thegipples/health

From the page: "A new NYT poll found that the overwhelming majority of the public support giving people the option to be into a Medicare-type plan. The margin was 65 percent in favor and just 26 percent opposed."

From the page: "The argument made against the industry is that the structure of the industry causes it to profit by preventing people from getting coverage and that it adds an unnecessary layer of administration to the health care industry.

The first point is straightforward. Payments for health care come dollar for dollar out of the industry's profit. If an insurance company can avoid paying for its customers' care, then it increases its profits.

The industry is arguably unnecessary since it is not directly involved in providing care. Medicare pays the checks for care at far lower administrative cost than the private insurance industry."

From the page: "...many Britons were surprised to read a recent editorial in the American newspaper Investor's Business Daily. The editorial stated, "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Well, Hawking was in fact born in Britain and has lived there his whole life. The newspaper was forced to run a correction. Hawking said, "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. [I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.]" That's the National Health Service of Britain."

From the page: "The basic story of the U.S. health care system is that prices are inflated by enormous rents everywhere. Our doctors get paid twice as much as doctors in Canada, Germany, and elsewhere. (I know, they will all work as shoe salespeople and custodians, if we cut their pay.) We pay twice as much for prescription drugs as everyone else. And we throw 15 percent of our health care expenditures in the garbage, paying insurance companies to deny people care."

From the page: "There are millions of very smart people in the developing world who would be delighted to train to U.S. standards and work for the $170,000 year (net of malpractice insurance) that our primary care physicians. (Developing countries could train 2-3 physicians for everyone that came to the United States if we placed a modest tax [e.g. 10 percent] on the earnings of foreign-trained physicians and repatriated it to the home country.)

If the Post were not such an ardently protectionist newspaper (don't they know about Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression?), it would be writing about the potential to increase the number of foreign trained primary care physicians in the United States by removing legal and professional barriers."

From the page: "This paper notes that projections of soaring budget deficits are driven primarily by rising health care costs, not demographics. It proposes a solution that would enable Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the health care systems of countries with higher life expentancies and lower medical costs than the U.S."

From the page: "this exemption of employer healthcare contributions and expenses was a key reason for their rapid adoption by many businesses and was formally enshrined in the US tax code in 1954.6 So, as the costs to US businesses of their health care have rapidly risen over time, so have the costs to the US government of providing the tax breaks for it.

Current US law stipulates that the value of employer provided health insurance is excluded from income taxation, as well as from the FICA wage base for both employers and employees. The Joint Committee for Taxation in 2008 estimated that the tax-preferred status bestowed upon employer-provided healthcare provides a total subsidy worth $245 billion in 2007 alone.7 A large share of private employer healthcare costs--perhaps as much as half based on a back-of-the-envelope estimate (the equivalent of a $245 billion subsidy out of $480 billion in direct costs in 2007)--are thus in reality funded by the US taxpayer. Another way of thinking about this tax subsidy is that the costs are already socialized."

From the page: "One little bit of language in the omnibus appropriations bill signed today could shift the government's focus on food marketing and childhood obesity from kids under 12 to everyone under 18, potentially affecting hundreds of millions of dollars of food, beverage and fast-food advertising on TV."

The Constitution is under attack by Congress, but our courageous marketers of diabetes-inducing food products will defend it until it becomes a lost cause and unprofitable to do so--then they'll co-opt the healthy-teen food movement and market newly designed fake foods with new scientific claims.