From the comments: Kevin Kuros explains his vote against health care price controls

by: Rob "EaBo Clipper" Eno

Thu Jun 07, 2012 at 13:28:47 PM EDT

Best predictor of future performance is past performance (0.00 / 0)
First, let me say that the efforts of the Health Care Finance Committee were yeoman.  This was a huge piece of well-intended legislation dealing with an issue that is core to all of us.  And for that alone, all involved should be recognized and commended.  It was said at one point during the debate that perhaps as much as 1/3 of the $60B+ we spend on HC each year is waste, fraud or abuse.

Waste is bad.  Fraud is bad.  Abuse is bad.  But you don't necessarily need to flip the apple cart upside down to find the bad apples, and that is what happens if / when this is adopted.  We will be impacting 1/6th of the state's economy with this bill. It concerns me that this is a "bet the business" piece of state legislation, based on some unproven concepts, that will be followed two years later (assuming the Supreme Court allows it) by a second "bet the business" piece of Federal legislation.

In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "Feeling lucky, punk??", I am not.  And I'll tell you the underlying reason why... history.

The single best predictor of future performance is past performance.  And I'm struggling to find a single instance in history where a new bureaucracy, with new taxes, fees and mandates involved, did ANYTHING less expensively than the private sector.

Yet somehow this massive bill will save 1 out of every 6 dollars we spend on health care in the Commonwealth?  And it'll do so without meaningful malpractice tort reform?  Really???

One of the key drivers of the proliferation of tests that doctors order in the current "Pay for Service" model is the fact that they need to cover themselves for fear of a malpractice lawsuit.  So they order multiple redundant tests so that they don't get sued.  This obviously adds cost.

But rather than directly addressing the cause of much of the cost, we addressed the symptom that Pay for Service is expensive by completely re-inventing the payment model.  Let's be clear here... Pay for Service is neither inherently bad nor expensive.  "Pay for Unneeded Service" is incredibly so.

I hope for all of us that the vote I took on Tuesday was wrong.  However, I find it hard to argue with history despite the well-intentioned nature of the bill and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that supported it.

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty." - Ronald Reagan
by: kjkuros @ Thu Jun 07, 2012 at 03:25:38 AM EDT