Death By Private-Public Partnership
Yesterday, the country's major health care producers, including insurance companies, hospital and physician organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and health care labor unions, promised President Barack Obama they would reduce the growth rate of their future incomes by 1.5 percent over the next ten years. If those cuts actually happened, it would mean that in 2019 health care costs (both government and patient) would be $700 billion lower than current projections, reducing health care spending by $2 trillion over the next ten years.
Why would the industry agree to this preemptive surrender? Because it means the end of competition. Under the proposed agreement, the government would guarantee a certain level of profit for each health care producer. From the industry's point of view, the goal is to get a seat at the table as politicians and government technocrats "reform" health care—which means it will decide who the winners and losers will be.
There's a word for when the government directs the production of goods and services and divides the economic pie: corporatism. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics succinctly defines coporatism as "a system of interest intermediation linking producer interests and the state, in which explicitly recognized interest organizations are incorporated into the policy-making process, both in terms of the negotiation of policy and of securing compliance from their members with the agreed policy."
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