FedUpUSA

Tell me once again, other than the fact that I live with government guns in my face literally every day, why I bother listening to anything you clowns allegedly “legislate” any more?

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

I bet they are sensitive.  Too bad they’re now public.

We need a 28th Amendment that reads:

It shall be unlawful for any member of Congress, or any branch of the Federal Government, to introduce, propose, pass, issue for comment or otherwise attempt to put into force or effect any legislation, rule, executive order or other edict, mandate or law that exempts or privileges any member of the government over ordinary citizens.

Any person violating this Amendment shall be deemed guilty of a capital offense with publication or issuance of said order or regulation or filing of such bill or amendment serving as conclusive proof of guilt.

Guilty member(s) of government shall be executed at high noon by the means of hanging by the neck until dead in front of the Washington Monument on the next business day after the offense has been confirmed, with their corpse to remain on display as hung for no fewer than 24 consecutive hours.

How come we can’t nail this evil woman for violating the Sherman Act?

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

Yep.  Time for handcuffs.  Why?

PHOENIX – Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed legislation Friday that would have allowed individuals to shop around for the best price on health-care needs, saying there are technical problems with the proposal.

The legislation by Sen. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, would have put hospitals and doctors in the same position as retailers: They would have to give customers an opportunity to learn what certain procedures will cost before they show up in a waiting room.

That would have included both a requirement for online posting and making a price list available on-site.

Yep.  A good law requiring that you have the right to know what something costs before you agree to it was vetoed by the Governor of Arizona.

Barto called the veto “an insult.”

I say it ought to be a felony for all of the firms in Arizona to not post said prices, and all those who conspire to keep that from being part and parcel of your daily life in Arizona should be exposed to prosecution and imprisonment for their part in that.

This now includes Governor Brewer.

And listen to this – the governor’s press aide admitted that one of the reasons for the veto was in fact a deliberate decision to fix prices!

Gubernatorial press aide Matthew Benson said the veto is totally unrelated to Barto’s opposition to the Medicaid plan. He said there were “technical concerns.”

Among those, Benson said, is that hospitals do not have one flat rate they charge for procedures. He said different charges apply depending on whether the patient is paying his or her own bill, has coverage from an insurance company that has negotiated a discount or is a Medicaid patient.

There you have it — a raw admission that hospitals screw people “at will” — their charges vary not on the complexity or procedure performed but rather simply on how you pay and this is part of how they engage in that price-fixing.

We the people need to demand handcuffs.

There have been a number of comments on my previous articles related ot the Health Care scam and more than a few private emails I’ve received trying to cast doctors as “victims” of the medical cost-push cartel scams that run through the entire industry.

Don’t fall for the Marcus Welby crap.

Nobody who is part and parcel on a willing basis to an utterly-unsustainable system should be excused, just as you cannot excuse any of the officers and directors of a big bank.

The next generation of U.S. physicians is being saddled with record debt amid a looming shortage of doctors needed to cope with a rising elderly population. The burgeoning debt burden may be turning students away from primary care, which pays about $200,000 a year, toward more lucrative specialties and scaring off low-income and minority students fearful of taking on big loans.

Median tuition and fees at private medical schools was $50,309 in the 2012-2013 academic year, more than 16 times the cost when Moy’s father became a doctor.The median-education debt for 2012 medical-school graduates was $170,000, including loans taken out for undergraduate studies and excluding interest. That compares with an average $13,469 in 1978, said Jay Youngclaus, co-author of a February 2013 report on medical school debt.

Gee, I wonder why medical costs have gone up so much?  It’s all the tort bar and insurance companys’ fault, right?  None of it has anything to do with an educational debt load for the average medical school student that has gone up by a factor of 10 since 1978, right?

Like hell.

Being a doctor used to be a middle-class profession.  A primary-care physician — a generalist, in short — is not a brain surgeon.

Since when is $200,000 a “middle-class” income when the median family income in this nation is about $50,000?

It’s not, in short.

Record numbers of students still want to become doctors. First-time applicants to U.S. medical schools rose to 33,772 in 2012 from 24,884 a decade earlier, according to AAMC. New enrollment at U.S. medical schools grew 1.5 percent to 19,517 students, the highest ever.

Of course they do. We have a cartel in the country in the form of the Medical System and if you can get inside it you too can skim off your piece of the pie, and the best part of it is that you get to scare people into paying you by using their fear of death as a cudgel.

No, I will not excuse doctors.  I will instead excoriate them and point directly to the Sherman Act for what, in my opinion, they should face:

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

The silliness that makes you  in the morning…

President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats sold many Americans on the Affordable Care Act largely by emphasizing two arguments: The law would help to reduce overall health-care costs, and it would provide health insurance to those who, for financial or health reasons, cannot get it now.

