Professors generous with their time and ideas frequently concoct policies that U.S. presidents of both parties adopt. Future chief executives then go back to the same well, although it may have different water, to derive solutions to the problems that these same programs engendered.

It bears noting, then, what thoughts academics are offering up on the myriad problems the United States is facing today, not the least of which are the crises of the cost and quality of health care. “A plan with the government acting as the sole insurer—a single-payer system—could save as much as $350 billion per year, according to the Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy group in Chicago,” Michael Anft writes in the November 2008 issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine. “But a majority of Johns Hopkins administrators and professors say the single-payer idea would never get out of the legislative box.”

“For one thing, drug and insurance industry lobbyists simply have too much clout in Washington.” Ah yes, greedy pharmaceuticals and insurance companies, the very industries that managed to restrain their avarice for about 175 years until President Lyndon B. Johnson’s federal government introduced Medicare and Medicaid.

“Were they not greedy before 1965?” veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans has asked. “What happened: did pod people invade their bodies?”

“I was around back then,” Evans, the former publisher of Consumers’ Research magazine notes wryly. “I don’t remember reading anything about that in the papers.” The one-time editor of the Indianapolis News, Evans has been writing about health care for about the length of time that Medicare and Medicaid have been in existence.

Speaking of which, it is interesting to look at the projected cornucopia of savings from proposed national health care programs in light of the actual cost overruns in existing ones. Troy University journalism professor Christopher T. Warden does just that in the textbook that Accuracy in Academia is publishing with the working title Voodoo Anyone? How to understand economics without really trying.

“In 1967, the first year Medicare was fully in effect, spending was little more than $3 billion,” Warden writes. “And policymakers predicted that costs would reach $12 billion by 1990.”

Warden covered health care extensively as, first a reporter then later when he was editorial-page editor of Investor’s Business Daily. “As it happens, the Medicare system saw double-digit increases in spending every year, but two, from 1966 to 1990,” Warden points out. “The actual cost of Medicare in 1990 was more than $98 billion.”

Moreover, the luxury car prices have not resulted in anything resembling Cadillac care. “And that’s where the Medicare program stands today—waiting lists, fewer doctors who see Medicare patients and shorter hospital stays are all evidence of a shortage in medical care for senior citizens,” Warden observes. Nevertheless, none of the above deters one of the Johns Hopkins elites who concocted a scheme so utopian that it just may come to pass, at least in Congress.

Gerard Anderson is a professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins. “One possible solution offered by Anderson, would be a health plan available to the unemployed, the currently ‘uninsurable,’ and healthier workers and their employers—a plan he calls Medicare Part E(veryone), which he and others announced in a recent paper published by the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington,” Anft reports. “The plan would be mandatory for those without public or private insurance.”

“Those who preferred to buy private insurance still could, but the federal government would guarantee at least a minimum of coverage to the U. S. population.” As you might guess, this crowd does not care much for free market approaches to health care.

“Also part of the political debate is health savings accounts or tax credits,” Anft writes. “Most researchers and health care providers at Johns Hopkins, however, show little enthusiasm for such options, skeptical whether they will go very far in helping families pay the $12,000 on average that private health insurance costs them.”

Actually, the U. S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that Health Savings Accounts (HSA) holders tend to use less health care. “Among all [tax] filers reporting HSA activity in 2005, average contributions—reflecting both individual and employer contributions—were about $2,100, compared to average withdrawals of about $1,000,” mostly for medical expenses, the GAO revealed in May this year.

The GAO is a research arm of the U. S. Congress.

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