Those who favor legal abortion say “women should control their bodies.” But in America, the government controls all our bodies.

As former Budget Director David Stockman wrote:

There is a huge irony in this. America is allegedly the greatest assemblage of shoppers on the planet, and the rise of low-cost shopping meccas like Wal-Mart, its kindred big-box and specialty retailers, and now Amazon, is striking evidence of this societal competence in consumer choice. But with this tremendous resource for efficiency and cost-containment largely banished from the health care system, we end up with an uneven battle between the cost containment regulations issued by bureaucrats and third-party payors and the plunder of the cartels which dominate the delivery machinery.

The destruction of consumer choice and the shopping prowess of Americans in the health care delivery system was made in Washington—-not because people are not competent enough to choose among doctors, treatments, and vendors. Specifically, it started with the IRS’ WWII determination that employer health plans were not taxable income—a fraught policy decision that inherently created a bias towards tax-excludable insurance coverage versus after-tax out-of-pocket payments.

By the 1960s, employer health coverage was already creating an inflationary bias in the system, and a perceived inequity in terms of access to health care by the aged and poor who by definition weren’t part of the employer covered population. That resulted in LBJ’s landmark Medicare and Medicaid legislation, and before long a second prong of price-insensitive health care spending was off to the races.

The post-enactment explosion of costs for these programs is well-known, but the actual figures nevertheless powerfully reinforce the point. By the time these programs were up and running in 1970, combined Medicare and Medicaid costs (including state matching) amounted to $15 billion and 1% of GDP. Thirty years later the costs had escalated to $375 billion and 5% of GDP. Today they cost $1.2 trillion and with WIC and related child health programs, the total is $1.4 trillion. Finally, even conservative projections which embody far less than the worst case for Obamacare, show that government health spending will reach $2.4 trillion annually or 10% of GDP by 2022.

It goes without saying that the health care needs of the poor and elderly did not rise from 1% of GDP to a prospective 10% of GDP over the course of 50 years. What actually happened was that Washington created an enormous insurance pool for an uninsurable service, and then invited the medical professions to morph into the beltway’s greatest crony capitalist lobby.

The American Medical Association, for instance, fell on its sword in opposition to LBJ’s original legislation. Yet by 2010, it sold its soul in support of Obamacare in exchange for a more doc-friendly regime, the very thing which will cause the cost of Obamacare to balloon in the years ahead.

The following video is from the CBC, Canada’s government-run media system.

The video reports that, in British Columbia, “wait times are getting longer.” Already, it takes more than 5 years to get a routine operation for a sinus condition.

The median wait time for surgery in B.C. has risen to 19.3 weeks, from 18.8 weeks in 2010. That’s now almost 5 months.

Mike de Jong, the top B.C. health-care functionary, says they’re performing 25 percent more surgical procedures than 10 years ago. No doubt. As in America, Canada’s Baby Boomers are aging and need more care.

Looks like we’ll be putting up with the same thing soon. Except that we won’t enjoy the one thing Canadians do from their system: overall medical costs about half that in America.

In typical modern American fashion, under Obamacare we’re going to combine the high cost of capitalism with the incompetence of socialism.

By John Seiler

Wait! Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to give medical care and insurance to everybody, at a lower cost? How can that happen if insurers exit? This just in:

“Aetna Inc. said it would stop selling individual health insurance policies in California next month, and nearly 50,000 existing policyholders will have to find new coverage by January.

“The company’s announcement Monday comes a month after it opted not to participate in California’s new state-run insurance market for consumers, a key component of the new federal healthcare law.

“Aetna was a distant fourth in the state’s individual health market with a 5.2% market share in 2011, according toCitigroup data. Anthem Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente and Blue Shield of California dominate that business with a collective 87% market share in the state.”

This is just another indication that socialism doesn’t work. It’s just the first of many breakdowns in the system. Eventually, we’ll end up with a crummy, government-run system like Canada’s, where you have to leave the country to get care for anything serious, the way Newfundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams did.

Except that Canada’s socialized medicine costs 8 percent of GDP, half what America’s does, and will. So Canadians can save up for money to travel South for capitalist medicine. By contrast, Americans will continue paying 16 percent of GDP, twice the Canadian cost. So we won’t be able to save up to go elsewhere for health care. We’ll all die miserably waiting in long lines for Obamacare.

By DAVE ROBERTS

Like a bad horror movie in which the monster dies only to come back from the grave, socialized medicine has once again reared its ugly head in California. Not content to wait for Obamacare to kick in, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, has introduced SB 810. It’s a reincarnation of SB 840, a government-run health-care bill authored by Sheila Kuehl that was vetoed in 2008 by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the bill is estimated to cost $210 billion in its first full year of implementation and cause annual shortfalls of $42 billion,” said Schwarzenegger in his veto message. “To place this in proper perspective, our state budget deficit this year started at $24.3 billion.”

The fiscal hemorrhaging from SB 810, which is likely to be looked on more favorably by Gov. Jerry Brown, could be worse, perhaps $250 billion annually, according to the bill’s analysis. Startup costs could be in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Additional costs would result from the transition to a health care system run by state bureaucrats, including the implementation of a claims payment system, electronic medical records, labor market disruptions, reduced tax revenue and job loss from insurance companies.

Where’s the money going to come from? “Since no revenue source is currently identified, it would be pressure on the state General Fund,” the analysis states. That’s the same General Fund that has been running multi-billion dollar deficits for much of the past decade and which is on track for another $9.2 billion shortfall in the next fiscal year.