Unfortunately, both of these arguments are flawed. The law creates market distortions that will significantly raise premiums and costs for many Americans — including some middle- income families. And there are less costly, less distortionary and less intrusive ways to address the problem of the uninsured.

The “problem” of the uninsured?  You mean the “problem” that medical cartels, in concert with the government created out of whole cloth and now proposes to “save” us from?

Who is this clown?  Oh yeah, here we are:

(Lanhee Chen is a Bloomberg View columnist and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was the policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Oh, that explains it.  Romneycare and all.

Let me give you just one example — a relatively common chemotherapy drug.  I won’t name the drug as it might expose my source, but those in the practice of medicine are well-aware of the truth in this regard.

It has a cost including a market profit of about $30/dose.  You can’t buy it in the United States for under $100, however.  As a patient you will likely pay 50% to 500% more in a clinic or hospital for that drug.

If you go to one of the nations where it is produced, however, you can buy it over the counter for $30.

So why does it cost $150-500 in the United States?

Because drug makers colluded with the US Government to make it a crime to buy that drug in some other nation and then bring it into the United States and sell it for whatever you wish to sell it for.  You must have a valid prescription to possess it at all and since that prescription must be for your personal use possession for any other purpose without explicit government permission (such as, for example, arbitrage of price between a high and low priced location) is a criminal offense for which you can be (and will be) prosecuted and imprisoned.

Or so the “business” argument goes.

Look at Wylie’s recent loss at the US Supreme Court, and the arguments raised by publishing associations.  Specifically, this argument:

The potential longterm damage is not exclusive to publishers. It would have devastating consequences for authors, publishing industry employees and businesses directly supported by the industry, retailers, students and educators. Some examples of the damage:

Authors would be deprived of their rightful compensation because the royalties they receive from foreign versions of books, to the extent they are able to receive them, are typically lower than the royalties from US editions. The prospect of diminished earnings is likely to make academic authors and publishers less willing to engage in the labor-intensive process to create textbooks. The availability, quality and diversity of these critical educational tools would undoubtedly suffer.

It could affect high-quality, highly-educated US jobs which contribute millions to the economy in tax revenue.

Wait a second.  Why is the royalty lower for works sold in a foreign nation?

Note that the issue at hand here is not counterfeit goods.  It is that Wylie caused to be printed authorized editions of these books in another country, someone bought them there and shipped them here where they sold them for less money than Wylie would have liked.

The key point is that the seller legally purchased and owned the goods in question.

The US Supreme Court has ruled on this case and upheld the reimportation and resale of lawfully acquired copies of the books; it said in justification (in part) for its ruling:

A law that permits a copyright holder to control the resale or other disposition of a chattel once sold is similarly “against Trade and Traffi[c], and bargaining and contracting.” Ibid. With these last few words, Coke emphasizes the im­portance of leaving buyers of goods free to compete with each other when reselling or otherwise disposing of those goods. American law too has generally thought that com­petition, including freedom to resell, can work to the ad­vantage of the consumer.

Except, of course, when it comes to anything having to do with the medical industry.

The argument is often raised that trade in counterfeit goods could do severe harm to a consumer (e.g. adulterated drugs.)  But nothing has been said about allowing trade incounterfeits.  In fact that’s already separately illegal and adulterating drugs or tampering with devices is a separate and serious criminal offense.

No, what’s been granted to this “industry” is a means to violate the Sherman Act, 15 USC.  This act provides the following:

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

Every person.

This sort of cartel behavior is, by the black-letter law above, illegal in virtually all lines of business. Had I attempted to conspire to do that sort of thing when I ran my Internet company I would have gone to prison — and justly so.

But of course there are “exceptions”, and those “exceptions” were granted by Congress under lobbying pressure from the medical industry.

So we have CON laws (which make legal otherwise felonious activity), we have reimportation laws (which make felonies out of what is described above as ordinary commerce) and we have specially granted exceptions riddled throughout the law that give the privilege of violating the black-letter felony statute found in 15 USC to various actors in the health care sector.

These actors use that privilege in spades, and as a consequence there is a problem of uninsured people that is created out of whole cloth by the outright prohibition of competition between sellers of goods and services which result in a factual price difference of, for example, a $100 scorpion antivenom manufactured in Mexico (and available there at that price) being sold in the United States in a hospital for nearly $40,000.

Then, having created a circumstance where most people who do not have “insurance” would be instantly bankrupted by a need for such antivenom (especially if you need two shots, which is the usual course of treatment!) or at least severely harmed (having to pay nearly $100,000 for $200 worth of drug) the political class now exploits this to talk about how we must “solve” the problem of people being uninsured when they created the problem of ridiculous pricing and thus the original “need” out of whole cloth!

