Systole
and Diastole of Election: Goverment Spending Vs.
Market Discipline
Once
more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and
an age of discipline began.
Will
Durant (1885-1981 , Caesar and Christ (1944)
October
31, 2012 - The election is 6 days away. The central choice is in health reform is between more government spending vs. market
discipline.
An October 27 New York Times editorial “Barack Obama for Re-Election” sums up the
case for more government spending.
“Allowing
children under 26 to stay on their parents’ policies; lower drug costs for
people on Medicare who are heavy users of prescription drugs; free
immunizations, mammograms and contraceptives; a ban on lifetime limits on
insurance payments. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage to children with
pre-existing conditions. Starting in 2014, insurers must accept all applicants.
Once fully in effect, the new law would start to control health care costs. “
The
main problems with line of reasoning is that since Obamacare” enactment in
March 2010:
·
Health care premiums have soared by $2500 per
family
·
Businesses have postponed hiring because of uncertainties
of Obamacare costs
·
Estimates of its costs have grown from $900 billion to $2.6 trillion
·
Employers
have dropped up to 20 million from health coverage
·
The ACA
remains unpopular with the public
which favor its repeal by 54% to 39%
·
And the GOP has further neutralized its
appeal by maintaining that Obama cut
$716 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare.
To
complicate matters, the public is schizophrenic
about Obamacare. The
public disfavors Obamacare as a whole. According to Kaiser Health News, there are those who like the law, those who understand it, and those who want
to repeal it. A nationwide survey,
conducted between 2010 and 2012, of 2000
people indicated the following when
participants were given 18 statements about the law and asked to judge their
correctness. For example, 80% knew the law allowed young people to stay on the parents’
policies under age 26 and that companies with more than 50 workers were required
to offer coverage, but beyond those two provisions,
few participants were able to judge any other provision with any
certaintyas true or false.
Why
this lack of understanding? The first reason
may be that reworking 1/6 of the complex health care economy is a matter of
daunting complexity that effects different Americans in different ways. A second reason may be that so far in the nearly 3 years after its implementation, less
than 30 million of our population of 310
million has so far been directly impacted by the Affordable Care Act. A third reason may be that the two political
parties spins its impacts differently. A
fourth reason, as articulated by
Jonathon Oberlander, an Obama supporter, in “Beyond Repeal – The Future of Health
Reform,” New England Journal of Medicine, December 9, 2010, it that “The law is
not a single program. It is a collection
of mandates, public insurance expansions, and regulation that affect different groups of
Americans in different ways at different
times.”
Tweet: Health reform resembles the systole and
diastole of the human heart, systole being more government spending, diastole being market discipline.