“The bill is irredeemable” writes Charles Krauthammer. Unfortunately he is correct — it would take only 20 pages to write a good bill, not the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill:
(…) First, tort reform. (…) Second, even more simple and simplifying, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines.
Some states have very few health insurers. Rates are high. So why not allow interstate competition? After all, you can buy oranges across state lines. If you couldn’t, oranges would be extremely expensive in Wisconsin, especially in winter.
And the answer to the resulting high Wisconsin orange prices wouldn’t be the establishment of a public option — a federally run orange-growing company in Wisconsin — to introduce “competition.†It would be to allow Wisconsin residents to buy Florida oranges.
But neither bill lifts the prohibition on interstate competition for health insurance. Because this would obviate the need — the excuse — for the public option, which the left wing of the Democratic party sees (correctly) as the royal road to fully socialized medicine.
Third, tax employer-provided health insurance. This is an accrued inefficiency of 65 years, an accident of World War II wage controls. It creates a $250 billion annual loss of federal revenues — the largest tax break for individuals in the entire federal budget.
This reform is the most difficult to enact, for two reasons. The unions oppose it. And the Obama campaign savaged the idea when John McCain proposed it during last year’s election.
Insuring the uninsured is a moral imperative. The problem is that the Democrats have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency.
The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing, and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 — and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.
Health reform without tort reform is like treating a sick patient with pneumonia without using antibiotics. It’s negligent. See http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com under Legal Quality category.
Good grief, gang, do I have to do all the heavy lifting around here?
How many states have already enacted some form of tort reform in regard to health care? Can you point out the huge savings therefromCan anyone name me a place in the USA where health insurance is affordable and comprehensive? A state, city or county in which people from areas where insurance is overpriced could find cheap, awesome coverage? A state, city or county where the insurance companies who do business there don’t enjoy the comprehensive exemptions from the Sherman anti-trust act afforded the insurance industry by the McCarran-Ferguson Act?
For a more reality-based review of health care reform, from someone a little better-qualified than Kraphammer to offer an economics-based critique of the legislation, how ’bout this gentleman from MIT?