Hillary Clinton's bad dream

Hillary Clinton told the Association for a Better New York today that Democrats will focus on improving the quality and affordability of health care.

"Health care is coming back," the former first lady told the group, adding, "It may be a bad dream for some."

You may not remember--hey, she may not remember--but the Clinton health care reform plan was torpedoed by a Democratic House and Senate.

It's getting pretty tiresome to hear politicians snarling about health care as if the other party is dedicated to killing people.

Health care isn't free. Drug research isn't free. Americans seem to live in a permanent 1950s childhood where dad's company just pays for everything and the kids get to whine about how much they don't want to go to the doctor.

The various plans for making health care "affordable" always result in the same thing: cost-shifting. If Medicare won't pay, private insurance companies will be hit with higher prices and will pass them along to policyholders. If businesses can't pay the higher premiums, they will pass the costs along to their employees in the form of higher co-payments and lower coverage levels. If nobody pays, hospitals and emergency rooms close.

Sound familiar?

If you think drug prices are high now, imagine how high they'll be when Medicare sets price controls (excuse me, "negotiated discounts,") and pharmaceutical companies make up the difference by raising prices on drugs used by non-Medicare patients.

Efforts to "improve health care quality" usually include government mandates for insurance coverage of certain services and requirements for higher nurse-to-patient ratios at hospitals. Whatever the merits of these policies, they raise costs, and the costs are passed on. If the government demands higher quality and lower prices simultaneously, the result is more cost-shifting, which only accelerates the meltdown.

People are just not going to stand still and be forced to work for the benefit of other people. They will close their businesses before they will lose money by government directive.

And they should.


Copyright 2006

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