Steven Law: 2020 Dems and ‘Medicare-for-All’ -- here’s what ‘free’ health care really means

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 04:00:04 -0400

Americans hate to wait. We scout out the shortest grocery line. We choose the fastest delivery option. We chafe at slow-moving internet speeds. And we don’t like to wait for health care when we or our loved ones urgently need it. But if America gets saddled with a radical new health care system called “Medicare-for-All,” a lot of waiting for health care will be in your family’s future.

When Americans got tired of waiting around in clogged emergency rooms for last-minute care, the marketplace responded. Urgent care facilities started sprouting up, offering care for non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries. Hospitals, sensing a threat to their business, now buy billboards advertising current wait times in their ERs.

BERNIE SANDERS PROMISES FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

But in countries where the marketplace has been supplanted by government-run health care systems like Medicare-for-All, people have no choice but to wait for desperately needed health care on the government’s timetable. Not for minutes or hours, but weeks and months.

According to a comprehensive study by the nonpartisan Fraser Institute, patients in Canada wait an average of nine weeks to see a specialist, and an additional 11 weeks on top of that to receive treatment. Even when every day counts, such as treatment of cancer, patients have to wait a month before getting radiation therapy.

Advanced-stage heart disease can trigger a heart attack or stroke at any time, but in Canada, you’ll wait about two and a half months for coronary bypass surgery unless you are already in an emergency situation. If your life is not at imminent risk, you will wait even longer for care. If you need to be treated by an OB-GYN in Canada, expect to wait 21 weeks. If you’re suffering from acute knee or back pain, you’d better stock up on ibuprofen: you could wait six months to three-quarters of a year for orthopedic surgery.

In Britain, where the government’s role in health care is even more pervasive, wait times are much worse. A 2019 study by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists found that tens of thousands of elderly patients are left struggling with near blindness due to a government cost-cutting drive that relies on them dying before they qualify for cataract surgery. According to another study by the Royal College of Surgeons, nearly a quarter of a million Britons were waiting more than six months—some even longer than nine months—to be scheduled for surgery and other medically necessary treatment.

Why do government-run health care systems—including so-called single-payer schemes like Medicare-for-All—result in long waits for needed care? Because unlike the private sector, government has zero incentive to customize care to individual needs. It achieves efficiencies primarily by doling out one-size-fits-all health care to everyone, regardless of unique circumstances.

Government is also poor at adjusting to medical innovations, new technologies and changes in epidemiology. For example, Canada has struggled to handle the rise in asthma incidence rates. The Canadian Lung Association found that the average wait time for asthma testing is four weeks, with one in four asthma sufferers waiting longer than three months to be tested. In the U.S., private insurance usually covers most of the cost of expensive MRIs to evaluate medical conditions. But in Canada, where MRIs are “free,” wait times have steadily increased, reaching 364 days in British Columbia. Not surprisingly, some Canadians have taken to paying out-of-pocket for an MRI.

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Medicare-for-All and its various derivatives all have one ultimate goal: to push the private sector out of health care and replace it with more government. This means that government will be deciding what health care Americans can get and when—not doctors, not hospitals, and certainly not patients. When politicians absurdly promise to make health care “free,” what they actually mean is that government will pick up the tab and bill us later, while deciding what it will pay for and how much to pay. Those decisions obviously and inevitably will impact choice, quality and availability.

This week, on June 26-27, twenty Democratic presidential contenders will face off against one another on the debate stage. Nearly all of them publicly support Medicare-for-All or some variation. Each one should be asked: why should Americans be forced to wait longer (and ultimately pay more) for lower-quality, government-controlled health care?

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Steven Law: Democrats pivot from ‘war on poverty’ to ‘war on prosperity’

Sun, 19 May 2019 10:39:53 -0400

On April 24, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson strode up to a ramshackle house in Inez, Kentucky, and announced to the invited reporters that, “I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.” That war consumed well over $20 trillion, yet poverty rates (as measured by the government) barely budged. Even that shack in Inez, Kentucky, looks about the same now as it did 55 years ago.

Today, the Democratic Party’s vanguard is focused on a new war – against prosperity. Whereas the war on poverty aimed to lift people up, the mood of the Democrats’ new war on prosperity is to pull people down. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., rail against the “rich and powerful” despite being rich and powerful themselves. To them, the risk-taking and success that define the American Dream are economic vices that government must eradicate.

This isn’t just a war of words. Democrats are unveiling muscular new policies designed to crush successful companies and tear down the prosperous. For example, Democrats are jumping on the bandwagon to dismantle America’s leading tech companies. That would be a big boost to foreign competitors like Samsung and Alibaba, but it’s hard to see how American workers employed by these companies (not to mention consumers) would benefit.

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Democrats have also declared war on America’s financial markets. When Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., called for raising taxes on capital gains, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., upped the ante by introducing a plan to tax even unrealized capital gains – eliminating any incentive for long-term investing. Warren wants to put business leaders in prison for their companies’ regulatory lapses, even for mere negligence rather than criminal behavior. Risk-taking and innovation, so important to the vitality of our financial markets, would dry up – choking our economy.

The Democrats’ greatest passion, however, is for confiscating wealth from those who have a lot of it. Even though the top one percent pays more in taxes than the bottom ninety percent combined, Democrats want them to pay much, much more. Warren and Beto O’Rourke would impose a first-ever “wealth tax” on personal fortunes above $50 million. Whatever the government didn’t take from the wealthy while they were alive would be ransacked by a new 77 percent death tax pushed by Sanders, hitting family farmers and capital-intensive small businesses the hardest.

Punitive tax policies often backfire: France repealed a Warren-style wealth tax after it saw 200 billion euros in capital flee the country over 10 years. So did Sweden. But the real goal of the Democrats’ soak-the-rich schemes appears to be not revenue but social engineering through radical economic leveling. Left-wing phenom Stacey Abrams said as much in a recent interview: “The structure of our tax policy in America is the most direct form of social engineering that we have and the least investigated.” Abrams sees “structural inequality” in society as the vital concern of tax policy, not revenue-raising.

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The problem with the Democrats’ war on prosperity is that it won’t make life better for the have-nots, even if they drag the haves down to the same level. “In socialism, the rich will be poorer – but the poor will also be poorer,” said Thomas Peterffy, who fled the deadening hand of government in his native Hungary for a new life in America. More stifling regulation, less private investment and less incentive to work hard and save would leach prosperity away from our country. That would hurt not just the wealthy but also the middle class.

Democrats don’t like the “socialist” label but that’s where their anti-prosperity policies would take us. Fifty-five years ago, Democrats launched an ambitious war on poverty. It was a costly failure. In 2020, Americans will get to vote on whether the Democrats’ war on prosperity should be allowed to succeed. We can’t risk giving them that chance.

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Steven Law: 2020 Dems and ‘Medicare-for-All’ -- here’s what ‘free’ health care really means

Steven Law: Democrats pivot from ‘war on poverty’ to ‘war on prosperity’