Federal ‘help’ makes medical care more expensive and less available

By David McElroy · January 8, 2012

In the eyes of most people, the intent of legislation matters more than the outcome. That’s the only way we can possibly explain why most people continue to support federal efforts to make health care more affordable and more available.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the federal government got seriously involved with interfering with the medical industry. You can argue that it started before then, because it was certainly a gradual thing. But it was in the Great Society programs of the ’60s that the government started pumping massive amounts of money into health care. The purpose was to make quality health care available to everyone.

That’s not what happened, of course. In 1940, you could spend a day in the hospital in Greenville, Ohio, for $4. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $31 today. Do you know any hospital where you can get a day in a room for $31 now? I don’t. Why is medical care so much more expensive today? And why do people trust the people who made it more expensive to fix the problem?

There’s no question that advanced technology is responsible for some of the higher costs of today — because much of the care we have today wasn’t available at any price in 1940. But a lot of it has been driven by government distorting prices by messing with incentives for doctors, insurance companies and hospitals, as well as by massive regulations and tort laws that make it profitable to sue doctors and hospitals when pretty much anything doesn’t go as hoped for.

(If you really want to see the background for what would eventually become skyrocketing health care costs and lack of consumer control over the process, you have to go back to at least the ’40s, when the tax system gave companies an incentive to start paying for insurance instead of letting employees buy their own. This made insurance companies and health care companies cater to employers’ needs rather than consumer needs. But that’s another story.)

So if we judge 50 years (or more) of federal involvement in the health care industry by its results, what has it achieved? Much higher prices and less availability of care. And now we get word that many doctors are slowly going broke. Over-regulation and tort laws have made the business so expensive that some doctors are starting to get out of the field, especially in rural areas where they’re needed most. They just can’t afford to stay in business.

The doctor whose picture is at the top of this page is Robert Thomas. In the early and middle parts of the 20th century, he was a well-known physician among the poor people of east Tennessee. He’s the doctor who delivered Dolly Parton, and she wrote a song about him. Why could people get home medical care in those days, but house calls had disappeared by the late ’60s?

It was Frederic Bastiat who wrote in 1850 about “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.” He’s the one who had the insight to realize that much of what happens in an economy is unseen. If a government takes an action, it will have certain consequences. You can see the consequences, even if you can’t necessarily notice what was done to cause them.

What we see today in health care are consequences of government actions for 50 to 70 years. It’s an accumulation of good intentions. But are we better off? Do we have more affordable access to quality health care? You can successfully argue that the technology that has become such a huge part of the industry during that time has made us better off. You can’t argue that the regulations, price controls and rationing of services — de facto if not de jure — have made us better off.

Good intentions aren’t enough to justify what governments have done. We have to judge by the consequences. It’s not doctors, hospitals and health care companies that have created this situation. It’s the federal government.

People today want to blame the free market for the expensive health care mess we face. The truth is that health care hasn’t been a free market in many, many decades. The things that government has done so far to try to “help” have made things far worse. The things going into effect in the next few years (“ObamaCare”) will make them even worse than that. And when that happens, ignorant people are going to look around and blame “greedy businesspeople” instead of the politicians who created the mess and continue to make it worse.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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