Shooting magic blanks

Our favorite St. Petersburg Times commie columnist*, Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner is at it again, celebrating anniversary after anniversary of the perfect marriage between economic cluelessness and leftist ideology.

Perhaps that's redundant.

Anyhow, Blumñata's latest column blasts Republicans for supposedly presenting tort reform as a magic bullet for controlling the increase in health care costs before offering her own solution based on little more than a rhetorical "Abracadabra!"

On Republican magic bullets:

While everyone agrees that spiraling Medicaid costs are a problem that need addressing, Republican politicians would have you believe that tort reform is the magic bullet to cost containment, winning them plaudits and contributions from the medical community.

According to my recollection, Republicans advanced tort reform as a conspicuously missing piece of Democratic Party health care reform proposals.  Blumner apparently thought it unnecessary to provide any example of the type of advocacy with which she charges Republicans.

But at least she comes through with a stellar example when it comes to her own magical thinking:

While defensive medicine — where doctors order tests and procedures as a hedge against malpractice suits — undoubtedly adds unnecessary costs, it is not the main driver. That dishonor goes to one overarching factor: bad jobs — something Republicans don't want to talk about.

Blumner's claim is sheer lunacy, unless by "bad jobs" she literally means jobs that result in making it more likely that workers will require expensive medical care.  The only thing a bad job does is make health care, at whatever price it carries, less affordable.

This is an important distinction progressives like Blumner seem to handle with difficulty.  Suppose we had available a spinal replacement surgery, but it came a cost of $2 trillion per procedure.  In Blumner's world, spinal replacement surgery represents a terrible thing because it's just one more way that health care is unaffordable.  And such prices help necessitate universal coverage where "the rich" share the costs of expensive procedures.  That way, rich folks like Bill Gates can be forced to help underwrite spinal replacement surgery for dozens of people who can't even afford basic health insurance.

Of course, we don't have spinal replacement surgery at any cost--yet.  But the hypothetical procedure illustrates the primary driver of increased medical costs:  medical innovation.

If the only medical care we had was plaster casts, pain killers and 19th century surgical procedures then medical costs would be very low today.  It's not that hard to saw off a leg.  Medical costs increase rapidly because the technology to accomplish more medical treatment is increasing rapidly.  And even when a new advance is relatively inexpensive, such as treatment for erectile dysfunction, overall medical costs increase because people expect such treatments to make up part of their medical care.  That's why even Viagra was covered for a time under Medicare.

The cost (price) of treating erectile dysfunction went down.  The amount of money spent (cost) of treating erectile dysfunction went up.  It's a classic supply-and-demand curve.

And then there's the cost of health insurance as contrasted to the price of health care.  As above, if health insurance covered plaster casts, pain killers and 19th century surgical procedures then health insurance would be extremely affordable--no doubt a small fraction of what it costs today given coverage of everything from cancer treatment to substance abuse treatment.  But government regulators tell insurance companies what they have to cover.  And because so many expensive health procedures exist, the cost of covering the risk of providing those procedures grows right along with it.  The consumer foots the bill where the state mandates increases in the cost of shared risk.

If Blumner has any clue about any of this then her expertise in hiding it for the purpose of her columns cannot be questioned.


* I don't know that Blumner's a communist.  People in the comments section at the Times like to call her that, and I like alliteration ("commie columnist").  She likes organized labor and big government.  She calls herself an atheist.  So if she's not a communist then at least she has a thing or two in common. The description is not intended to identify her as a communist, however.  It is intended as alliterative hyperbole.



Hat tip to JD for pointing out the mess I had made of the third paragraph.  A redundancy has been removed and the phrasing changed slightly to meet my exceedingly high standards of something-or-other.