The Oregon Health Plan is a government run health insurance option that, like some current health plans being pushed in Washington, is designed to increase access to health care and contain health care costs. The cost of the OHP far outstripped original estimates so new enrollment in the program was closed from mid-2004 until early 2008, when a lottery-based system was introduced to limit new enrollments. As this June 2008 local news story from KATU in Portland shows, the Oregon Health Plan also found other ways to limit costs as …
We will have a longer point by point fact check of President Barack Obama’s Porstmouth, New Hampshire, health care townhall tomorrow morning, but one talking point Obama made today, and the White House has made before, is that health insurance companies already ration health care so Americans shouldn’t mind if the government does it instead. The Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle dismantled that line of reasoning last night: “we already ration health care; we just let the market do the rationing.” This is a true point made by the proponents of health …
Controversial Princeton bioethics professor and philosopher Peter Singer is making waves with his article outlining the case for rationing in last week’s New York Times Magazine. This is the same Singer who advocated infanticide, proposing that abortion be made legal for 28 days after birth, in order to allow parents to decide whether to keep an “imperfect” baby. Professor Singer’s latest piece, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” should be a call to action for every American who cherishes personal freedom and self-determination. There is no doubt that health care …
Rep. Marsha Blackburn has seen the future of health care in America that the Left wants to implement. Blackburn’s home state of Tennessee implemented TennCare, a Medicaid style program in 1994. The results were predictable. Employers moved employees onto TennCare because the subsidized public plan appeared to cost less. “As a result of this, insurance rates for those who have private coverage were going through the roof,” said Blackburn who spoke at Heritage’s weekly Blogger Briefing today.
What has been going on in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee for the past three weeks? Unless you’ve been carefully watching the mark-up of the Kennedy health bill, you wouldn’t be aware that Senators have been battling over many of the 398 amendments proposed to the legislation. You also wouldn’t know that all attempts to protect patients from health care rationing were defeated. Comparative effectiveness research (CER), which is research that compares the clinical and/or cost-effectiveness of two health care treatments for the same condition, has …
When President Barack Obama included $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research in his economic stimulus bill, we warned that such funding would set the stage for government rationing of your health care: The House and Senate bills would establish a framework and funding for comparative effectiveness research and health information technology. While the Senate’s language is broad and vague, the House language provides further clarity. The House committee report states that “those [items] that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be …
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus tackled health care reform in an op-ed this Sunday, and her article nicely laid out many of the key areas of dispute and offered some interesting ideas for compromise. But in doing so, she exposed the internal contradictions of those arguing for a “public plan” and why a public plan cannot be part of reform. Marcus writes: Should there be a public insurance option? This is a question that evokes near-religious fervor and that could crash the whole enterprise. Republicans hate the notion of a …
Several leading European and Canadian health economists, physicians and scholars — in Washington recently for the Galen Institute’s conference, “Lessons from Abroad for Health Reform in the US” — met with analysts from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think-tank leaders. They wanted to explain why Americans should be concerned when officials push for government-controlled, universal health care coverage that includes innocuous-sounding but largely intrusive and prohibitive health measures. “We were told single-payer health care would be a true liberation for Canada when they enacted it 40 years ago, and …
