August 26, 2009 | Vol. 4, No. 34

Facta, Non Verba:

Three Reasons Why Government Can't Run Health Care

by Newt Gingrich

Facta, non verba.

For those of you who have forgotten your Latin, it means "deeds, not words."

There's been a lot of overheated rhetoric about health care reform, but this saying is one that all Americans should return to when considering plans for a government-dominated health system. Sponsored Content

In other words, we should judge government, not by its words, but by its deeds.

With this simple principle in mind, what follows are three examples why government can't - and shouldn't - run our health care system (at least not any health care system you or I would want to be dependent on).

Reason No. 1: Government Can't Be Trusted With a Credit Card

Every family knows about making a budget and living within its means. Government, to put it bluntly, does not.

What if your husband had come home last Friday night and announced that he had racked up almost 30 percent more debt on the family credit card - including the mortgage and car loans - than he had told you about just a month ago?

Would you trust him to go out and start spending money to remodel the kitchen? And do you think he could get a loan to do it?

But that's exactly what the Obama Administration did with their weekend news dump. They announced late Friday that the amount of money they don't have but are nonetheless planning on spending over the next ten years isn't the astonishing $7 trillion they estimated in May but is instead an astounding $9 trillion.

Add this to the fact that, after the administration sold its health care reform proposal on the grounds that it will reduce costs to the Treasury, the independent Congressional Budget Office determined that the House plan will actually cost an astounding $1 trillion-$1.5 trillion in the next ten years, which will be added directly to the federal debt. The director of the CBO testified before Congress last month that "[i]n the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs."

Which do you have more faith in, the government's happy talk of "bending the cost curve" or its record of out-of-control spending?

Deeds, not words.

Reason No. 2: Government Can't Even Give Away Money Effectively

As the inimitable Andy McCarthy of National Review put it, "Compared to the infinite complexity of healthcare and health-insurance, cash-for-clunkers is kindergarten stuff. You trade in your old car for a new one that gets (slightly) better mileage and the government gives you money - between $3,500 and $4,500. How hard is that?"

Too hard for government bureaucrats, it turns out.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has boasted that the cash-for-clunkers program provided "a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work.''

But look at the deeds, not the words.

Last week, cash-for-clunkers ended in a bureaucratic morass of red tape, failed promises and unanticipated costs.

Air Traffic Controllers Manning the Cash-for-Clunkers Hotline

Only a government bureaucracy could mess up a program designed to give away free money.

The government wizards who set up cash-for-clunkers initially budgeted to sell 250,000 cars in three months.

The program sold that many in four days.

And because the central planners who think they can provide government "competition" to the private health insurance market failed to accurately estimate how many government workers it would take to administer cash-for-clunkers, they had to take employees from the FAA - air traffic controllers, no less - to help manage the demand.

And what about the car dealerships the program was supposed to help in the first place? Even though the rebates were supposed to be paid within 10 days, only 7 percent of federal promises under cash-for-clunkers have been paid so far, leaving dealers with millions of dollars in unfunded government promises.

More Than Bureaucratic Incompetence, Political Business as Usual

The headlines should have been blazing. The biggest health discoveries of our time-effective treatments for almost every disease. Breakthroughs like:

a side-effect free cholesterol buster-that costs 4 cents a day

a natural cancer killer 10,000 times stronger than chemo

And if Big Pharma had their way, you'd never hear about a single one.

But they can't keep these cures a secret forever-and one team is working round-the-clock to make sure you find out about every last one.

Keep reading...

But there's more to the cautionary tale of cash-for-clunkers than just bureaucratic incompetence.

This is a case study in what happens when politicians get involved in the marketplace.

Despite all the rhetoric of jump starting the auto industry, politicians' priorities are to give free goodies to their constituents. So as far as they're concerned, cash-for-clunkers has been a resounding success.

Forget the fact that they're spending money they don't have, or that car dealerships are left holding millions of dollars in empty government promises. They're not concerned with the long-term, just the next election.

So tell us again why should we think bureaucrats and politicians will perform any better with our health care?

Reason No. 3: Government Would Rather Pay Crooks Than Manage Efficiently

There's been a lot of worrying about the inevitability of government rationing health care under the Democratic reform bills in Congress.

