Steve,

I’m glad I could give you some chuckles. I saw that NY Times story and am going to write about it. The quote you included shows precisely what is wrong: ” haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.”

You neglected to notice that, that passage you quoted, the patients themselves have no say in the matter. It’s the Bigs that decide everything: Big Insurance, Big Hospital, and Big Specialists, and Big Government.

In the pre-1965 system, as Ron Paul said, the patient was at the center: he decided what he would pay, and haggled with doctors and hospitals. Charity took care of the poor. It was a humane, free-market system; instead of the inhumane, Crony Capitalist-part socalist system we now suffer under.

Oh, one of the worst “reforms” actually came in the early 1970s when Nixon gave us HMOs. So, yes, another socialist Republican was at fault. Please keep blaming Republicans when they are wrong.

— John Seiler

Your “analysis” of why health care costs are rising is laughable.

See below for a perfect example of the REAL reason health costs continue to skyrocket and why health care reform is needed.

“The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/health/colonoscopies-explain-why-us-leads-the-world-in-health-expenditures.html?_r=2&

Colonoscopies Explain Why U.S. Leads the World in Health Expenditures
http://www.nytimes.com

Although we libs LOVED him! OWH was the good kind of conservative re taxes and of course THE archetypal regulator!

So you’re just picking on them as part of the unions’ attempts to unionize the company.

What to do about many of them going on Medicaid/Medi-Cal? Simple: End the Medicaid/Medi-Cal programs. This would do two things. First, competition in the medical field would increase to help these people, driving down cost. Why are costs dropping sharply everywhere else, such as computers, but not in the medical field? Because only the medical field is run so much by government.

For the poor or those with low-incomes who couldn’t afford care,charity would take over, as it did before Medicare and Medicaid were imposed by LBJ 50 years ago. As Dr. Ron Paul (the former congressman) has pointed out, when he started out in medicine in the early 1960s, hospitals took care of the poor for free, and doctors rotated offering their services to the poor for free, or at a reduced fee. The poor got good medicine from a kindly, free-market doctor; instead of today, where they get sub-par care from a snarling government functionary.

— John Seiler

Actually, Holmes was an associate justice. The exact quote is: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=275&invol=87

And he wrote that in 1927, when the top federal income tax rate was 25% (compared to 40% today); most people in the middle class paid no income tax at all; there was no combined 15.3% Social Security and Medicare tax; and California had no income tax.

So, I agree with you: We should return to the “civilized” tax rates of 1927.

— John Seiler