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Follow on Google News | High Court's Obamacare Ruling Will Not Touch Crucial IssueThe Supreme Court's Obamacare decision will do little to hold down the overall costs of medical care, and will do virtually nothing about a factor which, all by itself, could have funded health care reform without any individual mandate or new taxes.
"The ruling may help determine how the costs of medical care will be allocated or shifted, but it do little about actually reducing those costs," says "The Man Big Tobacco and Now Fast Food Love the Hate" because of the leading role he played in using legal action against these two major health problems. "Preventing diseases in the first place is obviously far more efficient than marginally reducing the costs of treating them once they've developed, and much better than simply trying to shift the costs to those in no position to reduce them, rationing health care, or stifling economic growth with taxes and regulations," Smoking costs the American economy about $200 billion a year in totally unnecessary costs, most of which are paid by nonsmokers in the form of much higher taxes (for expenses under Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) and grossly inflated premiums for health insurance paid both by individual workers and their employers. http://www.lung.org/ In other words, simply cutting smoking and its related expenses by 50% would have covered all of the estimated health care costs - "around $900 billion over 10 years for the first ten years," according to President Barack Obama - with no need for additional taxes, cost savings, or cost shifting, says Banzhaf. http://www.whitehouse.gov/ Similarly, the other major preventable cause of unnecessary health care expenses - obesity - also costs the American economy about $200 billion annually. So, slashing obesity by 50% - or, more realistically, cutting both smoking and obesity by only 25% - would have more than paid for health care reform. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ "In other words, if we could have used well-known techniques which have been proven - at no cost to taxpayers - to cut the incidents of these two hugely costly behaviors by only about 25%, there would have been no need for the constitutional problems posed by an individual mandate, or for penalties, increased taxes, direct or indirect rationing of health care, and the other controversial and arguably harmful aspects of the current law," suggests Banzhaf. If the Supreme Court leaves the new health care legislation largely intact and it goes into effect as intended, it will do little if anything to cut back on these two major drivers of health care expenses, since the legislation does not include any measures which have been shown to be effective. Indeed, notes Banzhaf, the law actually cuts back on what could one of the most effective measures. On the other hand, if Supreme Court's action and/or actions by a new Republican president prevent the legislation from becoming effective, there is still no guarantee that Congress will seriously address either or both of these two major drivers of out-of-control health care costs. In its place is likely to be some other jury-rigged system of simply spreading the ever-growing costs, rather than serious attempts to begin reining them in by using well-established zero-cost techniques, suggests Prof. Banzhaf, who played a role in the smoking-related provisions of the legislation being challenged. JOHN F. BANZHAF III, B.S.E.E., J.D., Sc.D. Professor of Public Interest Law George Washington University Law School, FAMRI Dr. William Cahan Distinguished Professor, Fellow, World Technology Network, Founder, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) 2000 H Street, NW, Suite S402 Washington, DC 20052, USA (202) 994-7229 // (703) 527-8418 http://banzhaf.net/ End
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