Economists have known about this inevitability for a long time. Well, Americans can stop worrying. Government is rationing care already - and doing it in a particularly stupid way.

Studies have shown that early use of home health care after hospitalization - allowing patients to go home and be visited by a nurse to manage their care - saves Medicare billions of dollars.

So here is a case where an innovative government program actually saves the government money. Home health care is both more compassionate and more efficient. It reduces the likelihood a patient will be readmitted to a hospital by allowing her to heal in a more familiar setting.

Home Health Care Works, So Naturally Medicare Bureaucrats Cut Its Funding

So naturally bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cut $34 billion from this compassionate, efficient program last week.

And if the House health care reform bill becomes law, an additional $56.8 billion will be cut from the program - an amount equal to almost the entire federal budget for home health care services in 2007.

What makes rationing care to the homebound all the more immoral is the fact that there is a much bigger pot of savings available to Washington if it only had the political will to look.

Instead of Seeking Savings from the Homebound, Why Not the Crooks?

As a new book by the Center for Health Transformation's Jim Frogue details, criminals rip off the taxpayers to the tune of $80 billion to $120 billion each year in the current Medicare and Medicaid programs.

We're not talking about inadvertent bill errors but outright fraud. Government health programs are currently paying men maternity benefits, giving taxpayer dollars to pizza parlors that are supposed to be HIV transfusion centers, and even paying dead patients federal health care benefits.

If ever there was a reason not to turn our entire health care system over to government it is this: Government can't run the health care programs it already has. It would rather ration compassionate, effective programs than do the hard work of rooting out and punishing the crooks who are stealing our taxpayer dollars.

Facts are Stubborn Things

Americans have already heard a lot of rhetoric about health care reform, and we can expect to hear a lot more.

But as Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. And the facts of government's track record in managing our money and delivering on its promises speak louder than any televised presidential speech or stage-managed town hall ever could.

So as the summer winds down and the debate rages on, let this be our mantra:

Facta, non verba.

Period.

Shep,

Ever notice that those who continue to shout that government can't run something get their advice from people that failed in government.

The thing that amazes me is that certain idiots will continue to spout this line even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

As proof take a look at our education system. When we get the failure party in charge our education stats decline, but when there is a democrat in office the stats climb. Or we could look at the military. It seems to work far better than anything we could ever hope for from the private sector. Or our national highway system. I would hate to have to rely on the private sector alone for our roads. And just imagine how bad our police force would be if we had to rely on the private sector.

Until next time,

Zif.

In the world of abstract Republican theory, it's definitionally a bad idea to have government involved in healthcare, just as government involvement in anything is a bad idea. When your patron saint has declared, as a matter of official religious dogma, that government is the problem, orthodoxy requires that you conclude that government shouldn't be involved in healthcare, regardless of any real-world evidence to the contrary.

However, for those of us who judge based on evidence, the real world has spoken quite plainly. In every other wealthy nation on Earth, government has far more involvement in healthcare than here. They all have universal coverage, and a more or less socialized system. The results are in. Not only do they all pay about half as much for healthcare than America, per capita, they have better results to show for it. They live longer, have lower infant mortality, lower incidence rates of most preventable diseases, fewer social/medical epidemics (STDs, teen pregnancy, obesity, and crime.), and so on.

Moreover, there's no particular reason to think that America is some strange exception to the general rule -- that somehow the basic formula that succeeded in so many other places would fail here. There's no reason, in other words, to think that there's something so deeply fundamentally wrong with America, at its core, or so profoundly inferior about Americans, as people, that we can't run our healthcare system as cheaply and effectively as French people run theirs. After all, we already have socialized medical systems in this country, and they work well. I was born and raised in one: the extremely socialized military system -- where the government directly builds the hospitals, employs the doctors, and buys the drugs. It's a great system, and if anyone were to argue that we should take this away from our troops, and throw them to the mercy of our incompetent private market system of medicine, people like Gingrich would scream bloody murder. Then there's Medicare: a highly cost-effective program that's so wildly popular that calling for its privatization would be political suicide.

So, we know that, IN REALITY, socialized systems have been proven to work quite well, in a couple dozen other wealthy nations, and even here in the United States. The only question is whether you care about Facta (the real-world evidence), or Verba (the hymnal of faith-based conservative rhetoric from which Gingrich reads).

