78-07-B8

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Health Care

Transcript By saying it over and over and over again, proponents of government medicine have tried to make us believe that health care costs are spiraling out of sight. And, I'm afraid they have been fairly successful. If a pollster asked about medical costs the average citizen would probably respond that "yes they were rising faster than prices of other commodities." But the average citizen would be wrong because like all the rest of us he's been subjected to a snow job put together by the busy planners in the Department of H.E.W. It is true that a dollar's worth of medical care ten years ago costs $1.85 today. But a dollar's worth of plumbing repairs ten years ago costs $2.10 today. I'm not picking on plumbers; for auto repairs it's $1.90 and the same figure for blue jeans. A dollar's worth of postage stamps ten years ago costs $2.22 today, shingling your roof $2.33 and, to top it off, social security costs have gone up twice as much as the increase in health care costs. Now how does H.E.W. justify its contrary opinion about medical care? Well, it does it by proving that Disraeli was right when he said, "these are lies, blankety-blank lies and statistics." H.E.W. doesn't take ten-year figures. H.E.W. just tells us how much medical costs jumped in 1975 and '76--and forgets to tell us that the recession inspired price controls weren't lifted on medicine until 1975--a year after they were lifted on everything else. When price controls are removed there is a thing called a "bulge". The consumer price index jumped as much for other commodities in 1974 as it did for medical care a year later. It continued to rise for two more years and in the third year leveled off. The bulge in the consumer price index for health care leveled off in the second year. If we wanted to play H.E.W. 's game we could take just the period between 1965 and 1973 and find that, yes medicine costs rose faster than other prices--and government was to blame. That was the period when government went into medicine by way of Medicaid and added tremendously to the total expenditures for health care. Secretary of H.E.W. Califano has said Britain's national health care program should be our model. He should take another look. Over an eight year period hospital staffs in Britain increased by 28 percent while the number of hospital beds occupied dropped by 11 percent. Typical of any government program is this next figure--the number of administrative and clerical staff jumped 51 percent. There was talk of a shortage of nurses but the ratio of beds per nurse fell from two to one-and-a-half. Amazingly in view of all this the greatest growth was in the lineup of patients waiting to be admitted to the hospitals. The input of resources went up and the output of services went down. The Secretary should find a better model--perhaps the system we already have.		Details Batch Number 78-07-B8 Production Date 05/15/1978 Book/Page RPtV-302 Audio Youtube? No
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