The people critical of the Obama-Democratic health care legislation are solely screeching right-wingers, correct? You know, columnists like yours truly, wild-eyed bloggers, Fox News commentators and nonsense-slathering radio know-nothings. But if so, what are we to make of Jeffrey Flier?
He’s hardly some intemperate, thoughtless, uninformed bozo. He happens to be dean of the Harvard Medical School, and while he thinks the bills before Congress take steps to make care more easily accessible, he doesn’t think they do a blessed thing to control costs or make care better.
“In discussions with dozens of health care leaders and economists,” Flier writes in the Wall Street Journal, “I find near unanimity of opinion that … the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health care’s dysfunctional delivery system.”
It’s not Flier’s point, but one outcome of this increase could be to help bring us huge, prolonged, threaten-the-economy deficits when the size of government relative to goods and services is already the highest since World War II. As a worst case scenario, we could be talking about a reduction of this country over time to a shadow of its old self, a land that’s less leader than laggard.
In the health sector, insurance premiums would continue to soar, badly hurting Americans who are unqualified for new government help and all the businesses obliged to either provide insurance or pay the government an equivalent sum.
Current programs will be in increased danger. Medicare is already set to go bankrupt in a matter of years, and the addition of a new health entitlement seriously lessens the rescue options, making all of them very close to politically untouchable.
Flier fears the current system’s problems of fragmented, sometimes inadequate care will be made more difficult to solve, not less. “Ultimately,” he says, “our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.”
As evidence, he points to the financial mess caused in Massachusetts by a health plan similar to the ones being considered in Congress, and how proposed solutions point to creation of an immense new bureaucracy and pre-set limits on compensation to health care providers.
Are there other answers to the Democrats’ arrogant, mad rush to something disastrous? You bet. Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein has shown how the government could provide every family and individual in the country with vouchers to purchase insurance for health costs that are more than 15 percent of income without adding a nickel to the budget.
You do it with $220 billion gained by ending the subsidy of employer-based insurance. And then the government can provide health credit cards to help out when families can’t immediately meet the costs under 15 percent.
We meanwhile have some extraordinary bottom-up answers coming from doctors who have joined together in a few communities to more carefully investigate the outcomes of various treatments and then sticking with what works best. A consequence of these wonderfully American, voluntary associations has been to hold down costs and improve care, and while reports remind us of criticisms, it’s possible as well to see positive nationwide possibilities.
The fact is that there are any number of prudent steps (such as tort reform and selling insurance nationally) that could begin to address faults in a system that also happens to have many pluses, and those making the case include any number of people who are cool-headed, wise and caring, no matter what you may be hearing to the contrary.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