The real quotation from Ronald Reagan was "facts are stupid things." It was a bit of a Freudian slip, and summarizes the true outlook of Reagan and Gingrich, so fond of their alternate Republican reality that the intrusion of facts is unwelcome. The real-world facts that you, and their kind, have got to come to terms with is the long-standing track record of socialized medicine costing half as much and producing better results than our system. That's Facta, not Verba.

My favourite example is peanut butter. Recall for a moment what happened recently when the government allowed the largest producer of institutional peanut paste in the USA to police itself?

Yes.. clearly... the invisible hand of the market is always the best and wisest provider and protector of the citizen!!! not

Shep

That was a particularly bizarre argument from Gingrich, since it directly opposes its own premise. The premise is that facts are more reliable than words. But rather than looking at the REAL WORLD facts regarding the success or failure of socialized medicine, Gingrich spirals into a game of verbal sophistry about the supposed reliability of government, generally.

I'm a simple pragmatist. If socialized medicine had failed, again and again, in practice, I'd be against it. The facts matter to me, not the words. Gingrich, on the other hand, is an idealist. It doesn't matter to him that socialized medicine has produced low prices and great results, again and again, in practice. He's still against it, because facts don't matter to him, words do. He is against socialism as an abstract concept, and that's all that matters. To hear someone so deeply entrenched in that mindset announce facta not verba are important is downright hilarious!

Tell Jimminy to give up his medicare and Newt cannot have it in a few years.

MaryAnne:

Tell Jimminy to give up his medicare and Newt cannot have it in a few years.

The government keeps telling us that Medicare and Social Security are broke. You are throwing gasoline on the fire with national health care.

TB,

Keep on spreading your particular brand of manure. According to the last reports (FY 2009) SS will remain solvent until 2037, and will not run out of money until 2085. Of course those projections are based on the previous three years of economic underperformance, and will have to be revised upwards as things improve with the economy.

As to Medicare... I think Arkady has already pointed out the facts that destroy your odd fantasy on this matter.

Until next time,

Zif.

Arkady:

In the world of abstract Republican theory, it's definitionally a bad idea to have government involved in healthcare, just as government involvement in anything is a bad idea. When your patron saint has declared, as a matter of official religious dogma, that government is the problem, orthodoxy requires that you conclude that government shouldn't be involved in healthcare, regardless of any real-world evidence to the contrary.

However, for those of us who judge based on evidence, the real world has spoken quite plainly. In every other wealthy nation on Earth, government has far more involvement in healthcare than here. They all have universal coverage, and a more or less socialized system. The results are in. Not only do they all pay about half as much for healthcare than America, per capita, they have better results to show for it. They live longer, have lower infant mortality, lower incidence rates of most preventable diseases, fewer social/medical epidemics (STDs, teen pregnancy, obesity, and crime.), and so on.

Moreover, there's no particular reason to think that America is some strange exception to the general rule -- that somehow the basic formula that succeeded in so many other places would fail here. There's no reason, in other words, to think that there's something so deeply fundamentally wrong with America, at its core, or so profoundly inferior about Americans, as people, that we can't run our healthcare system as cheaply and effectively as French people run theirs. After all, we already have socialized medical systems in this country, and they work well. I was born and raised in one: the extremely socialized military system -- where the government directly builds the hospitals, employs the doctors, and buys the drugs. It's a great system, and if anyone were to argue that we should take this away from our troops, and throw them to the mercy of our incompetent private market system of medicine, people like Gingrich would scream bloody murder. Then there's Medicare: a highly cost-effective program that's so wildly popular that calling for its privatization would be political suicide.

So, we know that, IN REALITY, socialized systems have been proven to work quite well, in a couple dozen other wealthy nations, and even here in the United States. The only question is whether you care about Facta (the real-world evidence), or Verba (the hymnal of faith-based conservative rhetoric from which Gingrich reads).

The real quotation from Ronald Reagan was "facts are stupid things." It was a bit of a Freudian slip, and summarizes the true outlook of Reagan and Gingrich, so fond of their alternate Republican reality that the intrusion of facts is unwelcome. The real-world facts that you, and their kind, have got to come to terms with is the long-standing track record of socialized medicine costing half as much and producing better results than our system. That's Facta, not Verba.

