Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The futility of health care "reform"

Aretae ponders what makes things get better, and looks at how the health care industry stacks up:

Almost everything in the world is getting better and less expensive. Why? Better technology, new entrants, real competition, proper incentives, new approaches

A few things in the world (Education, Health Care) are NOT getting both better and less expensive. Why? Lack of (a) technology, (b) new entrants (c) real competition, (d) decent incentives (e) new approaches. Indeed, one can make an argument for rate of progress in a field being based entirely on those 5 factors.
His is the best analysis I've seen explaining the deep pit of FAIL that is our current system.  Incentives count, and they're all aligned wrong.

What he doesn't discuss is what Obamacare will do to this.  Tech, new entrants, competition, incentives, new approaches - can we expect this "reform" to actually improve any of these?

Unlikely.  When you consider that the two groups that spent the most lobbying for Obamacare were the AMA and the Insurance companies, you can kiss new entrants, competition, and new approaches goodbye.  The FDA ensures that we get no new tech (specifically, their risk adverse rules mean that new tech is 3x to 10x more expensive).  As to incentives, they've been set by the AMA and the Insurance companies, and written into law by a compliant Democratic Congress.

That's one righteous "reform" effort, right there.  Fail.

You really need to RTWT.

1 comment:

NotClauswitz said...

Obamacare is all about regulatory capture, not incentives.
There's nothing in Obamacare that will actually help improve the quality of healthcare, and there's a lot of diss-incentives that will reduce quality in a great number of areas.