Healthcare Bill, not for us

teresa · November 3, 2009, 6:48pm

Here is an article that will clarify the “unintended consequence” of Obamacare.
If are not for this, its time to let your elected officials know. This week is it.

Health-Care Overhaul IV: This Time It’s Personal
Pelosicare is not good news for diabetics.

By Mona Charen

I labeled it “Health-Care Overhaul IV” for convenience. In fact, a new 2,000-page behemoth seems to emerge more than once a week from the maw of Congress, so it’s becoming impossible to keep track.

Until now, my reasons for opposing this fright mask were entirely dispassionate and flowed from 1) common sense (how are they going to provide more care for less money, and can we afford another huge entitlement when existing ones are going bankrupt?), 2) experience (government entitlements always cost far more than projections and government is far less efficient at providing services than the private sector), and 3) philosophy (the way to reduce prices is to increase competition — not reduce it). But now the proposals being considered will hit my family particularly hard. This time it’s personal.

In order to pay for its new entitlement, the Senate Finance Committee bill (Baucus) proposes to tax medical-device manufacturers $40 billion over the next ten years. To the average person, medical-device manufacturers may not mean much. They produce heart monitors and stents and pacemakers.

They also produce insulin pumps. My 16-year-old son, who has had Type I diabetes (an autoimmune disease distinct from Type II) since the age of nine, depends on a pump to live a reasonably normal life. If he didn’t have an insulin pump — a device the size of a cell phone that delivers insulin through a tube directly under his skin — he would be required to give himself as many as four injections a day, as he did before he got the pump. And his life expectancy would be shorter.

In just the six years since David began using the pump, the technology has improved markedly. Whereas he used to have to insert the catheter (which must be changed every three days) with a two-inch needle, he now uses a much less painful spring-operated inserter. The programming has become more sophisticated as well. The pump can now deliver carefully calibrated doses for high-carb foods like pizza and ice cream — foods that are otherwise parlous for diabetics to enjoy — and the pump is preset with carb counts for many common foods.

Insulin pumps provide better blood-sugar control than other diabetes treatments. But they are far from perfect. Even careful users will frequently experience highs (which increase the likelihood of long-term complications like heart disease and blindness) and lows (which can be immediately life-threatening).

Yes, we families with Type I pray for a cure. But the recent progress in technology has offered really tantalizing possibilities. Medical-device manufacturers have recently debuted a new technology that is key to the health of Type I diabetics — continuous glucose monitors. These provide 24/7 data on the patient’s blood sugar to supplement the six daily finger sticks. Eventually, the combination of these two technologies — the insulin pump and the continuous glucose monitor — could provide the Holy Grail for Type I diabetics: an artificial pancreas. The AP would keep blood glucose at normal or near-normal levels and thus prevent the worst effects of diabetes. We’ve heard estimates that the technology may become available within five years.

Unless the medical-device industry is hit with a major tax.

While the U.S. leads the world in medical technology, most device makers are not huge conglomerates, but smaller companies already hurting in this recession. According to the Advanced Medical Technology Association, the industry consists of about 6,000 companies, most of which earn less than $100 million annually. The chief executive of B. Braun Medical, which makes pain-control devices, told the Washington Post that paying his share of the new tax would “exceed my research and development budget.” The $4 billion annual tax would represent about 40 percent of the industry’s outlay for research and development ($9.6 billion).

If this tax is enacted, medical-device manufacturers will cut back drastically on R&D, and may have to lay off employees. In addition, they will charge higher prices for their products to compensate for the money confiscated by Washington. Since health-insurance plans frequently cover half or more of the cost of these already-expensive products, health-insurance rates would have to rise as well. This is just one more example of the ways health-care costs would be driven up, not down, by the Democrats’ reforms.

As for David, he will see the prospect of an artificial pancreas — his greatest hope for a healthier and longer life — recede over the horizon.

teresa · November 3, 2009, 6:52pm

Also, I forgot to mention in the Healthcare Bill, they are going to cap the Flex Spending Accounts, and Health Savings Accounts. I depend on this to help keep our costs down and purchase the pods.

BWashington · November 3, 2009, 7:19pm

Does anyone know if the ADA is doing anything to help us? I haven’t seen or heard anything.

teresa · November 3, 2009, 7:25pm

I don’t know about that, all I do know is that this bill is not going to bring down healthcare cost, it will make everything more expensive. It is just a shell game, it might look like the cost is down in one area, but it will make other things more expensive. I am already paying around 800 a month for my daughters supplies because we are on a high deductible plan, but I take out enough pretax dollars for my HSA. When they start taxing for medical supplies and cap the contributions for the HSA I am going to really have a problem. They are also going to raise our taxes, implement a value added tax, you name it, its going to cost us all in one way or another. No one is going to help us. And once the government get involved there is no where else to go.

teresa · November 3, 2009, 7:32pm

Here is another article from a author who writes for the hoover institute. I hope it will help you.

November 03, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

The ‘Costs’ of Medical Care
Government control of health care will shift costs, not reduce them.

By Thomas Sowell

We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is “too high” — either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.

There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like the pea in a carnival shell game. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor’s office and more in taxes — or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

Costs are not reduced simply because you don’t pay them. It would undoubtedly be cheaper for me to do without the medications that keep me alive and more vigorous in my old age than people of a similar age were in generations past.

Letting old people die would undoubtedly be cheaper than keeping them alive — but that does not mean that the costs have gone down. It just means that we refuse to pay the costs. Instead, we pay the consequences. There is no free lunch.

Providing free lunches to people who go to hospital emergency rooms is one of the reasons for the current high costs of medical care for others. Politicians mandating what insurance companies must cover is another free lunch that leads to higher premiums for medical insurance — and fewer people who can afford it.

Despite all the demonizing of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and doctors for what they charge, the fundamental costs of goods and services are the costs of producing them.

If highly paid chief executives of insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies agreed to work free of charge, it would make very little difference in the cost of insurance or medications. If doctors’ incomes were cut in half, that would not lower the cost of producing doctors through years of expensive training in medical schools and hospitals, nor the overhead costs of running doctors’ offices.

What it would do is reduce the number of very able people who are willing to take on the high costs of a medical education when the return on that investment is greatly reduced and the aggravations of dealing with government bureaucrats are added to the burdens of the work.

Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors’ income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.

Any one of us can reduce medical costs by refusing to pay them. In our own lives, we recognize the consequences. But when someone with a gift for rhetoric tells us that the government can reduce the costs without consequences, we are ready to believe in such political miracles.

There are some ways in which the real costs of medical care can be reduced, but the people who are leading the charge for a government takeover of medical care are not the least bit interested in actually reducing those costs, as distinguished from shifting the costs around or just refusing to pay them.

The high costs of “defensive medicine” — expensive tests, medications, and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients — could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.

If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys’ fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.

Why should they, when it is so much easier just to start a political stampede with fiery rhetoric and glittering promises?

teresa · November 3, 2009, 7:36pm