A fun video on “free” health care in Canada:

Don’t believe everything you read at The Plank — including the part about Sarah Palin’s “death panel” claim being a “lie.”

Palin’s claim was a tad hyperbolic, but that does not change the fact that — as I explain in the Detroit Free Press — President Obama has proposed a new government panel that would enhance Medicare’s ability to deny care to the elderly and disabled based on government bureaucrats’ arbitrary valuations of those patients’ lives.

Recent editorials in both the Boston Globe and The New York Times contained some staggering falsehoods about the cost of Massachusetts’ health reforms. Here is a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Globe:

The editorial “Mass. bashers take note: Health reform is working” [Aug. 5] states that “the cost to the state taxpayer” of the Massachusetts health reforms is “about $88 million a year.” That claim is unquestionably false. The cost to state taxpayers is 19 times that amount, while the total cost is 24 times that amount.

The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation explains that the $88-million figure represents not the total cost to the state government, but the average annual increase in the state government’s costs. Worse, the editorial completely ignores new spending by the federal government and the private sector, which account for 80 percent of the law’s cost.

According to Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation estimates, health reform will cost at least $2.1 billion in 2009. The total cost to state taxpayers is at least $1.7 billion and growing. (The fact that other states’ taxpayers bear the balance should not be a source of pride.)

One wonders how such a falsehood comes to appear on a leading editorial page.

And one I sent to the Times:

“The Massachusetts Model” [Aug. 9] understates the cost of the Massachusetts health plan.

The editorial claims, “the federal and state governments each pa[y] half of the added costs, or about $350 million” in 2010. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, which generated that estimate, assumes that Massachusetts will eliminate $200 million in subsidies to safety-net hospitals next year. Given that those hospitals are currently suing the Commonwealth and exerting political pressure to increase such payments, those assumed cuts are hypothetical. More certain is the foundation’s estimate that the on-budget cost will reach $817 billion in 2009.

Yet the foundation’s estimates also show that the law (1) pushes 60 percent of its cost off-budget and onto the private sector; (2) costs about three times the $700 million that the editorial suggests, and (3) is covering 432,000 previously uninsured residents at a cost of about $6,700 each, or $27,000 for a family of four. That’s more than twice the average cost of family coverage nationwide.

The editorial admonishes that “the public should demand an honest assessment, from critics and supporters” of the Massachusetts health plan. Indeed.

A fuller response to these spurious claims may be found here.

I wish I could run a newspaper, so I could print false stuff and then not correct it. Oh wait, I do blog…

Having Congress charter a health insurance “cooperative” is just another way of creating a new government-run program that would drive private insurers out of business.

The definition of a cooperative is a health plan governed by its enrollees. Since a government chartered co-op won’t have any enrollees at first, it will be governed like any other government program. So when the Obama administration and congressional Democrats say, “We’re going to create a co-op,” what they mean is, “We’re going to create a new government health program but we will turn it over to the members in five years. We promise.”

As I explained in a recent Cato study, a government-chartered co-op would become just another Fannie Med:

It makes no difference whether a new program adopts a “co-operative” model or any other. The government possesses so many tools for subsidizing its own program and increasing costs for private insurers—and has such a long history of subsidizing and protecting favored enterprises—that unfair advantages are inevitable.

Who was it that said that thing about putting lipstick on a pig?

Politico reports that the so-called “public option” provision could be dropped from the highly controversial health care bill currently being debated throughout the country:

President Barack Obama and his top aides are signaling that they’re prepared to drop a government insurance option from a final health-reform deal if that’s what’s needed to strike a compromise on Obama’s top legislative priority.… Obama and his aides continue to emphasize having some competitor to private insurers, perhaps nonprofit insurance cooperatives, but they are using stronger language to downplay the importance that it be a government plan.

As I have said before, establishing health insurance co-operatives is a poor alternative to the public option plan. Opponents of a government takeover of the health care system should not be fooled.

Government-run health care is government-run health care no matter what you call it.

The health care “co-op” approach now embraced by the Obama administration will still give the federal government control over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, with a government-appointed board, taxpayer funding, and with bureaucrats setting premiums, benefits, and operating rules.

