicare and proposals
to reform medical care in general, too little attention has gone to that
uncomfortable fact. If government controls medical spending, it controls
you, including the very length of your life."
The
Rise of Markets and the Fall of Infectious Disease
by Stephen Gold
"True, capitalism is not a magic wand. As the former Communist
countries of Europe are learning, an affluent market economy takes time to
develop. Still, if the lesser developed countries of the world can
liberate their economies from government control and encourage private
enterprise, then future generations of children there will look upon
infectious diseases like typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis the way I
looked upon scarlet fever—as a relic of bygone, pre-market days."
Self-Medicating
in Burma
by Kerry Howley
"Freedoms are in short supply in Burma, a country run by a hardened
military, yet the freedom to treat a bout of food poisoning with
pharmaceuticals was new to me. The United States is the only country in
the world that divides drugs into two rigid categories of
prescription-only and over-the-counter. Most other developed nations allow
for a third class of drugs to be dispensed by a pharmacist, and developing
nations typically do not have prescription requirements or fail to enforce
them."
What
the World Needs Now Is DDT
by Tina Rosenberg
"The move away from DDT in the 60's and 70's led to a resurgence of
malaria in various countries -- Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Swaziland, South
Africa and Belize, to cite a few; those countries that then returned to
DDT saw their epidemics controlled. In Mexico in the 1980's, malaria cases
rose and fell with the quantity of DDT sprayed. Donald Roberts, a
professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in
Bethesda, Md., has argued that when Latin America stopped using DDT in the
1980's, malaria immediately rose, leading to more than a million extra
cases a year. The one country that continued to beat malaria was Ecuador,
the one country that kept using DDT."
WPC
on health care
A collection of policy briefs and press releases devoted to pointing out
the folly of government socialization of health care, subsidization, and
other market distortions.
Here’s
a Second Opinion | Hoover Institution - Hoover Digest
Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition
than you might suppose
The
Market Doesn’t Ration Health Care | Foundation for Economic
Education
Economics 101 says giving more people access to the same number of
doctors and hospitals means government rationing. Decisions
about healthcare will be made by bureaucrats to "control
costs," which MUST increase when "access" to a fixed
supply of goods is increased.
Our choice is between rationing by bureaucrats (including insurance
clerks empowered by government tax policy) and individual
self-determination through free exchange.
Restore
consumer-controlled health care
