With Congress stalled, the media is regrouping, getting back to the basics of reporting – of course with their own particular slants.
Arthur Caplan offers a Reform reality check on MSNBC that appears to bolster arguments from the left.
He takes on seriously the claim that insuring more people will stress an already existing shortage of physicians to treat them.
Reality check: This truly is a problem but it’s coming anyway. If current trends continue, the shortage of primary care physicians will reach 40,000 in a little more than 10 years, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Medical schools are only graduating about half the needed number of primary care doctors.
He doesn’t see a public option creating a government monopoly. “Some charges — that reform means the end of private insurance — are quite simply bogus.”
He agrees it will be harder to compete with a government run plan with no profit directive and lower administrative costs, but assumes cheaper private insurance plans will emerge. Caplan also suggests that any public option be “bare bones” until we as a nation decide what we want to do with it.
He drops the ball in discussing rationing, raising the common retort that we already face profit-driven rationing by the industry. But he fails to address how the government will dictate rationing, raising a straw-child of exploiting the industry critique that leaves the poor behind.
“Can we limit exploding costs by some form of rationing other than telling parents not to take their sick children to the doctor?”
Real Clear Politics - mentioned yesterday in this space, but deserving a re-visit - has a stunningly clear breakdown of the short-sightedness of most arguments promoting single-payer health care – by Clifford Asness.
“In the case of health care, the fact that we spend so much more on it now is largely a positive,” Asness argues. What we get for our money makes much of that expense worthwhile, though he said there is waste and fat that can be trimmed from the system.
His strongest arguements, however, take on comparisons to national health care in Canada and England that have been bandied about so much it’s hard for the average person to divine fact from rhetoric.
Myth #2 The Canadian Drug Story
Ah … one of the holy myths of the “US health care sucks” crowd. This should be fun.
The general story is how you can buy many drugs in Canada cheaper than you can buy them in the US. This story is often, without specifically tying the logic together, taken as an obvious indictment of the US’s (relatively) free market system. This is grossly misguided.
Asness proceeds to explain how our health costs subsidize the Canadians’ access with stunning clarity and more than a bit of wit. Basically it breaks down to the U.S. funding research and innovation, but he argues that drug companies are barred from recouping their initial investment by Canadian law.
We could go with the Canadian system and have super cheap drugs, if only we can find a much bigger, more medically advanced, freer country right next to us to make miracle drugs for themselves, and then we insist that we pay them only a bit above their [production] cost for our share, and then they in turn agree to let us be their parasite. Mexico, would you mind helping us out?
Asness breaks down cheaper medicine in European countries along similar lines, arguing that America’s market freedom subsidizes their controlled market, kind of like the Chinese fixed currency market.
Over on Politico, the Arena Digest: Advice for POTUS on health care is not a true myth-busting format, but does indirectly address some of the common arguments - that Obama needs to get more involved to the need to finish individual bills by recess.
The digest gives a chorus of voices offering advice to the president on various issues relating to health care reform.
And the Houston Chronicle’s Froma Harrop offers The Good, Bad and Ugly of health care reform bills.
After attacking the President’s backseat driving and arguing for a better way to sell taxing “Cadillac” health plans, Harrop defends the tax the rich financing plans as fiscally responsible - as opposed to another unfunded mandate.
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