To get a sense of how divorced from real experience most healthcare policy experts are let me share with you some recent examples..
Here's Jonathan Cohn:
"The idea behind the Affordable Care Act is to strengthen health insurance and give it to more people, which will cost the government money. At the same time, though, it will make the health care system as a whole more efficient, which will save the government money. Over the course of a decade, the costs and savings should be about equal, which means the net cost to the government would be roughly zero -- even as we'd made insurance both more reliable and much more available. That would be a pretty good deal...
Now, if you're worried about the government's long-term fiscal future -- and you should be! -- the key question is what happens after those 10 years. The big worry is that the budgetary burden of health care will become staggeringly heavy in 2030, 2040 and beyond. The only way to avoid that scenario is to slow down the growth of federal health care spending -- that is, to make sure it doesn't keep going up as fast as it's been for the last few decades."
But it begs the question: haven't we been making health care more efficient over the past 20 years? Following Cohn's argument, doing so would have prevented federal health care spending and spending overall not to go up as fast as it's been for the last few decades.
www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Columns/2011/February/020311cohn.aspx
Applying that timeline what do we see?
The rate of increase in healthcare spending is three times slower in the last few years compared to what it in 1970.
Assuming government wasn't doing anything to help, what was? I have some ideas but the point is, health care debates that don't start with accepting the facts as they are instead of some narrative we "feel" is right will go nowhere fast.
In the interest of fairness, here's an example of empty expertise from the conservative perspective:
Here's John McCain on Rx drug costs:
"Americans salaries are being cut, household budgets are slim and millions of Americans are struggling to make their monthly mortgage payment. For these reasons and so many more, Americans should not be forced to wait another day to purchase safe and affordable prescription drugs from outside the United States. But, while Americans all over the country and having to choose between their next meal and their necessary prescriptions, the large pharmaceutical companies continue to pressure Congress to delay consideration of any legislation to allow the importation of safe and lower priced prescription drugs."
The reality?
"Canadians (on average) spent 2.5% of their per capita PDI on prescription drugs in 2007, compared to 2.6% in 2009. Americans spent less of their per capita after-tax income (2.3%) on prescription drugs than Canadians in both 2007 and 2009. Comparable results were found when prescription drug spending as a share of per capita GDP was ana- lyzed. Canadians (on average) spent roughly 1.5% of their per capita GDP on prescription drugs in 2007, compared to 1.7% in 2009 (figure 1). Americans spent the same percentage of their per capita GDP on prescription drugs in 2007 as they did in 2009—roughly 1.7%."
tinyurl.com/4f7x94y
www.fraserinstitute.org/.../fraser.../prescription-drug-spending-Canada-and-US.pdf - Canada
People can have their own opinions, but not their own facts....
