The Obama administration has taken to the precept of government by crisis. Nearly every issue he has placed before the American people has been in the context of a crisis of one sort or another. The most current push is for a healthcare reform plan to save the nation from ruin. Mr. Obama has gone as far as saying that if this plan does not pass, thousands of Americans will die in the streets, which is just plain nonsense. At the same time he is threatening legal action against healthcare insurers for airing advertisements opposing the plan saying their ads are only meant to scare seniors. I guess its ok for the Federal government to frighten people into supporting the bill but it is not ok that the opposition is sharing frightening facts to oppose it.
First, let’s debunk another myth. The President says we have a healthcare crisis that threatens the economic security of the nation. To be fair I will admit it is partially true. Medicare and Medicaid represent half of all medical expenditures in the country. These programs are bloated with administrative waste and are cursed with fraud and corruption. They are the crisis and this is what is threatening the economic security of the nation. The reason private health insurance keeps going up or becomes exclusionary is because the Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates keep going down to contain costs to the programs. What the hospitals and doctors cannot charge the government, they charge you, or rather your insurance, in what amounts to another hidden tax courtesy of your Federal government.
Whether we are addressing the healthcare legislation or the Climate Bill the issue is a matter of trust. We no longer trust the government and with good reason. When they aren’t lying they are exaggerating. Let’s go back sixteen years and look at what President Bill Clinton said in a 1993 speech when he tried to pass healthcare reform.
“Despite the dedication of literally millions of talented health care professionals, our health care is too uncertain and too expensive, too bureaucratic and too wasteful. It has too much fraud and too much greed. At long last, after decades of false starts, we must make this our most urgent priority, giving every American health security — health care that can never be taken away, health care that is always there. That is what we must do tonight.”
In the same speech he added, “…But we also know that we can no longer afford to continue to ignore what is wrong. Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called a pre-existing condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans, most of them working people and their little children, have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on earth, and the gap is growing, causing many of our companies in global competition severe disadvantage.”
That sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it? The only real difference is that Bill Clinton didn’t recklessly accuse doctors of performing unneeded surgeries on our children out of greed as Barack Obama did. Fraud, waste and greed were identified in 1993 as the major reasons why our healthcare costs were out of control just as they are today. Ok, so why hasn’t the Federal government moved one finger to address that in all these years? After all, according to Mr. Clinton, healthcare was in crisis then too. How did he put it? Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health coverage? They certainly fixed that by passing NAFTA. That allowed companies to relocate from our country to a place where labor costs were only a percentage of what they are here and still have free access to the American marketplace. They must have thought it was more humane to eliminate those worrisome jobs and allow people the excitement and challenge of seeking work instead of living with the stress and fear that they might lose their current jobs.
The sirens that Bill Clinton had been sounding back then possessed all the distress and urgency that Barack Obama is using today. Both Presidents’ pleas point out the same threat of jobs loss, the same thirty plus million Americans without healthcare, the same out of control costs and the same comparisons to “other industrialized nations.” England just reported that there were over 40,000 preventable deaths in their system last year alone but since their plan is so "civilized" their people die in the hospital waiting for rationed services instead of in the proverbial street.
Instead of NAFTA, Barack Obama has endorsed the Climate Bill which promises to eliminate more jobs than NAFTA did as prohibitive taxes for carbon emissions drive businesses to relocate to countries with a less restrictive approach to business. They can still sell their goods in America thanks to NAFTA and GATT but it is doubtful anyone will actually purchase them. Not because of any sense of patriotism or support of American made goods. They will simply be no market for them since by then, the loss of U.S. jobs and the increases in home energy costs as a consequence of the Climate bill will seriously affect the purchasing power of the Average American family; families that are barely getting by now. Only the poorest families will be offered grants to offset the increase in energy costs in yet another hidden program to redistribute even more wealth.
