Smart Bombs: Private care is sick

White House aide Allan B. Hubbard wrote an opinion piece for Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that advocates a large standard deduction of $15,000 so Americans can buy their own health insurance. This, he says, is a better solution to universal coverage than expanding government programs and subsidizing employers.

He begins with a rah-rah premise:

“Let’s start with what’s right. America’s private system of medicine is the world’s finest.”

In 2003, a group called Physicians for a National Health Care Program came up with a proposal for a single-payer health care system to be run by the government. It was endorsed by 8,000 doctors. Of the current system, PNHP says on its Web site:

”(The) U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 46 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.”

Meanwhile, back to Hubbard’s megaphone:

“It puts doctors and patients in charge – not government.”

According to PNHP, physicians and patients are not at the controls:

For physicians, the gratifications of healing give way to anger and alienation in a system that treats sick people as commodities and doctors as investors’ tools. In private practice we waste countless hours on billing and bureaucracy. For the uninsured, we avoid procedures, consultations, and costly medications. In HMOs we walk a tightrope between thrift and penuriousness, under the surveillance of bureaucrats who prod us to abdicate allegiance to patients, and to avoid the sickest, who may be unprofitable.”

Hubbard then makes this curious complaint about the U.S. Senate’s plan to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program:

“This bill would run up a huge tab – $71 billion over 10 years – and would impose new tobacco taxes to pay for it.”

That “huge” tab is one-tenth the amount we’re spending on Bush’s Medicare drug program, with no new funding source. And, unlike SCHIPS, there is a “doughnut hole” in its coverage.

Clearly, private insurance and market forces have failed to rein in prices, improve quality or expand access. So put down the pom-poms and look at the scoreboard.