As Ron Reagan Jr. made clear to Frank Gaffney and Pam Geller, the relatives of political icons don't always echo their views. (Gaffney went so far as tell Reagan, "Your father would be ashamed of you.") Now, as the health care debate nears it climax, the Washington Times has trotted out Dr. Milton Wolf, "Barack Obama's second cousin once removed," to maul the President's health care plan. But while Dr. Wolf's personalized version of conservative talking points is music to Republican ears, it's bad medicine for the American people.
The arch-conservative Washington Times opens by trumpeting the op-ed by the Kansas radiologist with the subhead, "A doctor savages his cousin Barack's reform plan." Only at the end of the piece do readers learned that the Obama family tree looks more like a game of six degrees of separation:

President Obama's great-great grandfather, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, is Dr. Wolf's great-grandfather. Dr. Wolf's mother, Anna Margaret McCurry, was five years older than Mr. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The two were childhood friends until the Dunhams moved from Kansas to Seattle in 1955.

But while the mystery of Wolf's distant relationship to the President isn't solved until the conclusion of his rant, his mission is clear from the beginning.
In his blistering critique of Democratic health care reform, Dr. Wolf puts his professional gloss on virtually every Republican sound bite. Sounding more like GOP strategist Frank Luntz than a physician, Wolf regurgitates word-for-word the tried and untrue Republican talking points on HCR. To list just a few of Wolf's diagnoses:

"Government takeover of health care"; "America has the finest health care delivery system in the world"; "the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits with every single decision"; "provisions that will ration care and artificially set price"; "decouple health insurance from employers and empower patients to be consumers once again"; "This free-market approach has worked for everything from high-definition TVs to breakfast cereals."

Never once mentioning the American Medical Association's endorsement of the "Obamacare" that he derides, Wolf instead offers himself as an authoritative focus group of one:

"Primum nil nocere."First, do no harm. This guiding principle is a bedrock of medical care. Sadly, those politicians who would rewrite our health care laws do not live in the same universe as do the doctors and health care professionals who must practice it.

While selectively citing a few data points on comparative cancer survivals rates, Dr. Wolf conveniently ignores the numbers that matter most about the death spiral of the American health care system. Numbers like 50 million uninsured, 25 million more uninsured, 98,000 deaths annually from medical errors, 45,000 deaths to lack of insurance, 62% of personal bankruptcies due to medical costs, 1 in 5 Americans postponing needed medical care and 94% of health insurance markets nationwide are already virtually monopolized.. Or that employer-provided insurance now covers less than 60% of Americans while the average annual cost of family health insurance premiums will rise from $13,000 now to $22,000 by 2019. Or that the total cost of the malpractice system and defensive medicine combined constitute at most 3% of national health care spending and that, if anything, there are too few and not too many malpractice lawsuits. Or that red states have the worst the health care systems and the unhealthiest residents.
(For data sources, see "The Republican 10 Point Plan for Health Care", "Republican Malpractice Myths", "Studies Confirm Americans Are Self-Rationing Health Care", "Family Health Insurance Premiums to Reach $22,000 by 2019" and "Red State Reality: Unhealthiest Residents, Worst Health Care.")
Wolf's own malpractice isn't limited to what he omits, but what he prescribes. In essence, Obama's relative suggests uninsured Americans should follow the advice of George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Tom Delay and countless other Republicans by just going to the emergency room:

Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process. But why stop there? Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day?

Interestingly, while Wolf's free market won't respond to the increased demand for medical services by producing a surge in new doctors, it will magically solve just about every other problem:

This free-market approach has worked for everything from high-definition TVs to breakfast cereals, but will it work for medicine? It already is. Take Lasik eye surgery, for example. Because patients are allowed to be informed consumers and can shop anywhere, doctors work hard for their business. Services, availability and expertise have all increased, and costs have decreased. Should consumers demand it, insurance companies - now answerable to you rather than your employer - would cover it.

Like most advocates of so-called "consumer-driven health care" (CHDC), Wolf pretends that the health care market is an ideal one where buyer and seller meet free of coercion and with perfect information. Of course, that is not the case. There is not only a staggering (and unavoidable) asymmetry of information between patient and provider; in most cases, the patient can't simply walk away. He or she isn't buying a car, TV or milk; the patient often must have care now. In the health care market, patients as consumers find not Adam Smith's invisible hand, but a middle finger.
The results of health care free market mania, as I wrote four years ago in "Unhealthy Trends," are predictable - and ominous:

Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and vice chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission concluded bluntly "this trend will shift more of the costs of health care onto the sick, especially those with chronic conditions, larger families, and older workers and reduce the burden on the young, the healthy and singles."
Which is exactly what appears to be taking place. In one the first evaluations of consumer-driven health care plans, a joint study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Commonwealth Fund found much lower satisfaction, higher costs and more missed health care with CDHC plans than traditional employer health packages. Americans utilizing new high-deductible CHDC health plans such as health savings accounts (HSAs) and health reimbursement accounts (HRAs) experienced dramatically higher out-of-pocket costs, with over a third paying more than 5% of their income towards health-related expenses, versus just 12% of those in traditional plans. Worse still, CDHC participants, especially those making under $50,000 a year, were much more likely (35% versus 17%) to skip or defer needed health care. The key to the new wave of consumer-driven plans, it would seem, is to be healthy, wealthy and lucky.

And so it goes. Dr. Milton Wolf may be vaguely related to Barack Obama, but his prescriptions more closely resemble the Republican health care playbook. It's all there, even the bit about death panels. Sounding like Sarah Palin, Dr. Wolf concludes:

The problems caused by government will not be solved by growing government. Now that this new era of big-government takeovers has spread to our health care system, it's not just our freedoms or our wallets that are at stake. It's our lives.

UPDATE: For more of Dr; Wolf's right-wing writings, visit his blog here.