Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s wage and price controls for health care services are no silver bullet

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has never earned an honest private sector dollar in his life, I suspect. He has been a government man since he left college, and he believes that wage and price controls are the answer to rising health care costs and expenditures.

Take it from someone who covered Nixon’s wage and price controls and lived under them in the 1970s. They don’t work. They distort markets, create shortages, promote corruption and give special interests more reasons to pay to play with members of Congress. Indeed, the good senator may just be looking for another campaign contribution.

Further, how do you measure quality and outcomes in a hands on profession like medicine? Yes, there are some processes that can be measured, but most of what goes on in the medical world involves dozens of people who inadvertently make mistakes, misdiagnose and forget things.

Nobody could create a Food and Drug Administration to control health care services quality. Heck, the FDA does a lousy job controlling the quality of drugs.

Anybody in health care who is honest will tell you that when you’re working with patients, you find they are all unique and vary in their willingness to follow doctors’ orders. Physicians, nurses and allied professionals are human. Some days they’re on their games, and others, they are as flat as an NBA team that loses a playoff game by 20 or 30 points after beating its opponent in the previous game. 

Ask Kobe Bryant, Lebron James and Dwight Howard about how hard it is to be perfect and to be up for every game. That’s what the idiots are demanding of health care providers and their patients.

Finally, evidence-based, or cook book medicine, sounds good to a McDonald’s chef. But evidence-based medicine can be applied to less than 50% of symptoms and cases. Go figure how evidence-based medicine is the silver bullet.

But I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth believes that there is a silver bullet for health care.

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