Damnit, Stop Lying On Health Care!
By Karl Denninger
I'm tired of this crap.
Look, I've said all alone (including in my book, Leverage, which you can find to the right if you haven't read it -- and you should) that the biggest issue we face is health care cost, and the drivers are cost-shifting and monopoly protections which exist only because of government.
We're all being jacked around by the politicians arguing over "Obamacare", "Romneycare", "Death Panels" and similar.
Nobody is talking about EMTALA, nobody is talking about Juanita the illegal Mexican who comes into this country 7-1/2 months pregnant, drug and alcohol-addicted with no money or insurance and pops out a $2+ million NICU bill, and nobody is talking about the state CON jobs.
Yes, CON. As in "Certificate of Need", otherwise known as a gigantic CON, that is, swindle that is shoved down your throat.
Look it up folks. Tennessee is one of many examples. Want to open an MRI center? You need a license to do so. To get that license you must convince a state panel that there is an unmet need for that service. On the board that makes the decision are a majority of entities that want prices high, not low -- hospitals, care providers, etc.
The only "need" one should have to open a hospital, MRI center, surgery center or similar is the desire to make a profit! That's called competition and it drives down costs. It is what Romney, Obama and Johnson all claim they will provide with their health programs.
They're all lying through their teeth. None of them intend to do a damn thing about these "Certificate of Need" programs that prevent you from opening up a medical facility and challenging the existing providers by undercutting their prices.
These laws came into place due to Federal legislation in 1974. That law was repealed in 1987. Yet 36 states retain these laws, and even those allegedly without them in fact have de-facto means of controlling the building and provision of health services anyway through various licensing requirements for individual facilities.
These sorts of licensing systems are directly anti-competitive.
When I ran MCSNet the only thing I needed to do to provide Internet service was have capital, brains and balls. There were over 100 competitors in our local market by the time I sold the company. That is, you could buy Internet service from one hundred companies in the greater Chicago area. If you didn't like me, you could buy from any one of 99 other people. If you didn't them, you could buy from me. Competition meant that we had to continually innovate both in price and service or we'd soon be out of business.
That's how it should be.
So why is it that none of these three clown-car brigades will talk about this part of the problem?
Yeah, you got it -- like all of the other special government protections like prohibitions on re-importation of drugs and devices, forced cost-shifting by allowing providers to bill you different amounts of money depending only on how you pay (unlawful in virtually every other business) and more none of the Presidential candidates has any interest whatsoever in actually addressing the problems with medical cost escalation.
They're all lying to you.
Period.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3017629
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