More Bad Spin on Healthcare

In the official response to Obama’s January 25th State of the Union address Rep. Paul Ryan said, “What we already know about the president’s health care law is this: Costs are going up, premiums are rising, and millions of people will lose the coverage they currently have. Job creation is being stifled by all of its taxes, penalties, mandates and fees.”

According to insurance companies and state insurance commissions, rising medical costs are the primary driver of increasing premiums. The Congressional Budget Office has said the law won’t have much of an impact on premium costs for most Americans, compared with what premiums would have been without the law. Premiums had been rising well before the law, and were expected to rise without it. People who buy their own insurance will see an increase of 10 percent to 13 percent and more than half of those individuals will get subsidies that reduce their costs substantially. The increase in premiums will be due to an increase in benefits in those plans.

Health care spending is expected to rise by less than 1 percent over a decade because about 34 million more Americans will gain coverage, according to the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

The CBO estimates that 8 million to 9 million people who would normally have employer-sponsored coverage won’t get such an offer from their employers. The reason is that these are mostly low-income workers who will get subsidies to go buy their own insurance in state-based exchanges. Whether the law had been enacted or not, employers would be free to drop coverage.

The CBO says the law would have a small impact on the labor supply, and that would be mostly due to workers retiring early or working less because they would have more secure health care options. It’s also expected to reduce the deficit over the next two decades and beyond.

The law does not create a government-run system. Studies on the quality of care worldwide have not put the U.S. at the top. A 2010 Commonwealth Fund study ranked the U.S. last among seven countries in health system performance. The U.S. ranks 49th in life expectancy, according to the CIA World Factbook, and many countries have lower rates of infant mortality.

The problem, of course, is the philosophical difference between the right and the left. The phrase Social Darwinism has been thrown around. These people believe in the survival of the fittest. Fee Market Capitalism will kill the weak and balance everything out. These folks have never read Darwin.

According to Darwin,“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Humans are a weak species, we need to work together to survive. We are SOCIAL animals, like it or not. Civilized people require social programs like health care and public education. Personally, I embrace our social nature.

A Republican friend of mine gave me a copy of On the Origin of Species. It’s a good read, I recommend it.