More and more we’re seeing what happens when health care “reform” is enacted. It removes signals, it gets in between patients and care causing them to make poorly incented decisions. More and more government money is thrown down a well, not only failing to fill the well, but actually making it larger.
All the while, government officials continue to use the promise of “No more homework” to get themselves elected into power. And we just go deeper and deeper into debt.
Canada, which was often used as a model for Obama’s reform, is beginning to feel the heat of the upcoming budget problems that are going to be faced as their state funded programs begin to cost more and more:
Healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded system, which covers all “medically necessary” hospital and physician care and curbs the role of private medicine. It ate up about 40 percent of provincial budgets, or some C$183 billion ($174 billion) last year.
Spending has been rising 6 percent a year under a deal that added C$41.3 billion of federal funding over 10 years.
But that deal ends in 2013, and the federal government is unlikely to be as generous in future, especially for one-off projects.
Canada just isn’t going to be able to keep up with the cost. And how high do they think it’s gonna get?
Ontario says healthcare could eat up 70 percent of its budget in 12 years, if all these costs are left unchecked.
Of course Canada doesn’t seem willing to do what they have to do to get this problem under control. They wanna tweak the distribution method:
Brian Golden, a professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business, said provinces are weighing new sources of funding, including “means-testing” and moving toward evidence-based and pay-for-performance models.
And then focus on specific costs:
“Why are we paying more or the same for cataract surgery when it costs substantially less today than it did 10 years ago? There’s going to be a finer look at what we’re paying for and, more importantly, what we’re getting for it,” he said.
Neither of which addresses the larger issue: That government can’t organize an industry. It just can not.