Democrat’s strange healthcare mathematics

As I was reading about the Democratic candidates forum in Nevada yesterday, I realized that both Bill Richardson and John Edwards need some math help. Both claimed that for between $90 and $120 Billion dollars a year they can provide “universal health care” for America. Now, the WaPo and www.americansforrichardson.org website don’t make it clear if that price is for all 320 million of us, or just the 46 million without health coverage. Either way, these guys need to look at their numbers, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll use the premise they are only talking about the uninsured. If I speculated that they were going to cover all of us then it becomes too funny to think about.

Back to the math, if either or both are only talking about the 45 million or so without coverage, that means that they are going to get Medicare to cover them for about $2600 per year. Currently Medicare covers just over 30 million people with a budget of $300 Billion. That comes out to $10,000 per year per person covered. How exactly are they going to get that number cut by 75%?

And, if it’s possible to do that, why not just lower the cost for everyone covered? Using their claimed numbers from yesterday we should be able to cut the Medicare budget by 1/3 from it’s current level and still cover the 76 million uninsured and elderly who would be eligible.

Universal health care polls great. Folks love the idea of everyone being covered, and no worries about health care. The truth is though, universal coverage isn’t going to come cheap, and it’s not going to come easy.

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Strange NHS priorities

Tom and Donna (not their real names) are professional shamen. They teach classes in shamanism at a “foundation”, where you can learn “soul retrieval healing”, help the dead “continue their journey into the Hereafter”, and investigate “the Fairy Kingdom”. These soul retrievers and Fairy Kingdom investigators also work for the NHS — where, according to Tom’s foundation profile, they “use complementary therapies to help those with mental health difficulties”.

Shaman therapies are not the only unorthodox treatments for which the NHS will gladly pay. Taxpayers are also subsidising Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) “therapy”, in which, according to one NHS trust, “subtle energies” are reordered via “tapping with the fingertips to stimulate certain meridian energy points while the client is ‘tuned in’ to the problem”. The inventor of EFT notes on his website that he “is not a licensed health professional”, which doesn’t stop him promoting it as an effective treatment for diabetes — unsurprising, since it works for “just about every emotional, health and performance issue you can name”.

If EFT doesn’t do the job, an NHS foot massage might help. Reflexologists believe that each part of the foot maps to a different organ, and that massaging a particular point can treat that organ. Medical doctors think it’s absurd. This is not to say that the NHS doesn’t have a sceptical side — even it is dubious about homeopathy, pointing out that “no evidence has been found” to support the key homeopathic principle that water retains a “memory” of molecules that have been filtered out of it, and that pure distilled water is an effective treatment for a host of conditions.

Since the NHS believes that the entire basis of homeopathy is “contrary to scientific knowledge”, the obvious question becomes: why is it funding five homeopathic hospitals? Most depressing of all for the rational taxpayer is the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which aims to promote “dowsers”, “flower therapists” and “crystal healers”.

We’ve just learnt that some hospitals are removing every third light bulb to save money, and that nurses are being paid half the minimum wage — or being asked to work for nothing — at others. That’s how bad the financial crisis has become. Meanwhile, the National Health Service is employing shaman fairy enthusiasts as psychological counsellors, enthusiastically providing treatments invented by “an ordained minister and a personal performance coach” who thinks tapping your body can cure diabetes, promoting dowsers and crystal healers and spending vast amounts on therapies that can’t be scientifically supported.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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