Advanced Mediterranean Diet

Karl Denninger has a plan that he thinks would reduce the cost of healthcare in the U.S. by up to 85%!

Almost one in every five dollars spent in the U.S. is for “healthcare.” That’s probably the highest percentage of any country, and I don’t think we’re getting our money’s worth.

Karl’s plan hinges on the reality that the healthcare system here is not operating as a free market. There’s too much price-fixing, lack of price transparency, lack of competition, and consumer fraud done by collusion among the big players, such as health insurers, hospitals, physicians, and politicians. Karl says such practices have been illegal for decades, but applicable laws simply have not been enforced by the powers that be.

I’ve always had the impression that health insurers were exempt from anti-trust laws. Karl says that ain’t so.

Read the whole thang if you’re interested in U.S. healthcare reform. For example:

I’ve repeatedly, over some 30 years time, heard that there’s “some law” that exempts health care from anti-trust [laws] when the discussion turns to the topic of price-fixing, collusion, differential billing for commodities of like kind and quantity and similar. Every time I hear this claim I respond the same way: “Show me the law.”

Nobody ever has.

And I haven’t asked just once or twice. I’ve asked dozens of times since the 1990s. I’ve asked politicians. I’ve asked lawyers. I’ve asked political candidates. I’ve asked policy “wonks” of various flavors. Gary Johnson got asked (Lib candidate for President) in person a number of years back in his suite during the Libertarian convention in Orlando. Yet not one of the people I’ve asked has ever replied with a title, chapter and section of US code that provides such an exemption.

As just one of many examples I heard this claim during the campaign from a (Democrat) candidate for the US House when I asked him whether he would demand that the executive enforce anti-trust law against all medical providers and suppliers. He said he’d call me with a cite to the law when I responded that with all due respect the exemption he claimed did not exist at a meet-and-greet in a room full of Libertarians. He never did call me. (He lost the election, incidentally.)

I’m utterly convinced that’s because the oft-claimed exemption doesn’t exist. I’m in fact quite sure of it, because I can actually read the US Code — it’s public, of course, and the sections that could bear on this matter are reasonable in size (that is, I can and have read through them in a day or two.)

Never mind the contravening evidence too – like this case from 1979 that went to the Supreme Court which ruled that Mccarran-Ferguson does not protect insurance companies against anti-trust claims related to drug “discounts” on collusive actions. In other words the insurance company took the case to the Supreme Court and lost, which is damn good evidence that (1) anti-trust does apply to health care broadly including the criminal provisions in the Sherman and Clayton Acts and (2) health insurance firms and providers are not exempt to the extent they collude to restrain trade or fix prices.

It is thus my considered position that the reason the law isn’t enforced isn’t because it doesn’t apply — it isn’t enforced because the Executive voluntarily chooses to refuse to enforce it in collusion with Congress and the States and has done so for 30+ years despite the evidence being clear that the law — a law that carries both ruinous civil and felony criminal penalties — is being violated on a daily, continuing basis by the entirety of the so-called “health system.”