Democrats in Congress are trying to abolish short-term, limited-benefit insurance, but that insurance is on the rise because people want it. Democrats complain that today’s short-term plans don’t cover services people might need. “What if you get sick and need expensive drugs?” they might ask. The answer is: you drop your short-term plan and enroll in an Obamacare plan.
In Chile, people can work and earn as much as they like, even while receiving social security benefits. In Singapore, Switzerland, the Netherlands and other countries, people don’t lose their private insurance coverage if they quit work or change jobs. In Chile’s unemployment system, people don’t lose income when they go back to work. Chile’s disability system, which allows people to go back to work without losing benefit checks, costs about half as much as disability programs cost in the U.S. and in Europe.
In health care we are not getting the benefits from competition that we receive in markets for other goods and services. The reason for that is unwise government regulation. Under the current system, We don’t allow health plans to specialize in something they are really good at. Say a plan is very good at diabetic care. If we would allow it to restrict its enrollment to diabetics and focus exclusively on their care, it would probably improve even further. Instead, we require health plans to be all things to all enrollees.
Because of budget shortfalls, the Heartland Institute suspended publication of Health Care News in March. Fortunately, the Goodman Institute for Public Policy has agreed to partner with Heartland to ensure the newspaper’s survival going forward.
Although liberals often talk about helping the poor and reducing inequality, their most cherished reforms these days would tax the poor and subsidize the rich – making inequality worse than it otherwise would have been. Consider three ideas that are at the top of the mainstream liberal policy agenda: Medicare buy-in for young seniors, free college education and making it easier for workers (especially public employees ) to unionize. It’s hard to think of an agenda that is less progressive in the original meaning of the word.
Regulations that lock down the economy are killing people. Deregulation is saving them. That’s the theme of several research projects at the GIPPR. It’s also the theme of John Goodman’s latest post at Forbes. Governmental bodies are repealing laws, suspending regulations, and ignoring previous restrictions that impeded the ability of the private sector to act. They are liberating doctors, nurses, drug manufacturers, test makers, makers of personal protective equipment, etc., to do things that were illegal to do only a few months ago.
The mainstream media had a field day condemning Donald Trump for promoting off-label uses of prescription drugs to treat the coronavirus. So what do you expect to happen when a drug is “proven”? Did you know that “approved” drugs work only half the time? What about “unproven” drugs? Did you know that as many as one in five drugs in use in the United States has been prescribed for an off-label purpose? Roughly one-half of all cancer patients are relying on off-label prescriptions. Much of what doctors know they learn by trial and error – outside of FDA tests.
A revolution is occurring in the way medical care is being delivered in the United States. It is happening almost overnight. People have stopped going to hospital emergency rooms. They have stopped going to doctors’ offices. Most of the nation is self-isolating. Doctors and patients are no exception. They are communicating by means of phone, email, Skype, Zoom and other devices. Last December, Zoom was the host of 10 million video conferences a day. Last week, the company was hosting 200 million a day. Many of those were patient/doctor communications.
I suspect that behind a veil of ignorance, you would choose rationing rules that favor people who are doing the most to improve the lives of other people. And I think this is what the health professionals do as well. Prospects for survival are important because the better the prospects, the more likely the patient is to contribute to social welfare as a whole. Age is important, because the more years of life the patient has left, the more opportunities there will be to make such contributions.
Most patients would have a health kit in their home, with a temperature gauge, blood pressure cuffs and an oxygen sensor. Patients would have these because doctors, hospitals and health plans would encourage them. Patients with older models would call in the readings to their doctors. Newer models would send the doctor an automatic, electronic alert if there was reason to be concerned.