Romney Outlines Health Care Plan Using the Consumer Model

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Romney is going "make" states responsible for insuring their uninsured populations "in the way they feel best"?  Okay then, I'm convinced. 

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WhyteRain,

Demand certainly has an effect on prices.  But in different health care systems, lots of other things do too.  Annual government bargaining with providers and pharma sets caps on the prices of treatments and medicines.  Companies that produce medical equipment use less expensive parts and divisions of those companies that are bigger profit-makers help support the manufacture of that equipment.  Different frameworks of non-profit insurance providers ration out certain procedures from coverage, but the systems still give people the option of purchasing supplemental coverage that will pay for additional care.  Much more stringent tort law in is place that caps lawsuit compensation, and education is heavily subsidized by the state, leading to the results that physicians don't have to spend nearly as much on malpractice insurance and leave medical school with far less debt than physicians do in our system.  In the midst of all these steps, sometimes demand for medical treatments of various kinds is more substantial than it is here, and yet costs are considerably lower than they are in the U.S.  MRIs are in constant demand by Japanese citizens, for instance, but the procedures costs 10% of what they do in the U.S.

Your response to all this will surely be that these measures result in lower quality of care.  In some cases, that's true, but hardly as much as you'd think, or even, I would argue, in the majority of cases in places I've lived.  I've actually been treated in clinics and hospitals in Germany, Japan and Taiwan, and have had American friends who have undergone surgical procedures and emergency treatment in these places too, and they had no complaints about the quality of the care they received (well, one guy hated Japanese hospital food, but I don't hear many people here raving about hospital food either).  The rap on Canada's long wait times and sometimes underperformance in quality is, as far as I've seen from having stayed there over long stretches in the past two and a half years, true enough.  But it would be far less the case if they had a Bismarck system like Germany and Japan do.

Governments, in my experience, can and do take measures to decrease costs and enhance quality for necessary treatments, all the while holding down total national healthcare expenditures below 10% of GDP.  The U.S. will never take such measures, not because its care, and certainly not its insurance coverage, is better than everyone else's, but because we have a badly fragmented system, because a lot of things the government does here with regard to the health care market is quite counterproductive, because there is lots of money in it for vested parties, and because the American people are spoiled rotten, don't take better care of themselves and are often wildly unrealistic about end-of-life issues.  We're eating a very bad bowl of health care soup in the U.S.

So far as I can tell, Romney's "plan" as stated so far won't do anything to effectively expand coverage and won't do anything about health care cost inflation.  The only thing he is promising to do is throw the current legislation in the trash bin.  For a guy who did a good job on his side of the desk in formulating the Massachusetts plan, and for a country where ever-increasing health care costs are the biggest elephant in the room, that's fairly disappointing.