The dangers of the statists' new god: controlling costs

(Apologies up front for the heartwarming photo. It's a shameless attempt at shielding ourselves from charges of demagoguing the issue and of acting out of fear and ignorance)

If you choose to study electrical engineering and land a job with HP, you have earned health care under our current system. If you choose to smoke dope in high school and end up as the night manager of the local No-Tell Motel with tattoos all over your body and a Home Depot Sampler Set of fasteners piercing your face, you have not earned health care. The Death Board, to a great extent, is controlled by your actions. Obamacare does away with that.

That from KT on incentives and personal responsibility.

And then we have the following from B-Daddy on his current misadventures in this country’s government-managed sector of healthcare:

This is the myth of single-payer. Obama's former personal physician, Dr. David Scheiner, was on Larry King spouting off how single payer would be so much more efficient as a health care system and we should just abolish insurance companies. There are many things wrong with our current system, but the lack of economic incentive that accrues to single payer would devastate health care. At least with insurance, somebody has some skin in the game to push for efficiency. I am already seeing the effects of single payer in the relatively well funded military medical system, but it is struggling to contain costs. How much worse would it be for the whole country, which cannot afford the per person expense of military medicine.

In different ways, the two paragraphs above illustrate the theme that runs throughout the healthcare debate when you are talking about effectiveness and controlling costs and it’s called “skin in the game” or incentive or for you Friedman-esque pigs out there, profit-motive.

We covered this phenomena previously, where spending your own money on yourself, yields the most optimum results and all other methods result in inefficiencies and a drop in quality.

What is the government’s motivation for you to stay healthy in a single-payer system? There isn’t any. The government has absolutely zero skin in the game when it comes to your health. This is not to set up the government as a nefarious bogeyman but just as there are no actual death panels in the current healthcare reform bill, because of how the system is structured there is the eventuality that the results will be the same.

Recall the situation in Oregon where a lady suffering from cancer was denied expensive medication by the Oregon health board (“death panel” by omission rather than commission), who was it that stepped in and provided the meds for free? That’s right, the evil pharmaceutical company. Why? Beyond any sense of altruism that may have guided the decision, they had skin in the game. They had a (gasp), profit-motive.

Where the government had no incentive to keep this woman alive (indeed, in order to control costs, they had every incentive for this woman to be permanently taken off the rolls), Big Pharma has every incentive for people to stay alive in order to continue to buy their products. So, greed is good

Big Pharma: Keeping people alive so that they can live to pay another day.

Given the alternative, how is this a bad thing?



Keep your politics off our bodies.