The other issue in the deficit of trust is that the American people are smart enough now to see the lies. The President says this is not a Trojan horse to get to a single payer, national healthcare system while many of his colleagues openly say they will not vote for a plan that does not have that as its ultimate goal. The President says his plan will not cover illegal immigrants even though the house Democrats voted down every attempt to put language into the bill that would exclude them. Now that Senator Baucus actually added the exclusionary language into his version of the plan, Barack Obama is talking about reforming immigration too. So I guess the new thought process is that they won’t be illegal anymore if the President grants them amnesty. The President promised no cuts to Medicaid but there are clearly identified cuts of over $156 billion dollars in black and white. When Representative Joe Wilson was chastised for yelling out “You Lie!” during the President’s speech that was apparently because of where and when he said it and not because it wasn’t true.
The Democrat’s favorite response to criticism of the bill is the lack of substantive alternatives. There have been many great ideas offered during the course of the healthcare debates that were unfortunately killed by The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They were never acknowledged because the suggestions and ideas, if implemented, would not have resulted in the massive new government program the President and progressive Democrats so desperately want. So what were those ideas?
1- Increase the enforcement in Medicare and Medicaid to root out fraud and waste. To sell the Healthcare Bill, the President claims it can be paid for in full by better management of waste and the prosecution of fraud. First I would have to say that if there is that much fraud and waste then the administrators of those plans should face criminal charges for allowing this to continue for as long as it has. After all, didn’t Bill Clinton point this out and sixteen years later, we are still throwing away that much taxpayer money?
2- Eliminate the Federal prohibitions that prevent healthcare insurers from competing across state lines. That’s right, I said government prohibitions. The Federal government has had those restrictions in place for decades. That is why people in most states can only choose between five or six plans. Competition makes companies better and limits how much they feel they can charge you for their services and products. Federal regulations currently prohibit that.
3- Eliminate the Federal prohibitions that prevent individuals from forming their health insurance groups and offer the same tax incentives to individuals that are offered to employers that provide employee healthcare coverage. I’m sure the insurance companies would love to have the ability to form their own insurance cooperatives that would allow individuals the option to join a particular group with a plan that fit’s their needs but right now, more government restriction prevent that.
4- Tort reform. Doctors pay exorbitant premiums for malpractice insurance because there is no sanity and sense to the legal system when it comes to law suits for damages. General practice doctors pay roughly $80,000 per year for malpractice insurance and OB/GYN can be as high as $200,000 per year. Of course if they actually are involved in a malpractice suit, those insurance costs can easily double. Doctors routinely order entire batteries of unnecessary tests just to make sure they can prevent malpractice claims if they are accused of wrongdoing. Those costs reflect an enormous amount of additional and unjustified expense added to medical
Case in point was Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants (1994). Ms Liebeck ordered hot coffee from a McDonalds drive through and placed the cup between her legs to add cream and sugar. As she opened the cup, it spilled, severely burning her. The lawyers eventually got hold of this. She sued McDonalds and was awarded $2.86 million dollars which was reduced by the trial judge to $640,000. McDonald’s threatened to appeal the judgment and both parties agreed to an undisclosed settlement. Truthfully, if I were deciding that case I probably would have awarded her an ice pack and a dunce cap. Coffee is hot and if you place a paper cup full of it between your legs, what can I say. Dumb.
We don’t need to eliminate the ability for people to sue if there is legitimate cause to suspect that the doctor had not properly treated his patient but perhaps the first stop should be a medical review board to determine if the accusation is warranted and should actually be referred to the courts. If we leave it to the lawyers, we will be passing out an awful lot of dunce caps to go with Ms. Liebeck’s.
It is clear that the Federal government has been grossly inept at handling even the small portion of the healthcare system they already control and has prevented much wanted competition and progress in that part that they want to get their hands on now. It would be ridiculous to think they can do any better with all of it under their thumb. If you go back to my August posts, I had written a series of articles on the healthcare plan that addresses the accusation of “death panels”, the Trojan horse theory, privacy issues, the actual crisis of costs and several other issues surrounding this bill. I urge you to go back to those earlier posts for a more in depth analysis of those issues.
