A Preview of National Healthcare, Part V

A Preview of National Healthcare, Part V
Chains You Best Believe In
By Howard Manser

First the government cripples you and then, with profound benevolence, offers a crutch.

Healthcare “reform” is but the latest crutch of a progressive agenda began, nurtured, and refined over the past 120 years since about 1890. President Obama, the ever persistent salesman, panders his opaque progressive agenda through carefully tailored language to purposely selected generally misinformed sympathetic audiences, like a pimp procuring customers for his “whores”. His vaguely worded goals are the sugar on a sweet tart. Once consumed with the bitter truth concealed, one winces and is then compelled to swallow. No one seems to be able to muster the gumption to spit!

Presently, polls indicate that the majority of the responsible Americans are satisfied with their healthcare and health insurance situation. The current crop of unabashed statists and crisis mongers fabricate fears while cloaking their intent, their real agenda, behind a truth-resistant translucent wall of ambiguity and misstated facts. The need for immediate “reform” is incomprehensible in view of the fact that the benefits of this “reform” will not take effect until 2013. While the government ignores tort reform, the misallocation of assets, burdensome unfunded mandates, fraud, and unrealistic expectations; they make their case. The new law, once finalized, will most certainly provide for immediate consolidation of the medical care community, control of 17 to 20% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), new taxes, fees, reductions in Medicare and Medicate benefits, in addition to the deliberate strangulation of private sector medical and insurance providers. These self-absorbed elitists and the laws they propose will be exposed for what they are, as they chase diminishing assets with dwindling revenues while trying to satisfy an exponentially expanding recipient base. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, “Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money”.

Ignored are those “No Cost” measures, which could be enacted before anymore self-serving government intervention further cripples and impedes our healthcare system and this nation’s economy. First and simplest might be verification of recipients. Voted down, October 2, 2009, was an amendment to the Baucus version of healthcare reform that would require proper photo identification of those applying for and receiving Medicare/Medicaid benefits. This measure alone would take a bite of crime, not a nibble, but a fifty billion dollar bite. The cost for this requirement, is the cost of showing a driver’s license or other recognized manner of identification thus preventing duplication of benefits, is negligible. Unbelievably this requires a law and is actively discouraged by both the democrats and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The simple act of requiring the same identification to cash a check has been successfully challenged in the courts and negated.

The second effort that should be addressed, Tort Reform, could immediately realize a $54 billion dividend over the next ten years according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Healthcare now pegged at 17% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) will increase according to the CBO, to 20% in 2018, 25% by 2025, and 37% by 2050. Enacting the healthcare agenda, as proposed, will accelerate, not contain the expanding costs and market share sucked from the GDP as it simultaneously evaporates. If this type of healthcare reform is not challenged, an unnecessary burden of excessive taxation encumbering generations to come and an inevitable economic death spiral will be the reward. This inappropriate power grab, with its provisions and implications, when viewed in conjunction with other pending legislation, such as “Cap and Trade” and “Card Check”, lacks true attention to the cost multipliers that will cannibalize our economy and enslave it to the government’s folly.

All of the proposals “nudge” forced participation in anticipation of unrealistic revenues in an effort to embrace noncontributing and “newly formalized” participants. For example, despite the advent of the War on Poverty in 1964 and the expenditure of billions of dollars annually through 80 or more funded and unfunded mandates and agencies, the only thing that has changed is the income level of the “poor”. The percentage of the “underprivileged” remains, plus or minus, the same. The government does not create jobs except those added to the bureaucracy or those artificially supported in perpetuity. What fuels an economic engine is employment that provides the meaningful and productive jobs for a nation’s human resources.

Framed by the American flag, Vice-President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, President Obama, in his September 9th address to a joint session of Congress, set the level of uninsured at 30 million. The Census Bureau, simultaneously set the level at 47 million. However, the best estimates of this now $1.8 trillion expenditure still leaves 25 million uncovered or uninsured ten years down the road, according to an October 8th revelation by the CBO. Not effective until 2013, new legislation will immediately enact a system of penalties, excise taxes, a naitonal value added tax –“VAT Tax” (envisioned by Nancy Pelosi), and possible IRS (Internal Revenue Service) criminal prosecutions ending with certain fines and possible jail sentences. The aforementioned immediate revenue generators are designed to mislead the general public into believing this healthcare debacle is revenue neutral. There are no free lunches, but at least one should be able to read the menu and choose a lunch that is best suited to their appetite.

Without any action the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that the expenditures for Medicare of $466 billion in 2008 will almost double by 2019 to $931 billion and by 2050 reach 6 trillion dollars. Two items not properly addressed in this projection are the increasing costs of fraud, 10 to 20% and in some areas such as New York at 40%+ annually and the synergenic effects of the hidden agenda under proposed and planned legislation. They also avoid disclosure of the “denile rate” for Medicare, 6.85%, nearly double that of private health insurance providers. With savings to come from reductions of about $500 billion in Medicare and $123 billion in Medicaid expenditures over ten years, the denile rate can only skyrocket while ineffectively addressing fraud and concessions to special interest groups.

There are also provisions in various proposals and specifically in HR 3200 (The America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, which amends title XVIII, Medicare, of the Social Security Act) for mobilization of an “army” of healthcare providers under the US Surgeon General. Also under consideration by this administration is “Card Check” AkA the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409 and S. 560) to bolster union membership. Aside from the fact that this legislation will fill union coffers emptied during the recent presidential election, it would also provide a home and “living wage” for millions of soon to be “formalized” alien workers, and it would also help one of President Obama’s key contriutors, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). The SEIU is the largest and fastest-growing union in North America with more that 1.9 million members with a stated mission that is, “… focused on uniting workers in the key service sectors”. Healthcare is one of these key service sectors. Promising a 10-30% wage incentive to non-union workers will insure an avalanch of new membership, resulting in increased healthcare costs and deminished services as dictated by union contracts which tend bloat work forces through specific task assignments.

150 AMA doctors does not a consensus make nor should emotion replace critical analysis! Attrition … while the progressives frame their utopian house of healthcare, they neglect the foundation. The better part of this foundation is a stable economy. But the current tsunami of planned legislation subverts recovery, stabilization, and contributes to an erosion of assets. Besides the fact that this whole healthcare “debate” is mis-focused, it is also ill-advised and debilitating in light of current events. Then there is the looming prospect of attrition. The “system” is now 30,000 doctors short. By 2025 this shortage will translate to 124,400 doctors according to the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges). 37% or 46,000 will be primary care doctors, the very doctors needed to address an increasing and aging patient base. Should “universal healthcare” become law, this shortage will increase by additional 4%. What is not predictable is the attrition rate reduced compensation and increased patients loads will bring. Under the increasing burden of malpractice insurance necessitated by lack of tort reform and the likelihood that an aging doctor population will not be willing to work for little or nothing, further significant shortages will come to fruition. Considering the cost of a doctor’s education and the time devoted to becoming proficient, licensed, and certified; it should be no surprise that they expect to be compensated and well compensated for long hours and exposure to every disease and malady under the sun. It should also not come as a surprise that those who can, come to America for treatment not offered or allowed in countries where socialized medicine or universal healthcare has imposed limits and urgent care needs experience delays. Unfettered by draconian and oppressive government intervention and restrictions, some of the world's best doctors have chosen to migrate to places where they can practice rather defend medicine. As a result, counties like Costa Rica, Thailand, and India are experiencing an explosive growth in the area healthcare services.

To them the law will not apply and the looters will continue to fleece the producers and propagate the moochers to maintain the status quo.

October 12, 2009