Government failure: Too many vaccines on the shelf

SWINE FLU FOLLIES:

WASHINGTON, May 3 (Reuters) - The United States still has 71 million doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine that have not been used, but it is not yet time to throw them out, the federal government said on Monday.

States and other providers should hang on to the vaccine and continue to offer them to people until drug companies can start distributing seasonal vaccine for the coming influenza season in the autumn, said Health and Human Services Department spokesman Bill Hall.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance committee, released a letter on Monday that he sent to HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking her how much vaccine was left over and when it would expire...

Sebelius said last month that 162 million doses were produced and distributed, but only 90 million actually got into people's arms or noses.

Full article here.

BHI releases study on jobs and Obamacare

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will destroy jobs not create them. That's the finding of a new study from the Institute.

Let's add a little economics to health care economics

Veronique de Rugy: Economists have shown that if a good’s price is zero or decreasing, then the demand for this good will likely increase. In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume

If it walks like a duck...

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR:

'You get into a lot of semantics here,” says Eric Toder, an expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington. But he says if money is owed to the IRS, “I supposed you would call that a tax."

There is no French free lunch when it comes to health care

Guy Sorman writing in City Journal:

It may indeed seem free, or close to free, for an American tourist receiving treatment in an emergency; as a French taxpayer, however, I paid a heavy price for Paretsky’s husband’s treatment. And you, my American reader, did too.

How much? France’s costly national health insurance is mostly financed by taxes on labor. A Frenchman making a monthly salary of 3,000 euros will pay approximately 350 of them (deducted by his employer) for health insurance. Then the employer will add approximately 1,200 euros, making the total monthly cost to the employer of this individual’s services not 3,000 euros but 4,200. High labor costs in France affect not only consumer prices but also unemployment rates, since employers are reluctant to pay so much for low-skill workers. Economists agree that unemployment rates and the cost of national health insurance are directly related everywhere, which partly explains why even in periods of economic growth, the average French unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent.

Infant mortality and health care reform

STEVE CHAPMAN:

"A lot of things could be done to keep babies from dying in this country. But the health care 'reform' being pushed in Washington is not one of them."

WSJ publishes letter from BHI Koch Summer Fellow

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor from BHI Koch Summer Fellow Alex Weckenman. Here's the entire letter:

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey argue that a public healthcare plan violates the privacy rights established in Roe v. Wade. But where is the violation of privacy?

Roe v. Wade.prevents the government from limiting access to abortion on the grounds that the decision to abort is a private matter best left to the woman. That same logic may prevent government from limiting access to the type of treatment that a patient deems most suitable. But the existence of a public plan does not preclude access to private insurance. Those that disagree with the government plan are free to pursue whatever private alternative they choose.

Government restrictions on access to private care are the real privacy rights violations. For example, the ban on interstate purchases of health insurance, like a ban on abortion, limits an individual's autonomy on a deeply personal issue.

Alex Weckenman
Boston

The Health Care "Market"

Paul Levy, the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has some great insights to problems facing health care:

The problem with the health care "marketplace" is that it is not a real market. There are so many intermediaries that the usual connection between buyer and seller that we see in other fields does not exist. Thus, the incentives for suppliers (doctors and hospitals) to engage in efficiency improvements and value enhancement are extremely slow to emerge. Also, the incentives for consumers to seek greater quality and lower costs likewise are very weak in this field. (This is aggravated, of course, by the lack of transparency about relative quality of providers.)

Then, we overlay on that the fact that government sponsored programs, Medicare and Medicaid and other state subsidized insurance plans, are ruled by administrative fiat and competing political agendas, and we see that over 40% of the delivery of health care is not subject to market influences at all. One result there is the focus on quick fixes that have headline value (not allowing payment for "never" events, for example) that only cover an infinitesimally small portion of the problem but do not address underlying structural problems. Another result is political battles focused on splitting the pie differently but not making the pie the right size or more tasty.

The whole post is worth a read.

Prononents of socialized medicine love to frame health care as a market failure. As Levy points out though, we hardly have a free market in the health care industry. Before we go on adding even more regulations, it would be best to examine the effects of the ones we have in place now.

An actually move toward a free market in health care, like the utilization of market forces in just about every other industry, would bring us much better services at much lower costs.

On my reading list

Just arrived in the mail, J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin's new book America's Health Care Crisis Solved. We'll be reviewing it ASAP. Meanwhile, from the publisher's press release:

America's Health Crisis: Solved shows that the current health care crisis is not about the care itself: American health care remains the best in the world. Rather it is a crisis of access, insurance, transparency -- and this crisis has been created by government meddling in health care markets over many decades. Rather than look for ways for government to solve the problem, Rooney and Perrin show that government is the problem. To fix this increasingly broken system, we must take health care decisions out of the hands of bureaucrats and return them to those with the most interest in quality, affordable care -- the consumers themselves.

The authors' blog is here.

Medicare may be making the primary care doctor shortage worse

Having trouble finding a primary care doctor? Medicare may be making the shortage worse according to a new study by the Harvard Medical School.