The government injecting itself into the health care system or getting between doctors, insurers, and patients has been driving up the cost of care for decades. The knee-jerk response to complaints about the cost of health care is to meddle some more, resulting in more expensive health care.
Democrats in Vermont have been pretending to know better for years, but more recent veto-proof majorities have a way of inspiring. They are health Care’s worst enemy, but that’s not how they see it. Instead of tearing down barriers and opening markets, their solution is predictable progressive pablum.
Allow more people on Medicaid.
New legislation would expand Medicaid services to more people without telling taxpayers how much this will cost them.
One idea, which would require coverage for obesity drugs (where it is bravely inferred that the body positivity movement is detrimental to public health), has an estimated cost of 100 million. Government watchers will know this is likely a gross underestimate but not nearly as blatant a disregard for other people’s money as expanding eligibility to age 26 or anyone in a 4-person household with income up to 7,925.00 a month. That’s 87,540 a year.
Median household income in America (2022) is $67,521.00. The average salary in Vermont is just over 59K a year. Are we admitting that the state has so bolloxed up health care with its meddling that the average Vermonter should be on Medicaid, or are we saying we want everyone on Medicaid because cradle-to-grave government-run care was always the plan?
That was the goal of Obamacare, which is still around, but it never managed to do anything to make care more affordable (if it had, we wouldn’t be having this discussion).
New Hampshire’s problems began when legislators led by Democrats made it impossible for insurance companies to compete. We went from more than a dozen insurers to fewer than five. We may have fewer today.
The hospital cartel has used the legislature to ensure its good health by promoting rules and laws that make it harder for private non-affiliated medical practice to thrive, which would create competition and drive prices down.
Legislators, pockets filled with donations from the medical Industrial complex, aid and abet the monopolies instead of going out of their way to get government out from between patients and providers, including health insurers and nothing Vermont (or New Hampshire, as far as I can tell) wants to change the trajectory.
The only thing legislators can do to help healthcare costs go down is to open up markets that allow for competition. Permit any insurer to do business with anyone (patient, practice, whomever) and watch them compete like Geico, Progressive, and State Farm on plans and pricing. Let private practice negotiate with insurers and patients for the cost of care and coverage and watch access improve..
Drugs? The US does pay too much, more than most other nations, but the internet (as with telehealth’s potential) is waiting to solve that problem if licensed healthcare professionals and pharmacists are freed up to help consumers find the drugs they need at the lowest cost instead of at the inflated cost insurers won’t cover.
That’s a very loose 30,000-foot analysis, but in almost every case, the problems were created by legislators, and stakeholders leverage influence to create monopolies, and these solutions are nowhere on their radar.
So, Vermont Legislators are looking busy but not for ways to bring down costs. They are hoping to provide the appearance of doing something even when everyone should know it will only make matters worse so they can keep looking busy, and so on.
