Democratic Health Care Fantasies
By Richard E. Ralston
July 27, 2004
Americans who care about their health care need to pay close
attention in an election year to politicians of all parties who seem
bent on becoming much more involved in the details of what health
care will be allowed and at what cost.
Neither the Democratic nor Republican platforms make for very
edifying reading on this subject. Taking them one at a time, the
Democrats convening in Boston come up first.
According to the web site for the “2004 Democratic Platform
Committee Report” under the section “Reforming Health Care,” a long
list of new government spending on health care is what they mean by
“reform.” We should explore the last item on their list first,
“Honoring our veterans.”
Funding for the Veterans Administration needs to be greatly
increased, the platform maintains. We need to address the
“inexcusable backlogs” in veteran’s claims. Now we should all
remember that this is not a welfare program. It is an employee
benefit earned by those who spent years in the military, often at
considerable risk on behalf of America. If these Veterans currently
are subject to “inexcusable backlogs,” where will they and the rest
of us be if the government expands—as this Platform proposes—into
the entire health care system and starts “honoring” us all in the
same way?
The Platform maintains that those Americans who pay for their own
health care “pay too much.” It also says that their employers pay
too much for health care. The solution? “We believe that health care
is a right and not a privilege.” If those who pay nothing for health
care have a “right” to it, how will it be provided to them? Who will
pay for it? There is no one else left to pay for it, but those
individuals and those businesses already paying too much, according
to this Platform. As P.J. O’Rourke has said, “If you think health
care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.”
The Platform also proposes a “Patient’s Bill of Rights to put
doctors and nurses back in charge of making medical decisions with
their patients – instead of allowing HMO bureaucrats to decide what
a patient needs.” In 1993 the Clinton Administration proposed
legislation that would have forced millions into HMO’s as “managed
care” was its almost magical solution to increasing health care
costs. Now the Democratic Platform proposes that HMO’s no longer be
allowed to “manage” what they pay for, but be required to pay for
anything a doctor or patient wants to do. Is that cost control? Is
that even reality?
The Platform advocates, “securing more funding for aggressive
biomedical research.” However, it elsewhere attacks Drug Company
profits. These profits fund more than $22 billion in drug research a
year. The only intent here must be to replace private research which
must get results in the marketplace with government research, which
requires no results except in the advanced sciences of grant
proposal writing and political connections.
There is one gesture in the direction of cost control “by using
American technological know-how to cut billions of dollars wasted in
administrative processing and paperwork.” The Federal government, it
appears, will offer its expert experience and advice on reducing
paperwork by introducing the health care industry to computers. One
would think that anyone who has tried to make sense out of a medical
bill or an insurance statement in the last thirty years would
realize the industry is already using computers. Only someone who
thinks that Al Gore invented the Internet would believe that the
Federal government could reduce the cost of anything by using
computers.
The only redeeming proposals in this Platform allow the
importation of prescription drugs—which should be an option open to
Americans even if it is unlikely to save them much in the long
run—and unspecified tax credits to ‘individuals and businesses” for
health coverage. Otherwise there is no mention of what would really
improve health care: more freedom and less government involvement.
In another month we will be able to look at what the Republicans
have to offer. Don’t get your hopes up.
Richard E. Ralston is Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine.
Copyright © 2004 Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. All rights reserved.
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