I mentioned at some other website that the victory for AHIP and PhRMA in the “health care” battle has been total and complete, an awesome display of power.
However, President Obama says that he only got 95% of what he wanted. I wonder what the missing 5% is?
Here’s a prediction: Many people send their prescriptions up north to Canada to fill, to avoid cartel pricing down here in the States. I think this is technically illegal, but the pharmaceutical companies have had to endure this insult for fear of sparking a firestorm.
Now that they have what they want, now that there is no more to get from Washington, I predict that they will clamp down, and people will be prosecuted for filling prescriptions in Canada.
Piece of Mindful 
I agree.
Also look for a massive increase in UNinsured.
Since the penalty for no insurance is only $750 a year – it is significantly less than health insurance – ~$8000.
Since the program must accept all – even with pre-existing conditions – it pays to opt out, pay the penalty, and wait until sick, then opt in.
The economics of Socialist Health Care is disastrous.
With the economy in shambles, and government spending out of control, if any one thinks government can do health care is obviously living in fantasy.
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Mark, it’s easier than that. Big Pharma will refuse to sell excess products to Canada (and any other price controlled country for that matter) so exportation will come with a shortage of Rx up there. They have been threatening that for years and, hence, re-importation was always a non-starter in practical terms.
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Dave,
They would have to do that world-wide; which they won’t.
But if they do, they simply cause an explosion in ‘knock offs’. The other countries will make a special repeal of patent law to except pharmaceuticals, and essentially destroy the American Pharms.
So, the simplest way is to make Americans criminals.
That tactic maintains the global cartel – and forces Americans to pay top dollar.
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“exempt” instead of ‘except’
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I’m betting those drugs are not made in New Jersey.
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essentially destroy the American Pharms
A short sighted strategy.
I don’t see where insurance companies won much. They lobbied for what they could get, but the mandates and cost controls that came down will probably be their doom.
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The mandates are their idea; there are no cost controls.
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The controls on administrative costs will, as usual, favor the big boys. This coupled with mandates on covering pre-existing conditions will likely turn the industry into a ghetto and increase calls for a government run system, which is what I suspect the leftists on Harry Reid’s staff intended.
Anyway, this jihad against insurance companies is a shoot-the-messenger type of thing. The cost structure of the health care system is still the underlying problem.
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Administrative costs, which ran about 10% in the early 90’s, are currently running at about 20%. The bill lowers that to 15%. That can be easily obscured by accounting gimmickry.
Harry Reid is a “leftist” in the same sense Arlen Specter is.
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If you think 20% is bad, wait until the Zimbabweans in our civil service get a hold of it. We’ll be lucky to see 20% of our money coming out the back end.
Even if we cut administration to 1%, we’re still faced with paying mega bucks for marginal results on a cost curve that is approaching a singularity.
I don’t think Harry Reid is all that bad. The staffers are what worry me.
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When you add hospital and doctor overhead caused by insurance companies, the U.S. is at 31%.
Medicare: 3%. Canada – 16%.
Of course – it’s not that simple – Medicare needs to invest more in overhead to ferret out some of the massive private sector fraud that is going on. But even with that, its overhead would not begind to approach the private sector.
Deal with your internal contradictions.
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The 16% Canadian figure would be a good goal for our bloated bureaucracy to emulate. Medicare is a subsidized figure: if it had to run the whole system, it would do well to reach 16%.
When you slay the windmill of administrative cost, you are still faced with the continued rise in the cost of health care itself.
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So you’re pretty much unreachable, then? You took a slam-down on administrative costs in the private sectors and … Medicare is subsidized … and your conclusion … hard ot make sense of it.
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Some seniors will opt for the prison health care system. Senior living communities with lots of security. Dress code is casual in the dining hall.
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You took a slam-down on administrative costs in the private sectors
You play a school yard game here. You quote the highest figure you can find for private insurance and the lowest figure you can find for medicare. Several studies put private insurance administrative costs at 12%. It costs medicare 3% to dump the money where ever, but that money involves an administrative cost on the receiving end. Your comparisons here are not fair. The notion that you put government in charge to save administrative costs is a joke.
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The 20% figure for private insurance is rock solid – investors monitor it very closely. It is the reason they seek out the healthy, avoid the already-sick, and rescind existing policies when peoplebget sick. The whole of the corruption of the private insurance business rests on the backs of private investors. They are not doing anything useful. Remove them from the picture, costs go down automatically. They arre leaches.
The 11% figure for externalities posed on others by private insurance is taken from a Harvard study. That doesn’t make it gold – it only means that it probably wasn’t an ass plull, like your 12% figure.
Medicare numbers are widely cited but the tradeoff is that $100 – 500 billion per year is being stolen from the system by the private sector. Medicare ought to invest in better monitoring, but oddly, there is widespread resistance.
There is a private study out there that says that Medicare fudges it’s numbers, but I don’t see it widely cited.
And then there is the elephant in the kitchen, the fact that other countries achieve universal coverage and better outcomes than us at half bthe cost.
Deal with your internal contradictions.
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Deal with your internal contradictions.
I’m having constant seizures and I don’t know why.
Okay, let’s say I totally accept your figures. We are still faced with a high cost system with marginal outcomes. The insurance companies you like to bash account for about 1/2 of health care spending. If we wring out the administrative costs and investor income we’d be lucky to drop health care spending to 15% of GDP as opposed to 16% today, and we still face a rising cost structure on the service end. And we can’t raise investment money anymore, just like Cuba.
I’m not against cutting costs, but I’ve seen new management come into a business/government entity promising to crack the whip, reorganize, and lean up. Sometimes it works if the previous thing was bloated. But often the result is equal/worse. I’m not going to hold my breath on this being the area that makes our health care system more affordable.
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We might start by seeing how other countries manage to do it so much better than us, and for so much less.
Unheard of. Americans always know better.
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