John R. Graham

This is, to some degree, a distraction from the debate over health reform, because uncompensated care is not a significant driver of health spending. It may account for one percent of spending, or 3 percent if you want to take the most extreme, outlying, estimate that might be credible if ...

Not that there’s anything theoretically wrong with the co-operative in Green Bay, which required state legislation to enable the corporate structure. But why did it need a federal hand-out from day one? If group co-ops are the “natural” form of pooling risk or leveraging purchasing power, why did they not ...

Many folks are now aware that we have a civic duty to report “fishy” rumors and unfounded gossip about health reform. This is an important duty. Through the miracle of the Internet, all kinds of nonsense can get through. If you make the mistake of actually reading the text of ...

He is wrong: In Switzerland, the government does not order its residents out of private insurance once they turn 65; they can buy health insurance directly (rather than accepting what their employers choose for them); and they can control more of their health dollars directly than Americans do (rather than ...

So, I took the opportunity to inform the White House of a couple of “fishy” statements made by President Barack Obama in a speech to a New Hampshire rally, in which he claimed that the U.S. government will force health insurers to cover preventive screenings for breast and prostate cancer ...

But even if we don’t go off the deep end with the “death panel” rhetoric, there’s still a fundamental problem with this, which gets to the core of why health insurance is so expensive: There is no reason for a health insurer to pay for such counselling. It’s a service ...

The president said, “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” (Laughter.) He’s got that right. The Postal Service is going to need a taxpayer bailout of $7 billion this year. And despite the president’s claim, it doesn’t have ...

“The cost of our health care has weighed down the economy and the conscience of our nation long enough,” claims President Obama.1 This belief,unfortunately,does not jibe with the facts. In 1959,before massive government involvement in taxing,financing,and controlling Americans’access to medical services,spending on health goods and services accounted for only 6 ...

So, there’s no more “red pill versus blue pill.” Instead, there’s the promise that the U.S. government will force insurance companies to cover preventive screenings for breast and prostate cancer — which they already do. And he’s going to prevent insurers from dropping you when your sick — which has ...