Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Health Care

  • It’s The Health Care Costs, Stupid

    Get this straight: If health-care costs were rising at the same rate as inflation — even with our aging population — we wouldn’t have a budget problem. Congressional Budget Office: The red line is what Medicare plus Medicaid would look like in that scenario. So, for all you Democrats whining about how Obama should have tackled…

  • Republicans on Entitlements: Don’t Cut Benefits, Don’t Raise Taxes. Hmmm.

    71% of ‘pubs don’t want to raise taxes to pay for those ebil entitlements, and 59% don’t want to cut the benefits that those ebil entitlements provide. And they think Democrats are fluffy-headed utopians? Americans Disagree on How to Fix Entitlement Programs. Related posts: Two Thirds of Tea Partiers Want to Raise Taxes on the…

  • The Party of Prosperity? The Seven Reasons that Democrats’ Policies are More Economically Efficient

    Or: The Seven Habits of Highly Efficient Economies Republican economic policies are widely perceived (especially by Republicans) as being pro-growth and pro-prosperity, even though All. The. Evidence. Demonstrates. The. Opposite. (How dare they call themselves “conservatives”?) Even the rich get richer under Democrats — though not at the expense of the poor and the middle…

  • Is Swiss Health Care a Good Model for Ours?

    While perusing Arnold Kling’s post for my previous, I came across the following, which simply cannot go unchallenged: …why not try single-payer in one part of the country and radical deregulation in another? Switzerland, which is about the size of Maryland, has different health care systems in each of its 20-odd cantons, which are about…

  • Global Warming Caused by Sex!

    More sex, more people. More people, more global warming. Pretty simple. If people would just stop having sex, we could solve the global warming problem! (Envision: Just-Say-No types happily twirling their fingers in their cheeks.) Right. But my tongue-in-cheek wise-guyism is spurred by something quite real: reducing unprotected sex worldwide could be the most cost-effective…

  • Medicare: Government Does It Right

    I recently had occasion to go through two years of my 84-year-old mom's medical and insurance statements, to be sure that everything was kosher and that insurers were, in fact, paying all the bills they were supposed to be paying. You've undoubtedly attempted similar, so you can imagine that it was a daunting task–trying to…

  • Do Voters Prefer Death or Taxes?

    Today's NYT/CBS poll gives the answer: Taxes. 67% of voters think it's "more important to provide health care coverage for all Americans" than to "hold down taxes." Related posts: Tea Partiers: Old, White, Rich, Educated Men Business Roundtable Proposes Obamacare to Restore American Competitiveness ‘Pubs Love Catastrophic Coverage. Too Bad the Free Market Doesn’t Provide…

  • Wacky Objections to an Obama Senate Bill

    Greg Mankiw links, apparently approvingly, to a VoxEU post by Willem Buiter and Anne Sibert savaging an Obama-sponsored bill in the Senate. (Cloyingly titled the Patriot Employer Act.) Felix Salmon has replied quite effectively, pointing out that the bill would not have the kind of disastrous effects the authors suggest, and that their objections are…

  • “Usual and Customary”: Macro Effects?

    The NY State attorney general is investigating (NYT) health insurers for gaming the system on “usual and customary” charges. Turns out the database used to determine the charges is managed by Ingenix, which in turn is owned by UnitedHealth Group–one of the country’s biggest health insurers. The database is licensed to other insurers as well.…