Medical Industries DA
1NC shells
Organ Sales
1NC Obamacare Bad
Uniqueness: Perception of cost savings preserves Obamacare now
McCarter 14 Daily Kos staff reporter
Joan, Daily Kos, April 15, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/15/1292183/-Treasury-bonds-get-Obamacare-boost-as-health-care-costs-nbsp-slow#
Health care costs increased just 2 percent last year, the slowest rate of growth in 65 years, in large part because of the cost controls created with the Affordable Care Act. That means inflation is curbed, and it also means that U.S. treasury bonds are a good bet for investors.
Less inflation, which boosts the purchasing power of fixed-rate payments, may help attract buyers to Treasuries as the economy strengthens and the Federal Reserve pares its own bond buying. While yields have fallen this year, the compensation 10-year notes provide after inflation is close to the highest in five years. Excluding food and energy, health care accounted for about a third of the slowdown in consumer prices, which rose 1.1 percent in the past year from 2 percent in the prior 12 months.
“This is good news” for bonds, Kathy Jones, a New York-based fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co., which has $2.25 trillion in client assets, said in a telephone interview on April 4. By holding costs down, “it may be a benefit to inflation, longer-term.” Jones, who has been advising clients on the bond-market implications of the health-care law, is recommending that investors buy 10-year Treasuries because low inflation will keep the Fed from lifting interest rates. […] Inflation has remained below the Fed’s 2 percent target for 22 straight months and “a couple” of policy makers said at its March meeting that “unusually slow growth” in health-care prices has played a “notable role” in holding back prices, minutes of the gathering released on April 9 show. These cost controls in the law are largely through cuts in Medicare payouts to poor-performing hospitals and through the incentives it created to curb readmission rates, as well as and changed payment programs to reduce unnecessarily expensive procedures. Just think what savings could be achieved if Medicare could negotiate prescription drug prices. Or how much could be saved in a public option where the government was setting reimbursement rates for all care. The Republican mantra that the law is a total disaster that will doom the nation is sounding more and more ridiculous. This news, combined with the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office on the cost savings ($104 billion over previous projections in the next decade), is going to make a hard sell for Republicans with their traditional allies in the financial sector, not to mention the millions of people who would lose access to health care.
Threat of cost increases could kill Obamacare
Norman 14 health care reporter for POLITICO Pro. Before joining POLITICO, he worked as a science writer at The Rockefeller University. He previously covered the politics and policy of Medicare for Part B News and started out at the Pensacola News Journal.
Brett, “Obamacare: Anger over Narrow Networks,” Politico Pro, July 22, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/obamacare-health-care-networks-premiums-109195.html
Americans for Prosperity is hitting on these “narrow networks” against Democrats such as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, whose GOP opponent Scott Brown has made the health law a centerpiece of his campaign to unseat her. And Republicans have highlighted access challenges as another broken promise from a president who assured Americans they could keep their doctor. It’s not just a political problem. It’s a policy conundrum. Narrow networks help contain health care costs. If state or federal regulators — or politicians — force insurers to expand the range of providers, premiums could spike. And that could create a whole new wave of political and affordability problems that can shape perceptions of Obamacare.
Link: Plan reduces health care costs
Smith 08 online writer for Yahoo Contributor Network
John, April 11, “Legalizing the Sale of Human Organs: Necessary for Survival.” http://voices.yahoo.com/legalizing-sale-human-organs-necessary-for-1368813.html?cat=5
John has been writing online for several years. An avid hockey player and fan, he is enjoys writing sports articles, but is familiar with a wide variety of topics.
Oftentimes the cost of a transplant ends up costing less than the lifetime cost of dialysis for a patient with kidney problems, so it would be cheaper for insurance companies to purchase an organ on behalf of their clients, rather than having to pay lifetime costs. This would reduce the cost of insurance rates across the board as the companies would not need as much to cover their costs, but will continue making the same, if not a larger amount of profit (Nelson 1). Countries overseas have started to realize this fact. "In Israel, there is even tacit government acceptance of the practice [of selling human organs] -- the national health-insurance program covers part, and sometimes all, of the cost of brokered transplants" (Finkel 1).
Preserving Obamacare will kill the economy – loss of low wage jobs and marginal excess burden of taxation
Conover 12 Research Scholar in the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University, an adjunct scholar at AEI, and a Mercatus-affiliated senior scholar.
Christopher, August 10th, “Health care law will cost 1 million or more jobs” http://www.aei.org/article/health/healthcare-reform/ppaca/healthcare-law-will-cost-1-million-or-more-jobs/)
Moreover, the biggest losers under the ACA will be the least educated and least skilled workers in society. Under the law, large employers who do not provide health coverage will be fined $2,000 per full-time worker not counting the first 30. This increase is equivalent to about $1 an hour or a 14 percent increase in the minimum wage-a relative increase larger than nearly all others over the past 50 years.¶ Voluminous studies have demonstrated that minimum wage laws-however well-intentioned-actually increase unemployment among the very group they are intended to help. Even the CBO analysis acknowledges this negative impact [2]. Yes, some low-wage workers will benefit from the Medicaid expansions and exchange subsidies, but this will be little consolation to those who lose their job as a result of this mandate. How many such low wage workers will be put out of work by their employers? A reasonable estimate is more than 110,000 [3]. As AEI President Arthur Brooks has shown in his latest book The Road to Freedom, taking away someone's chances at earned success isn't good for them or for society.¶ Still, the direct job losses imposed by the ACA pale in comparison to the hidden losses that will result from its more than $500 billion in new taxes. I have elsewhere calculated that in its first ten years, the ACA would shrink the economy by a minimum of $157 billion (if its scheduled tax increases all are implemented) and perhaps by as much as $550 billion (if, as is likely, Congress elects to soften the blow of draconian cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors and hospitals by raising taxes to avoid having to impose them) [4]. Since GDP per worker is roughly $59 per hour, and the average U.S. worker works 1,787 hours, these GDP losses are roughly equivalent to the loss of 150,000 to 520,000 jobs on an annualized basis [5]. The CBO has never calculated the impact of higher taxes on lost output, so there is no special significance to its ignoring this impact in its cost estimate of ACA. The point is that when we consider both the direct and "hidden" costs of ACA, the adverse impact is 19 to 65 percent higher than the formally estimated 800,000 jobs figure.
