Back in 2008, while the Obama administration was first evaluating healthcare reform, Peter Orszag, then the director of the Congressional Budget Office, estimated that 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product, or $700 billion per year, goes to medical tests and procedures that have no proven positive impact on outcomes. Unaccounted for in this estimate are the billions more spent managing the often lifelong complications inherited from inappropriate tests and unproven procedures. MRIs that identify …
Read MoreFunding Healthcare Reform: Tax Sugar, Not Success, Part II
Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP No one has more eloquently stated the case for carving out the so-called “unnecessaries” from the capitalist code of taxation than Adam Smith. Yet, more than 230 years after the publication of arguably the most authoritative text in defense of capitalism, we continue to struggle with the concept of taxation as a socialist plot. Last month, I examined the so-called “success tax.” I suggested that a tax on earned income …
Read MoreFunding Healthcare Reform: Tax Sugar, Not Success
Lee A. Resnick, MD, FAAFP Healthcare is the ultimate paradox for democratic and capitalist ideas, an epic clash between inalienable rights and free market forces. Most everyone agrees that basic healthcare should be attainable, affordable, and non-discriminatory for all citizens. But how can we achieve this somewhat socialist-sounding goal within a free market system? Well, the free market has proven incapable of making healthcare affordable, and government coffers have proven too empty to subsidize it. …
Read MoreA Mathematical Model for Political Influence in Healthcare Reform
‘Round and ‘round it goes… and where it stops, nobody knows. Feeling dazed and confused by the dizzying display of legislative slight of hand? Now you see it, now you don’t! Compromise, in theory, sounds like the right thing to do when trying to balance interests. Compromise often leads to parity and equity between competing interests. However, when competing interests have unequal power, compromise tends to favor those with the most influence. I promise a …
Read More