14 | August | 2009 | The Homa Files

Archive for August 14th, 2009

Re: the death panels that won’t exist … here’s a headscratcher

August 14, 2009

Ken’s Note: Pres Obama has tagged “death panels” as one of the myths and pieces of misinformation being peddled by fishy people.

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Wash Post, Obama to Take On Health-Care Critics, Aug 14, 2009

One of the most inflammatory charges has been that Obama and Democrats were seeking to implement “death panels,” with bureaucrats making decisions about whether elderly or seriously ill patients live or die.

On Thursday, lawmakers working on the Senate version said that provision had been dropped from their proposal.

Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081301914.html?hpid=topnews

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Let me make sure I’m tracking: the Senate dropped a provision that didn’t exist in the Congressional version. Sounds fishy to me. Somebody report it. Fast !

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Posted in Health Care / Medical Insurance | 3 Comments »

More on pre-existing conditions …

August 14, 2009

Ken’s Take: In a prior post, I noted that if insurance companies are forced to take folks with previously disqualifying known medical “pre-conditions” into their coverage pools, then premiums are virtually certain to go up for the presumed healthier people in the pool. Its simple insurance economics.

Stossel (a classmate of mine at Princeton) raises an interesting philosophical point.

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Excerted from RCP: Impossible Promise, John Stossel, August 5, 2009

The New York Times describes a key part of the House bill: “Lawmakers of both parties agree on the need to rein in private insurance companies by banning underwriting practices that have prevented millions of Americans from obtaining affordable insurance.

Insurers would, for example, have to accept all applicants and could not charge higher premiums because of a person’s medical history or current illness”.

No more evil “cherry-picking.”

No more “discrimination against the sick.

But that’s not insurance. Insurance is the pooling of resources to cover the cost of a possible but by no means certain misfortune befalling a given individual.

Government-subsidized coverage for people already sick is welfare.

We can debate whether this is good, but let’s discuss it honestly.

Calling welfare “insurance” muddies thinking.

Full article:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/05/impossible_promises_97774.html

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Ken’s Take II: Somehow, somewhere, folks with pre-existing medical conditions should get coverage for their healthcare. But the who and the where sure aren’t obvious to me.

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