Paul
First, let’s debunk another myth. The President says we have a healthcare crisis that threatens the economic security of the nation. To be fair I will admit it is partially true. Medicare and Medicaid represent half of all medical expenditures in the country. These programs are bloated with administrative waste and are cursed with fraud and corruption. They are the crisis and this is what is threatening the economic security of the nation. The reason private health insurance keeps going up or becomes exclusionary is because the Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates keep going down to contain costs to the programs. What the hospitals and doctors cannot charge the government, they charge you, or rather your insurance, in what amounts to another hidden tax courtesy of your Federal government.
Whether we are addressing the healthcare legislation or the Climate Bill the issue is a matter of trust. We no longer trust the government and with good reason. When they aren’t lying they are exaggerating. Let’s go back sixteen years and look at what President Bill Clinton said in a 1993 speech when he tried to pass healthcare reform.
“Despite the dedication of literally millions of talented health care professionals, our health care is too uncertain and too expensive, too bureaucratic and too wasteful. It has too much fraud and too much greed. At long last, after decades of false starts, we must make this our most urgent priority, giving every American health security — health care that can never be taken away, health care that is always there. That is what we must do tonight.”
In the same speech he added, “…But we also know that we can no longer afford to continue to ignore what is wrong. Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called a pre-existing condition. And on any given day, over 37 million Americans, most of them working people and their little children, have no health insurance at all. And in spite of all this, our medical bills are growing at over twice the rate of inflation, and the United States spends over a third more of its income on health care than any other nation on earth, and the gap is growing, causing many of our companies in global competition severe disadvantage.”
That sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it? The only real difference is that Bill Clinton didn’t recklessly accuse doctors of performing unneeded surgeries on our children out of greed as Barack Obama did. Fraud, waste and greed were identified in 1993 as the major reasons why our healthcare costs were out of control just as they are today. Ok, so why hasn’t the Federal government moved one finger to address that in all these years? After all, according to Mr. Clinton, healthcare was in crisis then too. How did he put it? Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health coverage? They certainly fixed that by passing NAFTA. That allowed companies to relocate from our country to a place where labor costs were only a percentage of what they are here and still have free access to the American marketplace. They must have thought it was more humane to eliminate those worrisome jobs and allow people the excitement and challenge of seeking work instead of living with the stress and fear that they might lose their current jobs.
The sirens that Bill Clinton had been sounding back then possessed all the distress and urgency that Barack Obama is using today. Both Presidents’ pleas point out the same threat of jobs loss, the same thirty plus million Americans without healthcare, the same out of control costs and the same comparisons to “other industrialized nations.” England just reported that there were over 40,000 preventable deaths in their system last year alone but since their plan is so "civilized" their people die in the hospital waiting for rationed services instead of in the proverbial street.
Instead of NAFTA, Barack Obama has endorsed the Climate Bill which promises to eliminate more jobs than NAFTA did as prohibitive taxes for carbon emissions drive businesses to relocate to countries with a less restrictive approach to business. They can still sell their goods in America thanks to NAFTA and GATT but it is doubtful anyone will actually purchase them. Not because of any sense of patriotism or support of American made goods. They will simply be no market for them since by then, the loss of U.S. jobs and the increases in home energy costs as a consequence of the Climate bill will seriously affect the purchasing power of the Average American family; families that are barely getting by now. Only the poorest families will be offered grants to offset the increase in energy costs in yet another hidden program to redistribute even more wealth.