Economic downturn risks great power nuclear war
Mead 09 Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
(Walter Russell, New Republic, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=571cbbb9-2887-4d81-8542-92e83915f5f8&p=2), Feb. 4
If current market turmoil seriously damaged the performance and prospects of India and China, the current crisis could join the Great Depression in the list of economic events that changed history, even if the recessions in the West are relatively short and mild. The United States should stand ready to assist Chinese and Indian financial authorities on an emergency basis--and work very hard to help both countries escape or at least weather any economic downturn. It may test the political will of the Obama administration, but the United States must avoid a protectionist response to the economic slowdown. U.S. moves to limit market access for Chinese and Indian producers could poison relations for years. For billions of people in nuclear-armed countries to emerge from this crisis believing either that the United States was indifferent to their well-being or that it had profited from their distress could damage U.S. foreign policy far more severely than any mistake made by George W. Bush. It's not just the great powers whose trajectories have been affected by the crash. Lesser powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran also face new constraints. The crisis has strengthened the U.S. position in the Middle East as falling oil prices reduce Iranian influence and increase the dependence of the oil sheikdoms on U.S. protection. Success in Iraq--however late, however undeserved, however limited--had already improved the Obama administration's prospects for addressing regional crises. Now, the collapse in oil prices has put the Iranian regime on the defensive. The annual inflation rate rose above 29 percent last September, up from about 17 percent in 2007, according to Iran's Bank Markazi. Economists forecast that Iran's real GDP growth will drop markedly in the coming months as stagnating oil revenues and the continued global economic downturn force the government to rein in its expansionary fiscal policy. All this has weakened Ahmadinejad at home and Iran abroad. Iranian officials must balance the relative merits of support for allies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria against domestic needs, while international sanctions and other diplomatic sticks have been made more painful and Western carrots (like trade opportunities) have become more attractive. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and other oil states have become more dependent on the United States for protection against Iran, and they have fewer resources to fund religious extremism as they use diminished oil revenues to support basic domestic spending and development goals. None of this makes the Middle East an easy target for U.S. diplomacy, but thanks in part to the economic crisis, the incoming administration has the chance to try some new ideas and to enter negotiations with Iran (and Syria) from a position of enhanced strength. Every crisis is different, but there seem to be reasons why, over time, financial crises on balance reinforce rather than undermine the world position of the leading capitalist countries. Since capitalism first emerged in early modern Europe, the ability to exploit the advantages of rapid economic development has been a key factor in international competition. Countries that can encourage--or at least allow and sustain--the change, dislocation, upheaval, and pain that capitalism often involves, while providing their tumultuous market societies with appropriate regulatory and legal frameworks, grow swiftly. They produce cutting-edge technologies that translate into military and economic power. They are able to invest in education, making their workforces ever more productive. They typically develop liberal political institutions and cultural norms that value, or at least tolerate, dissent and that allow people of different political and religious viewpoints to collaborate on a vast social project of modernization--and to maintain political stability in the face of accelerating social and economic change. The vast productive capacity of leading capitalist powers gives them the ability to project influence around the world and, to some degree, to remake the world to suit their own interests and preferences. This is what the United Kingdom and the United States have done in past centuries, and what other capitalist powers like France, Germany, and Japan have done to a lesser extent. In these countries, the social forces that support the idea of a competitive market economy within an appropriately liberal legal and political framework are relatively strong. But, in many other countries where capitalism rubs people the wrong way, this is not the case. On either side of the Atlantic, for example, the Latin world is often drawn to anti-capitalist movements and rulers on both the right and the left. Russia, too, has never really taken to capitalism and liberal society--whether during the time of the czars, the commissars, or the post-cold war leaders who so signally failed to build a stable, open system of liberal democratic capitalism even as many former Warsaw Pact nations were making rapid transitions. Partly as a result of these internal cultural pressures, and partly because, in much of the world, capitalism has appeared as an unwelcome interloper, imposed by foreign forces and shaped to fit foreign rather than domestic interests and preferences, many countries are only half-heartedly capitalist. When crisis strikes, they are quick to decide that capitalism is a failure and look for alternatives. So far, such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work; they have left the societies that have tried them in a progressively worse position, farther behind the front-runners as time goes by. Argentina has lost ground to Chile; Russian development has fallen farther behind that of the Baltic states and Central Europe. Frequently, the crisis has weakened the power of the merchants, industrialists, financiers, and professionals who want to develop a liberal capitalist society integrated into the world. Crisis can also strengthen the hand of religious extremists, populist radicals, or authoritarian traditionalists who are determined to resist liberal capitalist society for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, the companies and banks based in these societies are often less established and more vulnerable to the consequences of a financial crisis than more established firms in wealthier societies. As a result, developing countries and countries where capitalism has relatively recent and shallow roots tend to suffer greater economic and political damage when crisis strikes--as, inevitably, it does. And, consequently, financial crises often reinforce rather than challenge the global distribution of power and wealth. This may be happening yet again. None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises. Bad economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful place in 1928, but the Depression poisoned German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts might start slouching toward Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline, but, if we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.