The Cost of Health Care Regulation

RUSH: This is Hillary Health Care Announcement Day. In case you’re just joining us and you missed any of the precious broadcast moments prior to right now, the American Prospect — a lib publication — has a story by a man named Paul Starr (not related to Ken Starr), who was on the Clintons’ health care team in 1993, and he announces today that it was Bill’s plan. Bill put it together. Hillary had nothing to do with it. All she did was chair it. This comes out… Well, it was dated the 14th. It’s Web only, this story. It’s not going to get wide distribution in the Drive-By Media. Why now? Why? For 13 years, her sole reputation as the smartest woman in the world and a great bureaucrat has been based on the fact that she puts the plan together — because she’s smart and she cares, and she wants the best for everybody. Now, via the American Prospect — you won’t hear this anywhere other than this program unless other programs pick up on this — we find out she did nothing but lead the effort, which was botched! Nevertheless, the Drive-Bys, ladies and gentlemen, are just ecstatic. On the Good Morning America program today, here’s a portion of Diane Sawyer and reporter David Wright announcing the Hillary Clinton health care plan.

SAWYER: Today is the day Hillary Clinton, Senator Clinton, wades back in on the issue of universal health care.

RUSH: (panting)

SAWYER: It is now 13 years after she first made an effort to overhaul health care, and it ended in an uproar. So what is she offering this time around? ABC’s David Wright is here with more, David.

WRIGHT: Good morning, Diane! This is a huge moment for the Clinton campaign!

RUSH: (Pant! Pant! Pant!)

WRIGHT: Health care was the issue that propelled Mrs. Clinton onto the national stage as a political figure in her own right.

RUSH: It’s a lie! She didn’t do it! Now what’s going to happen to the Paul Starr guy? It ‘ended in an uproar’? It ended in failure! It ended in total failure. But they’re so excited. (heavy panting) They’re panting away. ‘We can’t wait for Hillary to announce it!’ (panting) They’re just so excited, and this whole lead-in apparently, now, is bogus. It’s a lie. Not that they knew at the time she didn’t do it. Actually, I think I have figured this out, just off the spur of the moment here. I think one of the reasons they’re putting this out here is because it did fail, and since it did fail, let’s blame it on Bill. What the hell? Take her out of the realm of responsibility for failure on this to make sure that her new plan is hers, and she’s made modifications to it. Here’s a portion of what she said. This is at Tom Harkin’s steak fry yesterday in Indianola, Iowa, a portion of what Mrs. Clinton said.

HILLARY: I’ve been a child advocate for longer than I care to tell you, 35 years. (fake laugh) My first assignment was going door-to-door in communities trying to figure out why there were more kids registered in the census than there were enrolled in school. And I knocked on doors and I went into little apartments and I talked with people, and I found children in wheelchairs and I found blind children and deaf children. They weren’t in school! We were able to change that. So, for me, running for president is a continuation of what my whole life has been about, as an activist.

RUSH: (scoffs) Get out the Stradivarius. What are the odds you’re going to go into people’s houses and find deaf kids and kids in wheelchairs, and they’re not going to school and they need government to fix it? These are the kinds of little lies these people tell. It’s just like she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, just like she wanted to join the Marines. Yeah, that’s exactly right: She wanted to join the Marines. There’s a book out there called ‘Overtreated: Way Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer’ by Shannon Brownlee, and I have this about it from Publishers Weekly: ‘Contrary to Americans’ common belief that in health care more is more — that more spending, drugs and technology means better care — this lucid report posits that less is actually better. Medical journalist Brownlee acknowledges that state-of-the-art medicine can improve care and save lives. But technology and drugs are misused and overused, she argues, citing a 2003 study of one million Medicare recipients, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which showed that patients in hospitals that spent the most ‘were 2% to 6% more likely to die than patients in hospitals that spent the least.’ Additionally, she says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for some procedures than for more appropriate ones. The solution, Brownlee writes, already exists: the Veterans Health Administration outperforms the rest of the American health care system on multiple measures of quality.

‘The main obstacle to replicating this model nationwide, according to the author, is a powerful cartel of organizations, from hospitals to drug companies, that stand to lose in such a system.’ On the day that Mrs. Clinton has announced her health care plan, and the day that the Drive-Bys are having their health care orgasms out there because she did so, this book makes the point that people go to the doctor too much. They get tests that are not necessary, and drugs that are not necessary, and so forth. You know, I have to tell you something, folks. I know this is just anecdotal, but two Decembers ago I had been to Méjico and played golf for the week. I came back and it was right before Thanksgiving, and I guess this was the middle of December. Brian had to drive me up there to the hospital because I had these abdominal pains like I could not believe. So he drove me up there, and I thought, ‘I’ll just get it checked out and have something prescribed for me.’

