The Homa Files

Ken’s Take: Coburn & Burr raise good points — especially re: the likely consequences of gov’t controlled health care.  But, even they ignore the biggest issue: we’re spending over $7,000 per capita annually on health care.  Until the costs get contained, we’re just shifting around the burdens of who pays what.

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Excerpted from RCP: “Americans Deserve a Real Health Care Debate”, Tom Coburn and Richard Burr, October 10, 2008

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The American people have had enough and want the campaigns to confront the real problem: Health care is becoming less affordable and less accessible for millions of middle-class families. While health care premiums have gone up 78 percent from 2001-2007, workers’ earnings have only risen by 19 percent.

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Three core principles. First, a person’s ability to afford health care should not depend on whether they work for an employer who offers health insurance. Second, wealthy Americans with expensive health plans do not deserve a bigger tax benefit than working class Americans. And finally, workers should be able to pick the health care plan that best meets their needs, and they should be able to take it with them when they change jobs.

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Our current tax code is fundamentally unfair and regressive. Lower income workers receive the least benefit, while wealthy Americans receive the most. Because tax rules are tied to employment (health care benefits paid for by employers are exempt from income and payroll taxes), if you leave your job, you leave your health care behind. Meanwhile, Americans who purchase their own health insurance generally do not receive a tax benefit.

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Government-controlled health care is a seductive message that, in practice, is most cruel to those who can least afford a way out. Much of Europe is moving away from government-control health care.  Countries like the United Kingdom have learned the painful lesson that the only way government can control costs when it is in charge is by rationing care. In the UK, it is not uncommon for women diagnosed with breast caner to wait months for treatment.  Canadians look for health care asylum in the United States, not vice versa. As the Canadian Supreme Court said in a ruling that exposed the inequities of government-controlled health care, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”In short, government-sponsored health care will do for the health care economy what government-sponsored mortgages did to the housing market.

Tom Coburn, M.D. is a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma and Richard Burr is a U.S. Senator from North Carolina.

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Full article:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/americans_deserve_a_real_healt.html

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This entry was posted on October 14, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Government & Politics, Health Care / Medical Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.