The solution to this problem is not found in Obamacare, Romneycare or anything similar.

It is to return to the Rule of Law, pulling all of these protections from this so-called “industry”, resulting in free and open competition – that is, to restore the underlying and essential right of property that vests when one lawfully acquires a thing in voluntary trade.

Applying the same Rule of Law found in 15 USC to the providers of medical services so as to imprison those who attempt to or do manipulate the market to restrain trade and elevate price in things such as diagnostic imaging and other procedures, along with restoring the rule of law in 15 USC to medical goods and services of all sorts, would cause the price of medical goods and services to instantly collapse and thus render the argument of “need” for insurance moot for virtually all cases.

Oh yes, there still would be a demand and market for medically-related insurance.  But even for those events, such as cancer or catastrophic injury, the price would be a tiny fraction of what it is now and thus would be affordable in a free market environment for virtually everyone.

Even currently-catastrophic chronic conditions, such as HIV, would have the cost of treatment collapse to affordable levels for most persons.  A fall in the price of these treatment regimes by 80-90% would immediately occur.

Consider that if you took the free-market price of an uncomplicated childbirth including doctor and anesthesiologist billing (e.g. the epidural), an utterly routine procedure that occurs millions of times a year, from 1963 and inflated it by the CPI to today, you would be able to have an uncomplicated birth in a hospital including three nights stay for just under $1,000.

Back in 1963 medicine was mostly a free-market enterprise and the sort of jackbooted legal environment that has resulted in the financial rape of our nation did not exist.  Today it does, and as a result the typical price of that uncomplicated birth is ten times the CPI-inflated 1963 price.

Most people, even very poor people, can come up with $1,000 when they have nine months to do so.  That’s about $100/month, or less than most “poor” people in this country spend on beer, cigarettes or both in a given month.  It is clearly affordable to just about anyone and thus requires no “insurance” to cover it.

There is no solution to be found in yet more government privilege for the Health “Industry.”  We can only resolve this problem by tearing down the special privileges and exceptions to long-standing law that this so-called “industry” has garnered for themselves, reducing its impact on our economy and eliminating the outrageous distortions and financial rapes that it inflicts on the American consumer.

In a word, bah!

You may have already read or heard about Steven Brill’s excellent, long article in Time magazine, called “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” If you think it doesn’t concern you, don’t be so sure. Brill documents how a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion can exceed the cost of a semester of college, how simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital can be more expensive than a new car, and how a drug that requires $300 to make and that the manufacturer sells to a hospital for $3,000–3,500, can cost the patient to whom it is prescribed $13,702. He looks closely at the outrageous prices on itemized hospital bills and finds that individual services listed on them have been priced at double and triple what those same services cost separately—for reasons neither the patient understands nor the hospital can explain. And he recounts the horror stories of people reduced to penury after a brief hospital stay, even though they had some health insurance, money in the bank, and suffered from only minor ailments.

Put simply, Brill says, these bills tell us there’s no free market in our healthcare system, that hospitals set their rates knowing that someone in pain or in fear for his or her life is not going to ask to see the price list first before agreeing to some test or treatment. It’s no wonder that 60 percent of our fellow Americans who file for personal bankruptcy each year do so because of medical costs.

Charles Simic started out well with these two paragraphs. But then he immediately descends into the common lefty shibboleths that, unfortunately, are false when it comes to health care.

What makes articles like this so outrageous is that the facts are available to anyone who cares to look.  The data on health expenditures via the Federal Government, for example, are easily found in the Monthly Treasury Statements (MTS), public documents available going back for a very long time — as they are, after all, public.

This is where one finds the $1 trillion in total federal health spending, which incidentally is about $100 billion more than is counted in the various budget documents, even the so-called “as-spent” ones.

The argument that somehow Medicare is a “solution”, that is, a “government option”, is one of those common lefty shibboleths that is utterly devoid of factual basis.  The fact of the matter is the Medicare and Medicare are federal government medical spending — nearly all of it in fact — and it is rapidly driving the federal government into insolvency!

This is “restraint”?

That may sound harsh. But Brill’s article makes one comprehend not just the talk in Washington about the supposed absolute necessity of replacing Medicare and Medicaid with “market-oriented” health care, but also the full human cost such a change would bring. If the elderly and the poor are stripped of the few protections these government programs give them, they’ll be left at the mercy of a medical industry and insurance companies whose already huge profits, so they imagine, will then get even bigger. Despite the claims that these are high-minded proposals that will fix our national debt, and despite their veneration as such by the political establishment and the media, what is being offered to the American people is nothing more than thinly-disguised money-making scams.

Well, in that Charles is right, but for the wrong reasons.  And when you’re right for the wrong reasons then your prescription for change is wrong too.

