I don't think Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. has learned much about healthcare since her abortive health reform effort over a decade ago, based on her recent legislative efforts and in leaks about her latest presidential campaign ideas.
With Rep. John Dingle, D-Mich., she co-sponsored the Children's Health and Medicare Plan, H.R. 3162 (CHAMP) passed by the House of Representatives and now in a House-Senate Conference Committee. The bill would morph the State Children's Health Insurance Program, SCHIP (with a "P") into even more entitlements and social engineering incentives.
It would withdraw SCHIP support for pregnant mothers and their unborn children and would outlaw the prenatal care currently allowed under SCHIP. The bill would also include money for abortion-causing drugs, thus preventing children from being born by killing them beforehand. Yet the bill claims to be about "Children's Health."
As noted by Peter J. Smith of LifeSiteNews.com, it would also remove Title V abstinence education funding, reducing education efforts to safely prevent babies from being conceived in the first place.
By changing what the program will pay for, it limits and distorts doctors' incentives just as changes in your health insurance "coverage" reduces your doctor's incentives to diagnose and treat you, as we described last week.
By pouring more taxpayer money into government-sponsored health plans, the government would take over even more of America's medical system. When government takes over a healthcare system, it can result in a cheaper system than our current one, as in Belgium where the government limits spending. There, most government money spent on healthcare goes to those under 65, according to Paul Belien of Belgium writing in the Washington Times last month. "In America, the bulk of government healthcare expenditure goes to those over 65 years old" he notes.
But, cheap medical care isn't necessarily the best. Mr. Belien's grandfather in Belgium was healthy all his life, until he needed prostate surgery at the age of 90. The surgery went well. But he was given a cheap antibiotic that caused complete deafness by the time he left the hospital; the doctors could have prescribed other, more expensive medicines that didn't have this complication. But after that, Belien's grandfather lost his will to live. "Six months after the operation, he was dead."
"If Americans need bad examples in order to know what to avoid, then Europe is a good place to learn from." writes Belien.
The CHAMP bill also includes bounty payments to the states for enrolling increasing numbers of people in the program. Rather than paying for medical services, the bill would pay government employees to get people to sign up.
In addition, these bounty payments count towards the state's required share of program funding. In other words, the bill would give states a double incentive to sign up people rather than devote resources to actually providing medical help.
Another weird feature of the bill would outlaw physician ownership of hospitals. This makes as much sense as not allowing auto mechanics to own their own shops. Yet your friendly health insurance company could own a hospital and keep costs down by undertreating you. Maybe politicians are tired of the high quality of services and patient focus of physician-owned hospitals; the competition makes government hospitals look shabby.
According to early leaks about her healthcare proposals in her presidential campaign platform, Sen. Clinton would force people to buy health insurance. In the good old days, it was called a tax when the government forced money out of your pocket to pay for something you didn't want. Now, Mrs. Clinton wants to force us to spend money on something we don't want and then claim that she's somehow solved our problem. This is like forcing everybody in the country to buy a meal at a fancy restaurant (or an automobile or a handgun) and then claiming that the "problem" of hunger (or lack of transportation or lack of self-defense) is solved.
Can anybody out there explain this logic to me?
As we've previously noted in "Unisured Are Under Siege," most states require drivers to buy automobile liability insurance to protect other people or property potentially harmed by your driving. Yet many states have a higher proportion of drivers lacking this required-by-law insurance than lack health insurance. In my own Washington State, 18 percent of the Washington population do not have auto liability coverage, compared with 16 percent who do not have health insurance. Remember, now, buying health insurance is still voluntary and not required by law.
Let's hope the CHAMP bill stays mired in the Conference Committee and the SCHIP expires on Sept. 30 this year. If Congress does pass a bill, President Bush should veto it.
Editor's Note: Robert J. Cihak wrote this week's column.
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Robert J. Cihak, M.D., is a senior fellow and Board Member of the Discovery Institute and a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D., comments on medical-legal issues and is a visiting fellow in Economics and Citizenship at the International Trade Education Foundation of the Washington International Trade Council.
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