This is one of your finest logical posts, Arkady-Well done!

The economy of the United States is the largest national economy in the world.[12] Its gross domestic product (GDP) was estimated as $14.4 trillion in 2008.[1]

The U.S. economy maintains a high level of output per person (GDP per capita, $47,422 in 2008, ranked at around number ten in the world). The U.S. economy has maintained a stable overall GDP growth rate, a low unemployment rate, and high levels of research and capital investment funded by both national and, because of decreasing saving rates, increasingly by foreign investors. In 2008, consumer spending made seventy-two percent of the economic activity in the U.S.[13]

Since the 1970s, the United States economy has absorbed savings from the rest of the world. The phenomenon is subject to discussion among economists. Like other developed countries, the United States faces retiring baby boomers who have already begun withdrawing from their Social Security accounts; however, the American population is young and growing when compared to Europe or Japan. The 2008 estimate of the United States public debt was 73% of GDP, about the same as major European countries.[14][15]

The United States has been one of the best-performing developed countries, consistently outperforming European countries. The American labor market has attracted immigrants from all over the world and has one of the world's highest migration rates. Americans enjoy the second highest income per hour worked.[16] The United States tops the overall ranking in the Global Competitiveness Report.[17

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What can you say about the economies of ¨every other wealthy nation on Earth, government has far more involvement in healthcare than here¨.

Just because other ¨wealthy nations on Earth¨ (vague as that is) have national health care does not make it a popular of even desirable thing in the USA.

My children will not qualify for Social Security by 2037. Great point, and thanks, even if it´s your particular brand of bullshit, it´s a system in trouble -

Arkady:

In the world of abstract Republican theory, it's definitionally a bad idea to have government involved in healthcare, just as government involvement in anything is a bad idea. When your patron saint has declared, as a matter of official religious dogma, that government is the problem, orthodoxy requires that you conclude that government shouldn't be involved in healthcare, regardless of any real-world evidence to the contrary.

However, for those of us who judge based on evidence, the real world has spoken quite plainly. In every other wealthy nation on Earth, government has far more involvement in healthcare than here. They all have universal coverage, and a more or less socialized system. The results are in. Not only do they all pay about half as much for healthcare than America, per capita, they have better results to show for it. They live longer, have lower infant mortality, lower incidence rates of most preventable diseases, fewer social/medical epidemics (STDs, teen pregnancy, obesity, and crime.), and so on.

Moreover, there's no particular reason to think that America is some strange exception to the general rule -- that somehow the basic formula that succeeded in so many other places would fail here. There's no reason, in other words, to think that there's something so deeply fundamentally wrong with America, at its core, or so profoundly inferior about Americans, as people, that we can't run our healthcare system as cheaply and effectively as French people run theirs. After all, we already have socialized medical systems in this country, and they work well. I was born and raised in one: the extremely socialized military system -- where the government directly builds the hospitals, employs the doctors, and buys the drugs. It's a great system, and if anyone were to argue that we should take this away from our troops, and throw them to the mercy of our incompetent private market system of medicine, people like Gingrich would scream bloody murder. Then there's Medicare: a highly cost-effective program that's so wildly popular that calling for its privatization would be political suicide.

So, we know that, IN REALITY, socialized systems have been proven to work quite well, in a couple dozen other wealthy nations, and even here in the United States. The only question is whether you care about Facta (the real-world evidence), or Verba (the hymnal of faith-based conservative rhetoric from which Gingrich reads).

The real quotation from Ronald Reagan was "facts are stupid things." It was a bit of a Freudian slip, and summarizes the true outlook of Reagan and Gingrich, so fond of their alternate Republican reality that the intrusion of facts is unwelcome. The real-world facts that you, and their kind, have got to come to terms with is the long-standing track record of socialized medicine costing half as much and producing better results than our system. That's Facta, not Verba.

And this is real but I lost the URL

Proponents of HillaryCare, who claim other nations’ national health systems are the model the U.S. should adopt, are aghast at this week’s admissions that the British National Health System rations care to citizens based on their status in society. Contrary to the images of cute puppies, sunny days and happy citizens painted by those who want to socialize American medicine, British doctors noted their government routinely denies citizens access to new cancer medicines, diagnostic tools and testing and other procedures commonly available to Americans because certain British citizens are deemed unfit to receive the rationed care. In Britain, after one or more years, many health services become available for citizens who successfully navigate the mandatory rationing waiting lists unless they happen to be “unfit” (i.e. the elderly, overweight or disease-stricken).

