Saturday, August 15, 2009

John Mackey: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare - WSJ.com

John Mackey: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare - WSJ.com: "While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:"

These certainly look like some really good ideas. The most interesting part seems to be that it was laws and regulations that created this mess to begin with. I remember government creating new regulation with allowed the creating of HMOs which nobody really liked. and then PPOs.

And I've always wondered why employment and insurance have been coupled together. It turns out it was a result of the New Deal and wage caps, big companies wanted a way to improve the compensation of their workers but couldn't due to wage cap laws, so they worked a deal with government to allow them to give insurance as a benefit and not count it as earnings.

This smells and it smells the same as nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn't cost all that much to make but the cost of the red tape and anti-astroturf and the cost has risen too high to be worth doing.

I would say that more then half the cost of healthcare is now going to regulatory compliance and lawyers, but you would never see it on a billing statement that way, it is subsumed into everything so a patient never sees it.

Kind of hard to make a proper decision on this when that is the case. But then that is the point I suppose.

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