“There would be ongoing General Fund pressure in the millions to billions of dollars, because this bill would provide that the General Fund would be responsible for providing loans to the Healthcare Fund in the event of a shortfall or the delayed passage of the state’s annual Budget Act,” the SB 810 analysis states. “This bill would also permit the [health] Commissioner to use reserves and to borrow funds in such a situation and to take cost control measures.”

It would likely result in tax increases. The funding mechanism for Kuehl’s bill would have imposed a 12 percent tax on employers and employees along with another 11.5 percent in unspecified taxes.

Bureaucracy

If you thought the health care system was already bureaucratic, convoluted and confusing, wait until Sacramento takes over. A California Healthcare Agency would be formed along with the Healthcare Policy Board, the Office of Patient Advocacy, the Office of Health Planning, the Office of Health Care Quality, the Healthcare Fund, the Public Advisory Committee, the Payments Board, and the Partnerships for Health.

Few would argue that the current system is not in need of improvement.

Leno pointed out at the Jan. 17 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting that health care premiums have risen five times faster than the inflation rate since 2002. As a result, more employers are cutting back or dropping employee coverage. Employees are picking up more of the costs of premiums along with higher deductibles and co-pays. In the past year, 12 million Californians went without health insurance.

In 1960, the United States spent 5 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. That increased to 11 percent by 2000. Not it’s 17.6 percent of GDP, according to Leno. Without significant reform, the projections are that by 2015 we will be spending 20 percent of GDP on health care. Next: 25 percent by 2025 and 50 percent by 2060.

Leno said the World Health Organization ranks the United States 37th among nations in health care, despite Americans paying twice per capita than higher-rated countries with government-run health care. “So there is money in the system,” he said. “It’s just being wasted on both administrative and clinical waste. That’s what we’re purchasing: bureaucracy and waste instead of health care provision.”

He said costs can be cut through bulk purchasing of medicine and medical equipment. And he dismisses the concern about the impact on the General Fund budget, saying, “This is not a new $200 billion cost to the state of California. It’s the current $200 billion we are spending inefficiently on health care put into a new health plan that will be much more efficient, create greater results, keep Californians healthier and saving us billions of dollars.”

Leftist Support

California’s leftist organizations turned out in such large numbers that it took 17 minutes for all of them to come to the microphone and state their names and affiliations. In comparison, the opposition to the government takeover of a $200 billion industry was paltry.

Mark Burgat, representing the California Chamber of Commerce, said the Chamber disagrees that government systems are more efficient than private businesses, and that a single-payer system would be less costly than the current private system. But he provided no facts to back that up. He also warned about deficits in the tens of billions of dollars annually.

But he said the chamber supports Obamacare: “We believe the federal program is a program that is workable and we are working towards that end. We think that the state and the businesses in the state should focus on that. Trying to implement a California-only one-payer system is simply counter-productive.”

Also supporting Obamacare while opposing Lenocare is Nick Louizos, representing the California Association of Health Plans, who said, “Our industry is appropriately focused on implementing this [Obamacare] law and making it work. We believe the debate around SB 810 is counter-productive to those efforts. And, whether or not the funding is addressed in this bill or some future legislation, the cost of single-payer, as mentioned previously, is massive.”

Small Businesses Snuffed Out

The strongest argument against SB 810 was made by Ken DeVore, representing the National Federation of Independent Business.

“Right now small businesses in California are just struggling to survive,” he said. “Many of them can’t afford health care insurance for themselves, let alone for their employees. This could be the last thing that would drive them out of business, out of state. A study [on Kuehl’s bill] said that it would cost nearly a quarter million jobs in California if it was implemented with the imposition of all of these new costs on businesses. With 2.2 million unemployed in California right now, we just can’t afford something like this at this point in time with an economy that is still faltering.”

Several committee members spoke in favor of the bill; none spoke against it. But due to the need to further analyze the cost impacts on the General Fund, Chairwoman Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, ushered it into the suspense file with an agreement to vote on the bill today (Thursday, Jan. 19).

Like its predecessor, SB 810 is likely to pass the Legislature and reach the governor’s desk. Leno is optimistic that Brown will sign it, noting that the governor pushed a government-run health plan when he ran for president in 1992. “In the brief conversations I had with him when he was a candidate [for governor in 2010], he does want to sit down, look at the numbers and understand it more clearly that it is, of course, affordable for California,” said Leno.

In case you hadn’t heard, Gov. Dr. Prof. Arnold Schwarzenegger, M.D., F.A.C.C., D.O., D.C., D.D.S., D.V.M., signed into law the California Health Benefits Exchange. It implements Obamacare, otherwise called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Congress imposed back in February.

It fulfills Arnold’s wild dream to impose socialist medical care on everybody, just like the socialist Austria of his youth. Remember how he tried to impose his own socialized medicine scheme back in January 2006?

All his gabble about believing in free markets was just lies; and his friendship with the late free-market guru and Nobel Economics Prize winner Milton Friedman was just another of his schmoozing cons.

Other states have dragged their feet in imposing Obamacare, some even suing the federal government, to halt this Soviet monstrosity. Not Arnold Stalinegger.

Of course, Arnold won’t be standing in a long line with you to get poor care. He’s rich. He can go to a private clinic, or fly to Switzerland, to get treatment for himself and his family. He gets the best. You get the worst.

Here’a a chart showing the bureaucracy that you, Mr. & Mrs. California, will have to put up with.

Click once to enlarge it. Click once more to enlarge it again and read the details.

(Hat tip to LewRockwell.com’s great blog.)

Nov. 9, 2010