Upon examination, Vermont’s new law is not actually the start of single-payer health care, but rather the continuation of failed state government attempts to socialize the state’s health care system. …

Its big accomplishment is the Vermont Health Benefit Exchange, essentially a website already required by Obamacare to sell government-approved private insurance by 2014, and the Green Mountain Care Board, a sort of executive committee that will introduce price controls on health care in Vermont and design the details of the future single-payer plan.

Backers are aiming for a single-payer plan by 2014, but this requires permission from multiple federal agencies, some of which aren’t in operation until 2017. Most important, state legislators punted on financing the undertaking. …

Vermont’s new bill will move the state to a government-run health care system, but it’s not the utopian one advertised by today’s politicians. It’s called Medicaid, a near-perfect embodiment of government in action.

It’s a federal-state program that overpromises and underdelivers, a program in which everything is free at the point of consumption but nothing much of value is available — at least not without a long, hard wait.

Read the whole article: It’s déja vu all over again in Vermont | The Examiner.

(via FIRM)

A senior doctors’ leader has warned that the NHS is “creaking at the seams” as official figures showed almost a third more patients are waiting too long to be treated in hospital.

Read the whole article: NHS ‘creaking at the seams’ as waiting lists rise – Telegraph.
(via FIRM)

1. The “new Maine law allows insurers to charge older customers up to five times more than younger ones. But beginning in 2014, the federal healthcare law will cap that ratio at three to one,” reports The Hill. For why allowing insurers to more accurately price their premiums according to risk, see my Pajamas Media article “How to Insure Americans with Pre-Existing Conditions.”This law is in response to a 1993 law establishing community rating in Maine, which restricted how much insurers could vary rates.  For a summary of its damaging results, see “Maine Shows Path to Reform,” by Joseph Allumbaugh of the Heartland Institute.
2. In the same article, The Hill reports: “The Maine law … lets out-of-state insurers sell policies in Maine without getting a license there. But beginning in 2014, the federal law will require insurers to be licensed in every state where they want to sell coverage through a newly created insurance exchange.”  This allows for more competition and gives customers more freedom to by a plan not bloated with mandated benefits they do not need.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s legislature and governor have signed a bill intended to create a government-run monopoly health plan in the state, a.k.a., “single payer.” The Denver Post’s headline reveals its own, and the AP’s bias by referring to Maine’s plan as “universal health care.”  But remember having a government-run health plan does not guarantee that you get the medical care you need. The care is by far universal.  Health coverage is not health care.

For a critique of Vermont’s plan, see Vermont Takes the Single-Payer Plunge by Pete Suderman at Reason.

The National Health Service is today condemned over its inhumane treatment of elderly patients in an official report that finds hospitals are failing to meet “even the most basic standards of care” for the over-65s. …

In several cases considered by the Health Service Ombudsman, patients died without loved ones by their sides because of the “casual indifference” of staff and their “bewildering disregard” for people’s needs. …

The “harrowing” cases in the report disclose:

• An 82 year-old died alone because staff did not realise her husband had been waiting to see her for three hours
• A woman was not washed during 13 weeks in hospital, did not have her wound dressings changed and was denied food and drink
• A woman was discharged from hospital covered in bruises, soaked in urine and wearing someone else’s clothes
• The life-support system of a heart attack victim was switched off despite his wife asking to leave it on while she contacted the rest of the family

via Elder Abuse – Daily Brickbats : Reason Magazine.

Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada’s provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system. …

“There’s got to be some change to the status quo whether it happens in three years or 10 years,” said Derek Burleton, senior economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank.

“We can’t continually see health spending growing above and beyond the growth rate in the economy because, at some point, it means crowding out of all the other government services.

“At some stage we’re going to hit a breaking point.” …

Ontario says healthcare could eat up 70 percent of its budget in 12 years, if all these costs are left unchecked.

Scotia Capital’s [senior economist, Mary] Webb said one cost-saving idea may be to make patients aware of how much it costs each time they visit a healthcare professional. “(The public) will use the services more wisely if they know how much it’s costing,” she said.

“If it’s absolutely free with no information on the cost and the information of an alternative that would be have been more practical, then how can we expect the public to wisely use the service?”

As David Kramer remarked at Lew Rockell’s blog, “Duh.”

