“Supreme Court upholds health care subsidies” is a Boston Globe article that is typical of the press coverage of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the federal government can ladle out tax dollars in all 51 jurisdictions nationwide. In practice it is the insurance companies and health care industry that receive these dollars. Even a purportedly “subsidized” American will typically pay more for health care than his or her counterpart in a country where the industry consumes a lower percentage of GDP. Yet this manna from Washington is characterized as something that individual voters receive: “The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive…” (emphasis added, from the Globe article).
Without any mention of the fact that U.S. federal and state governments established policies that have driven up the cost of health care, it is easy to see how someone reading one of these articles would be grateful for the beneficence of the central planners.
Related:
- “The Soviet comrade tours Washington, D.C.” (USDA driving up food prices with market restrictions and then giving 50 million Americans food stamps to help pay the new higher prices).
- “Insurance and Hospital Industries Relieved as Supreme Court Upholds Health-Law Subsidies” (WSJ, 6/25/2015), noted that “Hospitals have benefited from a rise in paying customers under the law” and “’It is business as usual and that is good for us,’ said Alan Miller, chief executive of Universal Health Services Inc.” and “Much of the health-care industry’s attention will now be focused on the possibility of huge insurance deals that could knit together some of the industry’s biggest players and challenge the negotiating power of hospitals and doctor groups.”
Barney Frank said, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Which sort of glosses over the fact that those doing the choosing and those doing the “giving” are not necessarily the same people and that if you don’t “give” they put you in jail.
FDR, with Social Security, sort of lucked upon the concept that if you create a widely based entitlement program it will be very popular with many voters and will become seen as a natural right of every American and politically untouchable by anyone.
If you haven’t read Steven Brill’s “America’s Bitter Pill”, it is a book length expansion of his Time magazine expose from 2013, narrating the genesis and birth of the ACA. Short version: it’s not a “health care” program, it’s a “sick care payment” program that goes to great length to stay away from dealing with medical practice, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, or other players EXCEPT to devise ways to pay them (retail). The guiding principle is “everybody gets paid more” and the rest follows from there. The most depressing conclusion is there’s zero chance of moving toward either a single payer scheme or a market-based one. It will just keep shambling along until the internal financial stress overcomes the players one by one – the first to blink will be doctors, who are rapidly becoming employees rather than businesses. Next will probably be pharmas, whose pricing power will erode as global price discovery shocks voters enough to threaten their patrons in Congress. It will be a slow process with uncertain results.