Confusion? In a Government Program? Nahhhh…!
This strikes me as very funny. Harold Meyerson, writing in today’s Washington Post is unhappy that the new Medicare Prescription Drug benefit is incredibly complicated – perhaps too complicated for our poor senior citizens to actually use.
The number one holiday shopping nightmare this year isn’t taking place at the malls or the big-box outlets. It’s at our senior centers, where Americans over 65 are trying to figure out which private health insurance plan to enroll in to get their prescription drugs paid for under Medicare’s new Part D, which takes effect Jan. 1.
As seniors tell the tale, navigating the competing plans is no more complicated than mapping the human genome. In most states, Medicare recipients are presented with dozens of asymmetric options. The plans cover some drugs but not others, with discounts (or not) for generics. Some offer supplemental insurance to cover the gaping hole in the middle of the program (a patient’s annual drug expenses exceeding $2,250 are not covered under the law, though coverage kicks back in once the yearly bill tops $5,100); some don’t. Some plans re-price their options every day, a boon to seniors who want to make the selection process their life’s work.
Well, who would have imagined that a government program to provide drugs to several million people that carries a price tag of at least 500 billion dollars would be incredibly complex?
This seems to take Meyerson completely by surprise, or maybe we’re just getting a big helping of snark here since he wants to lay this entire boondoggle on the President.
Yep, the President does get his fair share of blame for proposing and backing our newest bureaucratic nightmare, but folks like Meyerson also get a huge hunk also for continuing to naively believe that we could create something so big and not have it be incredibly complicated. After all, this is the Federal Government we’re talking about, the land of byzantine personnel rules, layers upon layers of regulations, scads of oversight committees and boards, and Congressscavengers waiting around every corner for a place to drive in yet more pork for them and theirs.
How could this program be anything but incredibly and needlessly complicated?
The bigger shame here is that Meyerson believes that it’s possible to do better by using the government more.
The paradox here is that this most capitalist of models is also the least efficient. With all our insurance companies competing to cover healthy Americans and shun the sick, and all our drug companies fighting to keep their prices free from negotiation with a mass purchaser, we end up spending close to 15 percent of our gross domestic product on medical care — far more than any of the nations where the government itself covers health care out of its general revenue. Simplicity in a health care system is not just more intelligible; it’s also cheaper. And with those employers who offer decent health care benefits at an increasing competitive disadvantage with the growing number of employers who don’t, the logic of and need for a single-payer system steadily grows. Not that logic and need, in the calculus of the men who make our laws, amount to a hill of beans.
Wow, columnist, heal thyself.
The paradox here isn’t that capatalism isn’t efficient but that Meyerson is still so silly as to believe that he can create a government program that’s more efficient than the private sector. it hasn’t happened yet and I can’t imagine that it will. I defy Meyerson, or anyone, for that matter, to show me a nation with a socialized health care industry that provides that care more efficiently than we do in the United States.
The fact is that capatalism, for all its flaws, still manages to deliver services faster, less expensively, and with better quality than any government ever has or ever will. The answer here is not Meyerson’s beloved single-payer system but the same old system we’ve always had free from the well-intentioned but always troublesome hand of the Federal Government.
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Category: The Good Old US of A