Plus, it won’t be a true co-op, like rural electrical co-ops or your local health-food store — owned and controlled by its workers and the people who use its services. Under the government plan, the members wouldn’t choose its officers — the president would.

The real issue has never been the “public option” on its own. The issue is whether the government will take over the U.S. health care system, controlling many of our most important, personal, and private decisions. Even without a public option, the bills in Congress would make Americans pay higher taxes and higher premiums, while government bureaucrats determine what insurance benefits they must have and, ultimately, what care they can receive.

Obamacare was a bad idea with an explicit “public option.” It is still a bad idea without one.

“Death panels” are a dominant motif in the debate over health care regulation, a fact that spins off political flares like a roman candle.

Extremists on both sides have taken their extreme positions: Some literally fear President Obama and his health regulation plans; others are outraged that anyone could possibly feel that way.

Charges of special-interest organizing meet counter-charges of unfairness and false accusation. Good video from town hall meetings and volleys of “Nazi” and “socialist” give cable news networks another short reprieve from their long slow decline. It’s all manna for the writers at Comedy Central.

But let’s talk substance: Health care is a scarce good, so it will always be rationed. The core question is whether government should take the dominant role in health care rationing over from insurance companies, or whether reform should restore rationing decisions to patients advised by doctors. 

Though they would never have the name or the form, the “death panel” label roughly (and unfairly) describes what would happen if health decisions were turned over to government bureaucrats under the leading proposals today. The bureaucracy would do exactly what “reform” asks it to do(!): prioritize cost savings and efficiency over the unique, individual interests of patients and their families.

The bureaucracy would serve its own interests too. Bureaucracies are subject to capture by special interests, of course, and they can be corrupted. These things are easier when the people who might die look like statistics.

Many people feel very strongly that problems with health care today indicate the need for President Obama’s and Congress’ health care plans. But what’s wrong with health care doesn’t mean that these proposals would make things better. Because they would move control of health care in the wrong direction, they would make things worse.

Everyone has a personal story about health care, and I have one too. On the day my mother passed away, my family and I were called to the hospital and met by a social worker. He showed us to a small anteroom at the entrance to the intensive care unit, where he guided us through a lengthy conversation about my mother’s wishes and the family’s circumstances. He then called in the doctors to offer their prognosis and advice, which we took.

It was a death panel. It was our death panel — because my parents had fully prepared for this eventuality by buying insurance.

Just like health care will always be rationed, there will always be death panels. The question is who runs them. To the extent our public policy drives people away from financial responsibility for their own health care, it sets them up for death panels that are administered by government bureaucrats, not by loved ones and doctors.

Political debate is rollicking and unfair and full of inaccuracy. And in the terms of today’s health care debate, we don’t want “rationing” — meaning we don’t want government rationing. And we don’t want death panels — meaning we don’t want government death panels, because government death panels will deny people and their families an essential dignity of life: choosing how it ends.

In that sense I say with apologies to Patrick Henry: Give me liberty or give me death panels.

To cope with the growing cost of Massachusetts’ health reforms, some suggest government should block competition by new producers. Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter to the editor of the Boston Globe highlighting the flaw in that approach:

The Public Health Council is wrong to claim that requiring government approval for new outpatient clinics and ambulatory surgical centers will contain the costs of Massachusetts’ health-care reforms [“State toughens rules for building new clinics,” Nov. 14]. According to University of Alabama health economist Michael Morrisey, economic studies of such “certificate-of-need” (CON) requirements “find virtually no cost-containment effects…If anything, CON programs tended to increase costs.”

Morrisey suggests the real reason for such barriers to market entry is protectionism: “A reasonably large body of evidence suggests that CON has been used to the benefit of existing hospitals…Prices and costs were higher in the presence of CON…The continued existence of CON and, indeed, its reintroduction and expansion despite overwhelming evidence of its ineffectiveness as a cost-control device suggest that something other than the public interest is being sought.”

If the Commonwealth wants to reduce health-care costs, it should stop protecting inefficient providers.