The other issue in the deficit of trust is that the American people are smart enough now to see the lies. The President says this is not a Trojan horse to get to a single payer, national healthcare system while many of his colleagues openly say they will not vote for a plan that does not have that as its ultimate goal. The President says his plan will not cover illegal immigrants even though the house Democrats voted down every attempt to put language into the bill that would exclude them. Now that Senator Baucus actually added the exclusionary language into his version of the plan, Barack Obama is talking about reforming immigration too. So I guess the new thought process is that they won’t be illegal anymore if the President grants them amnesty. The President promised no cuts to Medicaid but there are clearly identified cuts of over $156 billion dollars in black and white. When Representative Joe Wilson was chastised for yelling out “You Lie!” during the President’s speech that was apparently because of where and when he said it and not because it wasn’t true.
The Democrat’s favorite response to criticism of the bill is the lack of substantive alternatives. There have been many great ideas offered during the course of the healthcare debates that were unfortunately killed by The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They were never acknowledged because the suggestions and ideas, if implemented, would not have resulted in the massive new government program the President and progressive Democrats so desperately want. So what were those ideas?
1- Increase the enforcement in Medicare and Medicaid to root out fraud and waste. To sell the Healthcare Bill, the President claims it can be paid for in full by better management of waste and the prosecution of fraud. First I would have to say that if there is that much fraud and waste then the administrators of those plans should face criminal charges for allowing this to continue for as long as it has. After all, didn’t Bill Clinton point this out and sixteen years later, we are still throwing away that much taxpayer money?
2- Eliminate the Federal prohibitions that prevent healthcare insurers from competing across state lines. That’s right, I said government prohibitions. The Federal government has had those restrictions in place for decades. That is why people in most states can only choose between five or six plans. Competition makes companies better and limits how much they feel they can charge you for their services and products. Federal regulations currently prohibit that.
3- Eliminate the Federal prohibitions that prevent individuals from forming their health insurance groups and offer the same tax incentives to individuals that are offered to employers that provide employee healthcare coverage. I’m sure the insurance companies would love to have the ability to form their own insurance cooperatives that would allow individuals the option to join a particular group with a plan that fit’s their needs but right now, more government restriction prevent that.
4- Tort reform. Doctors pay exorbitant premiums for malpractice insurance because there is no sanity and sense to the legal system when it comes to law suits for damages. General practice doctors pay roughly $80,000 per year for malpractice insurance and OB/GYN can be as high as $200,000 per year. Of course if they actually are involved in a malpractice suit, those insurance costs can easily double. Doctors routinely order entire batteries of unnecessary tests just to make sure they can prevent malpractice claims if they are accused of wrongdoing. Those costs reflect an enormous amount of additional and unjustified expense added to medical
Case in point was Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants (1994). Ms Liebeck ordered hot coffee from a McDonalds drive through and placed the cup between her legs to add cream and sugar. As she opened the cup, it spilled, severely burning her. The lawyers eventually got hold of this. She sued McDonalds and was awarded $2.86 million dollars which was reduced by the trial judge to $640,000. McDonald’s threatened to appeal the judgment and both parties agreed to an undisclosed settlement. Truthfully, if I were deciding that case I probably would have awarded her an ice pack and a dunce cap. Coffee is hot and if you place a paper cup full of it between your legs, what can I say. Dumb.
We don’t need to eliminate the ability for people to sue if there is legitimate cause to suspect that the doctor had not properly treated his patient but perhaps the first stop should be a medical review board to determine if the accusation is warranted and should actually be referred to the courts. If we leave it to the lawyers, we will be passing out an awful lot of dunce caps to go with Ms. Liebeck’s.
It is clear that the Federal government has been grossly inept at handling even the small portion of the healthcare system they already control and has prevented much wanted competition and progress in that part that they want to get their hands on now. It would be ridiculous to think they can do any better with all of it under their thumb. If you go back to my August posts, I had written a series of articles on the healthcare plan that addresses the accusation of “death panels”, the Trojan horse theory, privacy issues, the actual crisis of costs and several other issues surrounding this bill. I urge you to go back to those earlier posts for a more in depth analysis of those issues.
Paul
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