The Medical Cartels Get Religion

What do you know, Big Pharma, the Hospitals (many nefariously doctor-owned) and the AMA are all in sync with Obama's "Health Care Plan" to "control costs". Even the Insurance companies are on board. Call OffHisMeds a cynic, but has this Band of Thieves just had the proverbial foxhole conversion?

Confronted with the reality of Socialized medicine, they have rightly concluded that with just the right amount of cooperation with the Democrats, our Medical Cartels will be able to preserve the 18% of GDP that they have carved out for themselves, up from 6% as of 1971. And that's 18% of a $14 Trillion dollar GDP today vs. 6% of a $1 Trillion GDP in 1971.

That is why Obama's projected "savings" of $1 Trillion over ten years with his Health Plan was so laughable. With true reform, we could cut the cost of medical expenditures at least in half, which would result in savings of $1.2 Trillion per year. This would still leave inflation adjusted health care spending at more than triple what it was in 1971.

But that is not where this story is headed. No, the inevitable outcome - now that Obama and the Democrats have shot themselves in the foot by attempting to cram through Nationalized Health Care - is the perpetuation of the current system, as idiotic a system as could be conceived, and nothing like the "Private Sector" option portrayed by Democrats and strangely enough, Republicans as well. Folks, there is no private health care in America. Instead, we have a quasi-socialist blob that is only portrayed as private because a bunch of politicians and their cronies say so. Just think of all the ways that our current Health Care system is different from true free-market businesses:

1) The government mandates who finances health care insurance, and alone in the industrialized world, they have mandated that large American corporations do so. The result has been the decimation of America's industrial base.

2) Government strictly regulates the available supply of doctors, specialists, equipment, procedures, supplies and drugs. This is the very definition of a Cartel.

3) The government sets prices for virtually all medical procedures and tests - over 12,000 of them - the very definition of a Monopoly.

4) There is no true competition between U.S. providers, and there is virtually no foreign competition, with the exception of Medical Tourism. With consumers almost completely detached from price-shopping for their health care needs, providers have no incentive whatsoever to compete, innovate, or lower their prices.

5) The current system - controlled by the Government - not only protects consumers from the consequences of their unhealthy lifestyles, it actually incents bad behavior. Epidemics relating to overeating, laziness, alcohol abuse and drug abuse are all treated as diseases that must be fixed, rather than lifestyle choices. Consumers that are protected from these consequences are thus enabled to continue abusing their bodies further, with healthy people forced to pay for those consequences.

OffHisMeds will expound on each of these in turn, but he wanted to get this post out so that he could make a prediction now and thus be declared a "seer by the end of this year":

- If any version of Health Care Reform is passed in 2009, it is going to look exactly like Medicare, with gigantic increases in spending, massive fraud and zero accountability.

- It will address none of the issues above that have caused the problems, most notably government interference.

- There will be no meaningful free market reforms in the package.

- Health Care will continue to balloon as a percentage of GDP.

- All of the monied interests will preserve their stake. The Medical Cartels will have prevailed.

- The economy will continue to tank.

This will only happen, by the way, if Republicans can be intimidated into signing on, giving Democrats the political cover they need. Look for Obama to throw them some small bones in the form of a modest expansion of Medical Savings Accounts or somesuch, just as the Dems did when they allowed some tiny pilot programs for school vouchers in the 90s.

Repubs need to resist the temptation. Unless they can preserve this as an issue until the 2010 election season - a mere five months away, the Dem's version of Health Care will pass, and Republicans will have consigned themselves to the political wilderness for at least another election cycle, and likely for a decade.

Meanwhile, any Health Care reform under Democrats will have the Medical Cartels rolling out the champagne and caviar. They will have sanctified 40 years of ill-gotten gains, the common folk and deficits be damned, and they'll defend the status quo, right up until the time our Chinese Lenders tell us the Tab is due.