NPR, in general, has had a lot of recent programs talking to these types of people and the interviewers do not seem to press their guests as to why they are more capable than your average citizen in designing something that is not able to be designed. To think otherwise is to be part of an elite group of people who have their heads in the clouds. Or should I remind everyone that industry design on a national scale was tried many times with one of the most egregious examples being the U.S.S.R. It didn’t work, it still doesn’t work, and the U.S. is not any smarter or different. This type of thinking and action only takes away the freedoms of which the U.S. was founded on when the founders tried to escape from the design-crazy Europe. The government and their elite co-conspirators are going to lead the U.S. into a country that can no longer do anything. It won’t be fair, it will prop up certain minority groups who have the most money to lobby, and it will turn into a country of stagnation, low wages, little freedom, and a VERY powerful political class.

NPR, if it so desires to be comprehensive in its coverage of the healthcare debate, should also have reports questioning on whether the government is even capable of fixing rising healthcare costs. Investigate and report on the fact that most politicians are not trained in any of the industries that they seek to legislate and thus direct. Why not investigate from other experts like Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University whether staying out of the medical industry is a better idea? Maybe the politicians need to undo past mistaken legislation that gives skewed incentives to companies to provide health insurance only. Why not get rid of the entirely unfair laws that restricts U.S. citizens from buying health insurance across state lines? NPR is a somewhat tax-funded media source. As a tax-payer, I would like to see this kind of reporting. Please prove me wrong that publicly funded media is not an outlet for bigger government and government-favored solutions only. I want to hear all sides – government and the opposite of government.

I think Mitch is right on in this video. The only thing I disagree with him on would be accepting Federal money. But I don’t blame him for doing it. He is absolutely right about health reform and that our budgetary debt in the U.S. is the single most important issue outstanding today. It is a shame that it is not part of the Obama administration’s priority however.

“You are defending the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world.”

What do you expect to happen to a market when:

1) Roughly 50% of all the market’s participants on the purchasing side are relieved of any financial responsibility for their purchases, thereby destroying any incentive to shop for the best value for the dollars being spent or to consider the most cost-effective way of dealing with their condition — and also thereby reducing any incentive to compete among doctors and hospitals.

2) The agency — Medicare and Medicaid — that assumes the financial responsibility for this 50% has access to unlimited government funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars or government debt) and thus has no incentive to police for fraud — no incentive to care what anything costs — and no incentive to tole.

3) That same agency — though it has no actual incentive to police for fraud or to care what anything wants — is nonetheless run by power-hungry bureaucrats who, in the name of “cost control”, push off on the providers (the doctors) over 130,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations — rules so onerous and complicated that doctors that accept Medicare patients report that they must spend at least ONE FULL DAY per week on nothing but Medicare paperwork and must employ, on average, two additional clerical assistance to help in complying with those rules.

4) Another agency, state governments, gives in to special interest lobbying and forces ALL insurance policies sold by insurance companies in that state to include benefits such as alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health programs, maternity benefits, etc, and demands that ALL such policies are sold at the same price — which means that those that want these benefits get them primarily at the expense of those who don’t want them.

And if you think you can just buy a cheaper policy from another state — a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t contain certain benefits you know you’ll never use — well, tough luck, because the states with these mandates generally have laws prohibiting you from purchasing from other states.

5) Another agency, the FDA, adds millions to the costs of new drugs by spending years approving drugs after drug companies have already spent years on double-blind studies proving the drugs work.

6) That same agency — which has zero experience in manufacturing and generally employs people that know nothing about manufacturing — nevertheless promulgates a vast set of regulations known as “Good Manufacturing Practices” that forces those manufacturing medical devices to create thousands of pages of written procedures, audits, etc., thereby driving up the costs of all manner of medical devices.

This massive set of regulations, in addition to driving up the costs of existing manufacturers, also constitutes a huge “barrier to entry” to any new firms that might wish to compete with existing firms, thereby reducing the competition in the field of medical device production.

7) Still yet another agency — the tort court system and the trial lawyers — forces doctors to carry malpractice insurance policies whose premiums may exceed $100, 000 a year — as well as forcing doctors to run numerous medical tests not because they think the patient needs it or has asked for it, but simply to practice what is known as “defensive medicine”.

If you think the economic effect of this tort system is small, ask yourself why the trial lawyer’s professional groups give millions in campaign contributions every election to Democrats sympathetic to the current tort rules.

Still yet another agency, the Federal Reserve, continuously inflates a fiat currency thereby guaranteeing an ongoing, constant decrease in the value of everyone’s dollars.

How, in the face of this onslaught, can you expect anything BUT rapidly rising costs?

And why on earth — in the face of all the evidence that these government interventions are economically disastrous and unsustainable — would anyone think we can put 40 million more people into the system at no additional cost?

How is more of the same poison going to make us well instead of killing us off?

Stossel on health insurance

NPR even cited the number of people who this happens to and it’s just under 10,000 people in the entire country. Let’s do some math. There is an estimated 310,000,000 people in the country. If we take very conservative numbers and say that half of those people are adults who currently work, and then subtract 40,000,000 for the “uninsured,” we get 105,000,000 insured working adults. If we take 10,000 and divide that by 105,000,000, we get 0.000095238, or 0.0095% of the working population. NPR wants reform for 105,000,000 people based on shady practices to 0.0095%! There are more people that die from the common flu each year and yet we don’t talk about throwing out the current healthcare system so that 20,000 flu victims don’t die. Life is full of risks and the government is worse at eliminating risks than are a free and prosperous people independent of the government. This is why I call it idiocracy, NPR is no better than Fox News for sensationalism.

For all of you who think that universal healthcare is a utopia, don’t come crying to me when you can’t get the immediate care that you need because there are too many other people in line ahead of you. Economics is about the rationing of scarce goods in the most fair and balanced way. Politicians are not better at this than a market system where people, not politicians, place the value of goods and services like scarce healthcare resources. To anyone that thinks otherwise, I invite you to start a debate in the comments to this post.

On a related subject of government run healthcare, I submit this article as some more food for thought. The moral of the article, how are we going to afford government-run healthcare when we already have a national debt of $11 trillion and up to $50 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Medicaid. How exactly is government-run healthcare more cost effective?