‘Noooo! We gotta admit you!’ and here came three days of tests, even though the first CAT Scan showed what the problem was. It was a little bug in there I got in Mexico that was causing a blockage. Here came the antibiotics. Bammo! It was taken care of. Three days! All these tests and so forth. Now, I’m not being critical of the doctors in this case because they were thorough. I’m an important person. They had to go in there and they had to rule out a whole bunch of stuff. But it wasn’t necessary. They were just being careful. But it cost. It cost all kinds of money, and this is one of the reasons why I’m doctor-visit averse. When you go to the doctor for anything, and you’re looking at a day or two of batteries of tests, you get sent here to get that scan. This scan, go over there. My problem is compounded because I can’t get an MRI because my cochlear implant requires magnets inside my skull and that would blow the MRI machine up — and me. So they have to do other things, but it struck me that it’s almost like lawyers and their billable hours. You go in there, and you have to go down there for this guy to give you the tests, and you gotta go over there for that guy. It’s like they’ve got you, and once you walk in there, you can’t walk out on your own without signing all these forms and so forth. It’s sort of a process. Anyway, this book is all about the fact that there’s way more of this than is necessary after original diagnoses take place. So it’s interesting that Mrs. Clinton is coming out today with a new health care plan, which is promising that you can go anytime, anywhere, get whatever you want. It’s going to be paid for. It’s ‘only’ going to cost $110 billion. That’s one of the biggest rip-offs! Do you know that existing medical regulations in certain government-run health care programs now require $400 billion a year?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s a story in The Economist magazine from June 28th of this year. It’s from the print edition, found it on the web. It was in the third paragraph here: current federal health care regulations cost US consumers almost $400 billion a year, and they result in 4,000 deaths per year. Mrs. Clinton says she’s going to have universal coverage, universal health care, whatever the hell, for $110 billion a year. It’s interesting how this story starts out.

‘To Many outside the United States, America’s health-care system might seem an example of capitalism at its rawest. Europeans and Canadians enjoy universal health care and cheap drugs thanks to government-run systems, the argument goes, but the market-based approach taken by the world’s richest nation leaves many millions uninsured and leads the rest to pay the highest drugs prices in the world. Such doubts are sure to be reinforced by this week’s release of Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’. … So is America’s health system really red in tooth and claw? Hardly, according to a growing body of academic evidence. As a result of interference at the federal and state levels, health care is one of America’s most heavily regulated industries. Indeed, its muddled approach to health-care regulation may act as a massive drag on the American economy — what one expert has called ‘a $169 billion hidden tax’.

‘That figure comes from a path-breaking study of a few years ago by Christopher Conover of Duke University. It looked at the many ways in which the American legal and regulatory systems affect the provision of health services and lumped them into five categories: medical torts; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); insurance regulation; and the certification of both health professionals and health facilities. His team concluded that the overall benefit to society of $170 billion per year delivered by this system of oversight was far outweighed by the $339 billion in annual costs that it imposed (see chart). Even ignoring the cost of big federal tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance (which Mr Conover left out), his study estimated that the net cost of America’s health regulations resulted in perhaps 4,000 extra deaths each year and was responsible for more than 7m Americans’ lacking health insurance.’

We’ve known this. We are not surprised to hear that we don’t have a free market in health care. That’s what vouchers and all these health savings accounts are all about. It’s bad because of the way it is and it’s heading even worse, and now Mrs. Clinton comes along with her big announcement today, and at ABCnews.com, the story here by Liz Marlantes and Mary Walsh: ”Hillary Clinton: Health Care ‘Deja Vu All Over Again’ — It was one of the most spectacular defeats in legislative history — a 1,342-page disaster that became a symbol of arrogance and unwieldy bureaucracy, and contributed in large part to the Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. But these days, Hillary Clinton isn’t running away from the 1994 failure of her health care plan. She’s wearing it as a badge of honor — joking that she’s got ‘the scars to show for it. ‘We set the groundwork in place, so that now, people are saying, ‘boy, we wish we had done that back then,” she told an audience at a health care forum in Carson City, Nev.’

Now get this. Norman Ornstein, a renowned political analyst with a tremendous reputation at the American Enterprise Institute, ‘It’s really quite remarkable how Mrs. Clinton is turning the health care debacle of 1994 into an asset. Hillary Clinton has two great things going for her on this issue. The first is, she knows it cold. The second is that she can say, ‘I was for dramatic reform before any of the rest of you.” Well, well, well. We learn today how easy it is to spread a myth. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t know it cold. She didn’t write it. She had nothing to do with the structure of Hillary Care in ’93. Bill did it. This is from an article in the American Prospect, a lib publication by Paul Starr who was on the team. Hillary’s sole job was to sell it, commission all this stuff, testifying before the all the congressional committees in charge of the bus trips, which we had fun with. But she didn’t do it. She doesn’t know it cold. She doesn’t know anything. After 13 years, folks, what has she ever really done that’s worked out for her?