Remember when Obama and congressional Democrats made a big show of dropping the public option government insurance program that was supposedly going to give private insurers competition and drive rates down? The truth is the public option is alive and well, residing in Section 1334, pages 97-100, of the new health care law. That section gives the U.S. Office of Personnel Management — which presently manages the federal civil service — new responsibilities: establishing and running two entirely new government health insurance programs to compete directly with private insurance companies in every state with coverage for people outside of government.

I have not substantiated the claims I quoted in the above Examiner article.  The editors appear to draw on this publication from the Heritage Foundation: The Office of Personnel Management: A Power Player in America’s Health Insurance Markets? The abstract states:

On Christmas Eve 2009, the U.S. Senate passed a mammoth health care bill [HR 3590] that would dramatically expand the role of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Why should Americans care about this? OPM is the government agency that runs the federal civil service and also administers the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program–and does a decent job at both. But with its new powers, OPM would no longer merely act as referee in the annual competition among private health plans trying to attract federal workers. OPM would become the official sponsor of at least two national health plans (read: public option) that would compete against private plans in every state in the country. The possibility of OPM’s new role opens up a near-endless array of questions and concerns. In a panel discussion on January 20, 2010, hosted by The Heritage Foundation, four health policy experts, including three former OPM directors, address some of them.

I’ll look into this more when I get a chance.

For more of the Barney Frank video, see: Barney Frank: “public option” is “best way to reach single payer”.

Also check out Scott Harrington’s Wall Street Journal article, The ‘Public Plan’ Would Be the Only Plan:It’s impossible for private insurers to ‘compete’ with government.

(Examiner article via FIRM, video via Jon Caldara)

In the Dec. 10 [2008] Wall Street Journal, Polis wrote: “Our United States Congress… now finds itself poring over ‘business plans’ submitted this week by Ford, GM and Chrysler. People who have never before in their lives seen — no less implemented — a business plan are now trying to decide if these companies will succeed by means of a ‘capital infusion’ with… [taxpayer] money. Something is wrong with this picture.”

Polis is absolutely correct on this point. As a successful businessman himself, he knows that government cannot and should not be manufacturing cars.

His argument applies even more strongly to the issue of health care. Although he campaigned on a platform of government-run “single payer” health care, he should recognize that government cannot and should not be running health care.

Poor standards of care at an accident and emergency unit in one of the country’s flagship hospitals may have contributed to the unnecessary deaths of over 400 patients, an official NHS investigation has concluded. Dirty equipment and an absence of leadership contributed to a death rate almost 40 per cent above the national average among emergency admissions to the 770-bed Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, inspectors said.

The unit had blood stains on the floor, dirty curtains, stinking mattresses and soiled equipment; nurses who failed to monitor, feed and give drugs to patients correctly; and a rate of pressure sores almost twice the national average. Instead of the national four-hour maximum waiting time for A&E, the trust was operating a 10-hour waiting time.

Read the whole article: Shocking death toll at flagship hospital.

(via Martin L. Buchanan)

]]> http://www.patientpowernow.org/2009/11/death-toll-englands-hospital-basildon-thurrock/feed/ 0 http://www.patientpowernow.org/2009/08/art-laffer-obama-care/ http://www.patientpowernow.org/2009/08/art-laffer-obama-care/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:52:30 +0000 jlongo http://www.patientpowernow.org/?p=1430 Continue reading →]]> Current plans to expand government intervention in the health care system will further inflate prices for Colorado families without improving medical services, says world renowned economist Art Laffer in a new study for the Independence Institute.  The study is titled, “The Prognosis for National Health Insurance: a Colorado Perspective.”

The study concludes that President Obama’s health care reform agenda will cost $4,156 per Colorado resident in additional federal and state expenditures over the next 10 years. In addition, the proposed government health care expansion will reduce economic growth in Colorado by 4.3% through 2019.

the median wait time for patients requiring an inpatient bed-that is, from the time the patient presented at the ED [emergency department] to the time they were admitted to an inpatient bed-was 19 hours (average is 23.5 hours or nearly one full day), which is substantially higher than the CTAS thresholds (e.g., more than three times the 6 hour guideline for high-level acuity patients). The longer wait for patients to be admitted is often due to the inability to find an available hospital inpatient bed

The report has wait time data for other conditions including cancer.

John Stossel’s recent article cited this study. Here’s a quotable part:

Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” she said.