The reality of the health situation in the United States is that cost escalation is driven by a few rather simple facts, all of which happened and continue to happen specifically due to government protectionism and intervention, not the market and not “sadism” or “the profit motive.”

It is the cartel-like behavior that causes this problem.  Hospitals buying out independent imaging centers (think MRI) and then tripling their charges would be an utterly stupid act but for the ability to stop someone from setting up another one next door, undercutting their price by 90% and instantly putting them out of business.  To prevent this you haveCON laws in a significant number of states and where those are not present you still have active interference with the market, including forcible licensing and inspection routines along with subtle (and not-so-subtle) threats of refusal to allow doctors who are not “affiliated” presence in these hospitals.

Then there is the blatant “in your face” game-playing with drugs.  A drug made in Mexico and available over the counter for $100 is sold to a hospital here in the United States for $4,000 and is then marked up nearly 10x to almost $40,000 when sold to a patient.  Not only is it illegal for you to possess that drug without a prescription, which of course you can’t get without a member of the medical cartel writing it, but it’s also illegal for you to go to Mexico and buy it over the counter for $100 and then bring it back to the United States and undercut the hospital by selling it for $200 to anyone who wants or needs it.

Note that nowhere is an element of forgery, counterfeiting or misrepresentation present — this is simply collusive cartel behavior that is specifically enabled and given legal force (without which it would instantly collapse) by an industry who lobbied government to get special laws passed that prohibit the forces of the market from working.

Likewise, anti-gouging laws prohibit me from selling gasoline for $3/gallon every day of the year, except when there’s a hurricane coming, at which point I charge $6.  I can make a clean argument that such “anti-gouging” laws are wrong, in that the market price for gasoline in a hurricane might well be $6, and if it’s $3 instead everyone who drives by will buy up all my gas — which means the guy who really needs it will get none since I’ll run out!

But that’s not what happens here.  In the gasoline example there are 4 gas stations on pretty much every exit on the highway and they all have signs up posting the price before you pump the gas.  And these “anti-gouging” laws don’t require collusion — a singular and unjoined decision to boost your price is enough to get in trouble.

In the medical example not only is there no posted price anywhere, with the price being retroactively determined after the service is provided but there is active collusion between providers and overt acts to remove lower-priced competitors by buying them out or, if they refuse to cooperate, freezing them out of their practices through various means.  These sorts of actions in virtually any other line of work are rank violations of the Sherman and Clayton acts — laws that proscribe such anti-competitive behavior and attach felony criminal penalties along with treble-damage civil liability to violations.

The final shibboleth is that there was something immoral about what Ron Paul said in Tampa, when he made the comment that taking your own risk might mean that someone who is uninsured because he accepted his own risk might die as a consequence for lack of the ability to pay and obtain care.  What’s left unsaid by Ron Paul or anyone else for that matter, including the author of this piece, is that the reason everyone considers such “insurance” mandatory is because of the cartel behavior that leads prices to be FIVE TIMES what they would be in a free market.

The Oklahoma Surgical Center points this out quite clearly.  There prices are posted before the procedure is undertaken and they are quite-typically one fifth of what is often charged uninsured people in “conventional” hospitals.  For the same procedures.

The solution is not to further ensconce cartel behavior into the government and then try to “restrain” it while leaving the basic structure alone that led to the problem in the first place.

Rather, it is to first remove all such special protections from this industry en-masse and then prosecute any and all medical providers, irrespective of whether they are doctors, hospitals or drug and device makers who act in an attempt to restrain the market, de-capitating the medical cartels and imprisoning all involved from doctors to CEOs.

THAT will solve the problem.

Trying to place a cartel inside the government, which is what Charles proposes, is not only ethically bankrupt it will financially bankrupt our nation if we don’t cut that crap out.

Heh heh heh….

In Montana, for example, Hoey’s pharmacists group found that generic Lipitor, generic Plavix, diovan and Nexium together cost $359.38 per month through UnitedHealth’s AARP Medicare Rx Preferred plan at a Walgreen preferred pharmacy in Helena. The same drugs cost $327.73 at the independent Anderson Family Pharmacy in Great Falls. Hoey said his group relied on data from Medicare’s website.

Just wait until you see what’s going to be disclosed soon…..

Specifically, wait until you see what other first-world nation citizens pay for these same drugs.

Soon, you will be able to.

Easily.

And once you do then you will understand why we do not need this “coverage” at all and that the only reason it is “needed” is that you were raped by the medical industry in the setting of these prices in the first place and then those prices were protected by laws prohibiting the cross-border operation of the market which would otherwise instantly result in you being able to buy these drugs for dramatically less — in fact, so much less that you could almost-certainly pay cash.

You are likely to be rather angry, I suspect, and you should be.

Stay tuned.