Healthcare reforms warnings from France and Canada...
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2 … nd-canada/
Are these guys lying Cam or is their warning legit?
Brian Lee Crowley is the founding president of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), a public policy think tank in Canada (pictured left) and Valentin Petkantchin is director of research at the Paris-and Brussels-based Institut économique Molinari. The views expressed are their own. –
President Barack Obama’s package of heathcare reforms – mandatory health insurance, public health option and increased federal government financing – is being sold as preserving independent high quality care and choice for patients while keeping down costs. Taxpayers and patients in both Canada and France know better.
Unfortunately, our experience is that once the government gets its nose in the healthcare tent, not only is spending not contained, but health care professionals lose their freedom to practice. Left with few choices, patients face shortages and waiting lists.
Washington’s proposed new public health insurance option, while not imposing Canadian-style single-payer monopolistic public health insurance immediately, will almost certainly lead to that result in the end.
One of two things will happen. If doctors prove reluctant to accept patients covered by the public option and it is thus unable to compete successfully with private insurers, the politicians will not stand idly by.
Physicians’ freedom to practice outside the public option will become increasingly hedged with restrictions, perhaps ultimately ending up, as in Canada, with doctors in the public system being prohibited from taking private patients.
Or, more plausibly, in the short term at least, private insurers will gradually withdraw from the business, incapable of winning against a government-subsidized “competitor.”
In both cases, competition in the health insurance sector will progressively vanish and the U.S. will wake up with a monopolistic-style health insurance system, à la France or Canada.
Consider yourself warned.
French officials are scrambling to take more control of the system to bring these costs down, but Canada, where government controls all “medically necessary care,” shows that this is no solution at all. A growing share of Canadian provincial budgets is also swallowed by the health care system, going in 20 years (1983-2003) from 32% to 41% and on the way to 50% in a few short years. As a portion of GDP, and adjusting for population age, Canadian health care spending even ranked ahead of France’s in 2005.
Independent private medicine – once one of the main pillars guaranteeing quality and timely care in the French system – is being slowly strangled. At the end of 2008, nurses lost their freedom to practice where they please, while a new law will do the same for physicians by imposing an annual financial penalty if they refuse to practice where the government tells them to. Specialists’ fees are increasingly regulated. The last pillars of competition among providers, and choice for French patients, are thus undermined.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2 … nd-canada/
Are these guys lying Cam or is their warning legit?
Brian Lee Crowley is the founding president of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), a public policy think tank in Canada (pictured left) and Valentin Petkantchin is director of research at the Paris-and Brussels-based Institut économique Molinari. The views expressed are their own. –
President Barack Obama’s package of heathcare reforms – mandatory health insurance, public health option and increased federal government financing – is being sold as preserving independent high quality care and choice for patients while keeping down costs. Taxpayers and patients in both Canada and France know better.
Unfortunately, our experience is that once the government gets its nose in the healthcare tent, not only is spending not contained, but health care professionals lose their freedom to practice. Left with few choices, patients face shortages and waiting lists.
Washington’s proposed new public health insurance option, while not imposing Canadian-style single-payer monopolistic public health insurance immediately, will almost certainly lead to that result in the end.
One of two things will happen. If doctors prove reluctant to accept patients covered by the public option and it is thus unable to compete successfully with private insurers, the politicians will not stand idly by.
Physicians’ freedom to practice outside the public option will become increasingly hedged with restrictions, perhaps ultimately ending up, as in Canada, with doctors in the public system being prohibited from taking private patients.
Or, more plausibly, in the short term at least, private insurers will gradually withdraw from the business, incapable of winning against a government-subsidized “competitor.”
In both cases, competition in the health insurance sector will progressively vanish and the U.S. will wake up with a monopolistic-style health insurance system, à la France or Canada.
Consider yourself warned.
French officials are scrambling to take more control of the system to bring these costs down, but Canada, where government controls all “medically necessary care,” shows that this is no solution at all. A growing share of Canadian provincial budgets is also swallowed by the health care system, going in 20 years (1983-2003) from 32% to 41% and on the way to 50% in a few short years. As a portion of GDP, and adjusting for population age, Canadian health care spending even ranked ahead of France’s in 2005.
Independent private medicine – once one of the main pillars guaranteeing quality and timely care in the French system – is being slowly strangled. At the end of 2008, nurses lost their freedom to practice where they please, while a new law will do the same for physicians by imposing an annual financial penalty if they refuse to practice where the government tells them to. Specialists’ fees are increasingly regulated. The last pillars of competition among providers, and choice for French patients, are thus undermined.
Last edited by [TUF]Catbox (2009-07-24 07:31:50)
Love is the answer
