By John R. Lott, Jr.
Fox News
Senior Research Scientist, University of Maryland/Author, “Freedomnomics”
April 27 2009
“If
you got health insurance, then you can keep it . . . and we won’t do anything
about that,” at least
that was what President Obama promised during the campaign last year. Well, add that to a
very long list of broken campaign promises, including: cutting
government spending, reducing
the deficit, and “no
family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.”
Just as bad, on Friday it was revealed that Obama and the
Democrats have no problem pushing through Senate votes on these radical health
care changes that strip
away (All
constitutional checks and balances to protect this nation from an over reaching
federal government) normal
procedural protections for those who oppose such changes.
Last Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Larry Summers, Obama’s
chief economic adviser, let the cat out of the bag on health care. In
explaining why universal health care wasn’t going to increase the deficit,
Summers said that people are just getting too
much unnecessary care. Summers claimed: “whether it’s
tonsillectomies or hysterectomies . . . procedures are done three times as
frequently [in some parts of the country than others] and there’s no benefit in
terms of the health of the population. And by doing the right
kind of cost-effectiveness, by making the right kinds of investments and
protection, some experts that we — estimate that we could take as much as $700
billion a year out of our health care system.”
This sure seems like rationing.
Total health care expenditures in the
Tonsillectomies
have primarily been done because of acute or
chronic throat pain. Where different people are willing to draw the line
between pain and surgery is a choice that we have traditionally left up to
patients, but unless you know something about the patient’s preferences it is
hard to claim that a surgery was a “mistake.”
The selective use of statistics
by Summers and others in the Obama administration is
startling. In 2000,
It’s strange that the Democratic
Party, a group that doesn’t think the government should intervene between a
doctor and a woman when it comes to determining whether or not to have an
abortion, appears to have no problem in telling doctors whether they can perform
“tonsillectomies or hysterectomies.”
Ironically, the Obama
administration isn’t confident enough that they can simply explain to people
what medical procedures they should have. If people are getting costly,
unnecessary procedures, don’t you think that the insurance companies would
already have learned about it? For anyone who thinks that insurance companies
are too stingy, the Obama administration has a news flash: insurance companies
have been paying for too much health care.
But the Obama administration
apparently doesn’t think that they can simply convince people of the value of
their advice. Sadly, Summers and the rest of the Obama
administration have no problem forcing people to do what they think best.
Yet, not only is Obama going to
break his promise on interfering with these decisions, he has no problem with forcing this change on people.
Democrats have apparently figured out a way to pass health care legislation without
mustering the 60 votes normally needed to pass
things in the Senate. To do this, health care won’t be voted on as a separate
piece of legislation, but as part of the budget. The proposals also won’t be voted on in
the Senate when the budget legislation is first brought up, but only after the
final budget bill has gone through the process of “reconciliation” with the
House.
Possibly Americans should ask
Canadians
and Brits
–- people who have long suffered from rationing — how happy they are with
central government decisions on eliminating “unnecessary” health care.
John Lott is a senior research
scientist at the