In the Orwellian world of government healthcare rationing, “universal” care is not comprehensive care. The very persons who are most vulnerable are denied medical care because they need it, and other services eventually become available to healthy people who don’t need them. Due to the Medicare trustees’ recent warning about the impending financial bankruptcy of that social-welfare program because of government under-funding, can vulnerable Americans survive rationing after a federal government takeover of our healthcare system? Liberals who support partial-birth abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia and other population-control measures enable us to guess the answer.

But here's another article:

have spent most of the last month in the UK. From this vantage point I have watched on Fox the debate in the U.S. over the Democrats' desire to transform the way we care for the sick and elderly. Many opponents of the House plan (President Obama and the senate do not yet have one) cite the way the British deal with their sick and elderly and warn that America could become like Britain. Those critics are right to worry.

Just last week, the Times of London reported that "hospitals creak under the strain as vacancies spread through NHS (National Health Service)."

The socialized medicine practices here has brought a shortage of doctors, nurses and other clinical staff.As of March 31, a survey found a 5.2 percent vacancy rate in these critical fields. This compares to a 3.6 percent vacancy rate just one year earlier.

Qualified nurses and midwifes are retiring at a faster rate than newly trained staff can enter these professions. And a poll conducted by the Royal College of Nurses found that among 8,600 young people, aged 7 to 17, only one in 20 would actively consider nursing an attractive career.

Anthony Halperin, a Trustee of the Patients Association, says: "Nursing staff see that there are higher rewards in the private sector while doctors and dentists no longer see medicine as a career for life, or are having their hours cut back by European legislation. All of this has negative outcomes for patients."

Any sensible person wishing to model America's health care system after Britain and Canada ought to thoroughly examine how those systems have turned out before plunging into the same pool. A reasonable and rational conclusion would be that they are sicker than the patients they treat, after a suitable waiting period, of course. And even then, patients get treated only if they meet certain government "guidelines," which is precisely the situational ethics foundation President Obama wishes to create for Americans.

itain is no model for healthcare

All ya gotta do is search "Britain is no model for healthcare" and some good articles anout both British and Canadian healthcare plans show up!! Liberals beware!!! You won't like what they have evolved into!

A load of shit, Jimmy. I use the British NHS, my mother was a nurse, in the NHS, for many years. Sure people who refuse to, for example lose weight, are denied an operation where their excess weight would put them at risk for having the operation.

Excessive drinkers are denied a liver transplant, if they haven't stopped drinking for six months - better the liver goes to someone who will look after it than someone who will just abuse a new, hard to get, liver - eh?

Young people aged 7-17, give over, how many, at that age have any idea of what sort of career they can actually do?

Sure there are staffing shortages mainly because a helluva lot of them jump ship and head for the US, where they can earn a darn sight more money.

Up until recently, nurses have been grossly underpaid. After all, from a government viewpoint, they can't walk out on strike and leave their patients - but, nowadays, nurses get a decent wage - they would get a darn sight more if the hospitals weren't full of useless administrators, put in by Maggie Thatcher.

The British NHS has lots of faults, mostly Govt inspired, yet, even at that, it seems to me a darn sight better than you have in the US - nobody goes bankrupt, in the UK, because they, or someone close to them gets ill, or has an accident.

In general, it's not the NHS that refuses any sort of treatment, say expensive drugs, it is the "Trusts", again set up by Thatcher, that decide on the policy of drug prescription in their particular Trust. And, if a Trust refuses anyone treatment, then, that person can take them to court and force them to provide such treatment, it's happened a few times.

As I explained to thickbob, the Trusts were set up by Thatcher as jobs for the boys, Blair promised to get rid of them, all he got rid of was the Tory leeches, and replaced them with NuLabour leeches.

As I keep saying, go ahead, dig around, find out everything that you can that is wrong with the British NHS, and the NHS's of other countries, and then, use a wee bit of brains, and make sure that they aren't included in whatever health scheme you end up with.