Today's Washington Post has an opinion piece by Martin Feldstein on President Obama's healthcare plan. Martin Feldstein is a professor of economics at Harvard University and president emeritus of the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984.
First of all, I would like to comment that if you look at the current plans in Congress, they are not healthcare plans, they are health insurance plans. The government really doesn't belong in the insurance business.
Professor Feldstein points out that 85 percent of Americans have health insurance and that the current plans would be bad news for them. They will be faced with higher costs and less healthcare. According to the article:
"President Obama's primary goal is to extend formal health insurance to those low-income individuals who are currently uninsured despite the nearly $300-billion-a-year Medicaid program. Doing so the Obama way would cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. There surely must be better and less costly ways to improve the health and health care of that low-income group."
One of the goals of the healthcare proposals is to cut spending--Congress plans to do this by cutting the amount of healthcare that Americans receive. Nowhere in the current proposals is the idea of tort reform mentioned. Meanwhile, in some parts of the country, doctors pay as much as $200,000 a year in malpractice insurance. This plays a significant role in the consumer cost of healthcare.
The article also reminds us:
"To support their claim that costs can be radically reduced without adverse effects, the health planners point to the fact that about half of all hospital costs are for patients in the last year of life. I don't find that persuasive. Do doctors really know which of their very ill patients will benefit from expensive care and which will die regardless of the care they receive? In a world of uncertainty, many of us will want to hope that care will help."
Until tort reform is addressed and Congress agrees to become part of the healthcare plan they enact, I don't want the government changing my healthcare!
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