Medicare "Maligned"

One casualty in the attacks against expanding health insurance is perhaps the most popular federal program ever created: Medicare. Foes are careful not to say it too directly, but the implication is that the retiree insurance program exemplifies what's wrong with government-run health care. And the daughter of the president who created Medicare is fed up with that argument.

Here's Lynda Bird Johnson Robb in a video message to a retiree group on Medicare, which was signed into law by her father, Lyndon Johnson, in 1965:

That PESKY "Liberal Media Bias"!

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/06/talk_radio.html
AHA! Just as I suspected: The top corporate officers of a handful of the most powerful multinational conglomerates are in reality socialists pushing a liberal media bias!

Sieg Heil!

"... traditional radio remains one of the most widely used media formats in America. Arbitron, the national radio ratings company, reports that more than 90 percent of Americans ages 12 or older listen to radio each week, “a higher penetration than television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet.”

This report documents how conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format:

* Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.

* Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

* A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.

Tort Reform Unlikely to Cut Health Care Costs

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=az9qxQZNmf0o
Annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn’t driving premiums.

I'll blog about this more later.

Medicare and Masachusetts Myths

Health economists Amy Finkelstein and Robin McKnight examine what happened when the government introduced Medicare into the market.(PDF)

Abstract: We study the impact of the introduction of one of the major pillars of the social insurance system in the United States: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. Our results suggest that, in its first 10 years, the establishment of universal health insurance for the elderly had no discernible impact on elderly mortality. However, we find a substantial reduction in the elderly’s exposure to out of pocket medical expenditure risk. Specifically, we estimate that the introduction of Medicare was associated with a forty percent decline in out of pocket spending for the top quartile of the out of pocket spending distribution. A stylized expected utility framework suggests that the welfare gains from such reductions in risk exposure alone may be sufficient to cover almost two-fifths of the costs of Medicare. These findings underscore the importance of considering the direct insurance benefits from public health insurance programs, in addition to any indirect benefits from an effect on health.

Massachusetts Health Reform: The Myth of Uncontrollable Costs | Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation

Despite a public perception that the state's landmark health care reform law has turned out to be unaffordable, a new analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation finds that the cost to taxpayers of achieving near universal coverage has been relatively modest and well within initial projections of how much the state would have to spend to implement reform, in part because many of the newly insured have enrolled in employer-sponsored plans at no public expense.


The Foundation report concludes that state spending on the reform has increased by $350 million between fiscal 2006, the last year before reform, and fiscal 2010 - an average annual increase of only $88 million.


Full Publication (PDF)