“All of our major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc.) came into existence primarily to solve problems created by previous government interventions. And, the reason why there is a continuing push for further reform is because all the programs that are supposed to be solving problems are creating new ones.”
See Article Here: Reason For Our Health Care Crisis: Government – OpEd – Eurasia Review
HIGHLIGHTS
- Medicare and Medicaid unleashed an enormous amount of new health care spending. But there was no overall increase in health care. There was a shifting of resources to the elderly and the poor from the rest of the population. But the number of overall doctor visits and hospital procedures barely changed.
- “The reason we have Medicaid is that low-income families were priced out of the market for medical care. The cause: regulations that limit the number of people who can become doctors and limit what services nondoctors can offer.”
- “Certificate of Need (CON) laws protect monopolistic providers, raise costs and increase the size of patient bills.”
- “Government tax subsidies for years encouraged middle- and upper-income families to over-insure and over-consume care, while crowding out care for those at the bottom of the income ladder.”
- “Currently Medicaid finances 20 percent of all health care spending in the U.S. “
- “40 percent of children in this country are enrolled in Medicaid.”
- “Here is only one reason why we have Obamacare. Its advocates frightened people who had employer-provided insurance. The fear was that people might be discriminated against if they left their employers, had to buy their own insurance, and had a pre-existing medical condition. But the only reason why that fear lingered is because federal tax policy prohibited employers from funding personal and portable health insurance and failed to subsidize individually owned insurance to the same degree that it subsidized employer-provided coverage.”
