GOP Laboratory of Ideas

The GOP is the laboratory of new ideas in health care--and individuals come first. Universal health care is a mirage (say it en francais) and Hillary's frumpy, shapeless one-size-fits-all approach is really a robe cloaking the Grim Reaper.

From the autumn issue of CityJournal, Peter Huber "Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine":

This great etiological shift—from the medicine of us versus germs to the medicine of us versus us—upends everything. Disease and its cures now depend on factors too fragmented for conventional insurance pools to contain, too costly for public treasuries to underwrite, and too divisive for public authorities even to discuss, much less manage. The era of big government is over in medicine, too. Within a decade or two, a charismatic president will deliver on the promise to end health care as we know it. What then? Science will discover, competition will supply, patients will choose, and freedom will deliver better medicine and far better health, at lower cost, to many more people.

Worth reading all the way to the end.

McCain's Medicine takes a free market approach along with Giuliani and Romney (to a lesser extent). WSJ editorial:

One major difference among these front runners concerns insurance regulation, and here Mr. McCain comes out on top. Part of the reason coverage costs differ so sharply among states is because some have chosen to impose multiple rules and mandates. Mr. McCain would allow people to purchase policies across state lines, which is currently prohibited. That would let people choose the coverage levels that best serve their needs, and would make insurance far more affordable for people in mandate-heavy states like New York and Massachusetts. Mr. Giuliani says he'll allow for this eventually, with some caveats, and Mr. Romney goes out of his way to trash it.

And McCain would reform Medicare in a substantive way, showing the right stuff, alone among candidates of either party in tackling this entitlement bankrupting us. He proposes that government pay based on outcomes, particularly for seniors, rather than the outmoded and unwieldy fee-for-service--the Journal calls it supply side medicine. And this:

While the proposal would leave the beneficiary structure intact, we suspect that Mr. McCain is setting up an even bolder reform. Changing the payment architecture could be used as a lever to move Medicare toward a defined-contribution health-care model, where the government would pay a certain amount per individual, and private insurance would compete to insure patients. This would be a major step toward free-market spending discipline.

And here in Illinois we have a candidate for Senate, Dr. Steve Sauerberg, who understands what's at stake. There's a direct cause and effect relationship between Governor Blagojevich's wrong-headed big government approach to health care (not to mention state bankruptcy and Illinois' as judicial hellhole) and health care providers leaving the state in droves.

Do we want to be government guinea pigs or be able to choose our own health care?

The free market is driven by the choices of millions of individuals and has accountability and responsiveness far superior to that of any government bureaucracy. For us, it could be the difference between life and death.

UPDATE: My friend Pat Hickey, ...With Both Hands, endorses McCain's plan.

UPDATE: Giuliani health advisor Sally Pipes in the WSJ on HillaryCare (and Romney's plan in Massachuesetts):

Costs have turned out to be higher than expected in Massachusetts -- and they promise to keep climbing. In a bond filing, government officials told Wall Street that health spending under its plan would increase total state spending by $151 million. This was before the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick, in the face of a collapsing coalition, pushed $13 million more into the plan. On a household level, citizens have found that their government expects them to spend as much as 10% of their household income on health insurance, and then face deductibles and copays.

These high expenses will erode public support for the program. Officials active in designing and implementing the plan are fretting publicly about the need to control costs and how failure to do so will cause the scheme to collapse.

The lesson here is plain for Ms. Clinton's plan. It already projects an increase in spending of $110 billion and, unlike the state, cannot hide cost increases by shifting some of them to the federal taxpayer.

Related post: Stability and Portability