BrianGarst.com

Many of the problems with health care can be traced back to Medicare.  The third-party payer system, in which Medicare is the biggest single purchaser, means that the patient is not the customer.  This leads to all manner of undesirable outcomes, including excessive death due to negligence and price inflation.

David Goldhill is a self- described left-leaning democrat and businessman whose father died from an easily preventable, hospital caused infection. After his father’s death, he spent a year and a half learning everything he could about health care delivery and why there are so many practices in health care that are intolerable in other businesses. He rejects the almost religious devotion many have to the idea that health care is just so fundamentally different from other sectors, and instead believes that our insistence on treating it different is what ultimately causes so many of its ills.  It is clear from his exploration (video from a recent Cato hosted Hill event) that one of the primary culprits is Medicare.

In addition to its distortionary impact on the delivery of health care, Medicare is also fiscally unsound.  In the coming decades costs are set to balloon out of control, leaving trillions in unfunded liabilities.  None of this is a problem for democrats.  In fact, they love Medicare so much, they want to expand it!

Strategically they’ve discovered that the public is more likely to accept the expansion of something they are familiar with than the “public option,” even though it would serve largely the same function.  Naturally, politics is all that matters to democrats, so with this discovery they’ll now begin ramming a universal medicare plan down our throats, and to hell with the consequences.

Democrats