"Obamacare - It is not too Late to Reverse Course"
Sydney M. Williams
“We have to pass the healthcare bill so that you can find what is in it.” No matter how long Nancy Pelosi lives, she will never say anything that so marvelously combines sanctimony, idiocy and a lie. It is sanctimonious that Ms. Pelosi thinks of us as children and government as a benign parent. The statement was idiotic, in that she was obviously planning to vote for something she did not understand, let alone the rest of us. And it was a lie, because a year and a half after its passage we still do not know all of the Bill’s features. And, of course, the full costs of the Act are not scheduled to become effective until 2013, conveniently after next year’s Presidential election.
Last week, conservative radio host Mark Levin took a call from a man who stated he was a neurosurgeon and had attended a meeting in Washington to review the new healthcare plan, as it applies for advanced neurosurgical care for patients over 70. The caller referred to a document allegedly issued by the Department for Human and Health Services. Assuming the call was true, it was chilling, especially for one of my age. According to the caller, if one arrived at an emergency room with a brain trauma and was on government supported healthcare, the individual would get “comfort care”, in accordance to the determination of an ethics panel or committee. Like something out of George Orwell, patients were referred to as “units.
End of life care consumes the bulk of spending for the typical Medicare recipients (or patients in any other plan, for that matter.) In fact, on average, about forty percent of one’s lifetime spending on healthcare is done in the last month of one’s life. While it may sound callous, most of that spending does little other than to buy a few more weeks. In the last couple of decades, hospices have been providing palliative care to an increasing number of patients. The purpose is not to cure the patient, but to make him or her comfortable. Perhaps the hardest thing about living is knowing that at some point we die. And, while no one can foretell how they might feel when the moment arrives, I certainly hope that I recognize that money spent prolonging my life by a factor of a few weeks would be better spent on my grandchildren. Nevertheless, decisions should be made on the basis of condition, not age, and are better made by the patient and his or her family rather than by some bureaucrat. And, the patient should always be considered a person, not a unit.
Whether that caller was legitimate or not, mystery continues to enshroud the 2,733 page bill. Kansas Republican Tim Huelskamp wrote two months ago in the Washington Examiner that the level of shock from each new discovery in the plan “never seems to recede.”
The Bill has important components – for example, extending healthcare coverage to millions who are denied coverage because of “pre-existing conditions” and to adult children who are unemployed and living at home – but it is based on a lie: that it would reduce overall healthcare costs. We Americans may be rubes, but we are not stupid. We recognize an entitlement when we see one. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that existing programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt, or will soon be. Obamacare simply speeds the process. We know the numbers and we know that when additional services are provided, costs go up. Also, as everyone knows, the effect of Obamacare will be to divert money from private insurers toward Medicaid. The ultimate goal, as was made clear, is a single payer – the federal government. As Mitch Daniels writes in Keeping the Republic, “Obamacare reflects in crystalline form the worldview of our Benevolent Betters. It assumes that Americans are too dim-witted and too intimated to make their own decisions, even (or, perhaps they would say, especially) in this most personal of life’s realms.”
The federal budget today comprises about 25% of GDP, about one quarter of which is Medicare and Medicaid. The healthcare industry was 17.6% of GDP in 2009 and has continued to grow at double the rate of GDP. In 2009, the year before the Affordable Health Care Bill was passed and according to the California HealthCare Foundation, overall health spending grew at 4%, the smallest annual increase on record. However, and tellingly, Medicare spending grew by 7.9% and Medicaid by 9.0%, while spending by private insurers increased by 1.3%. The numbers suggest what most of us instinctively know – government is not the most prudent steward of our money.
The future of Obamacare is inextricably tied to the 2012 election. If the Democrats retain the White House and regain the House, socialized medicine will be the result, and the costs, as P.J. O’Rourke has pointed, out will skyrocket . Nobody knows how the election will fare; hopefully cooler heads will prevail and this Bill can be extinguished. Nevertheless, people have become frighteningly immured to the concept of an all pervasive government involvement with healthcare. Last week, I e-mailed a parody entitled Americans with no Abilities Act (AWNAA.) The piece of satire, brilliantly written, was sent to me by a doctor friend. The Act, according to this parody, is designed to provide protection to the estimated 50% of the population who “do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society.” The Act would create “25 million ‘middleman’ positions with important sounding titles, but little responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.” At least a dozen people e-mailed me back, asking if this was for real!
The election of 2000 had driven a wedge between the Parties. Democrats claimed they had been robbed of the White House. The 2008 Democratic nomination was expected to go to Hillary Clinton, but then Barack Obama came out of nowhere, winning the Iowa caucus, losing New Hampshire by less than three percentage points, and smoking Ms. Clinton in South Carolina 55.4% to 26.5%. People saw an attractive, well-spoken African-American who said he would bring us together. He spoke of “change” and “hope”; each of us heard what we wanted to hear. Once nominated, the mainstream press, which historically has played the role of the skeptic, lobbied blindly on his behalf. Mentioned, but left unexplored were his relationships with extremists such as Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright whose sermons were at times filled with diatribes against the United States. People wanted Mr. Obama to be something he was not – a centrist.
In my opinion, we Americans struck a Faustian deal when we chose Barack Obama to become President. The country, in 2008, was ready for a change. People were fed up with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sick of Americans dying. The rest of the world seemed to view the U.S. with alarm, claiming we had acted unilaterally, which we had. Divisiveness rent the populace. At home, the economy was in collapse, led by the housing industry, the source of most people’s wealth; the uncontrolled use of leverage and derivatives, fueled by a desire of politicians to provide homes to those without means, had almost brought the financial industry to its knees. Wall Street was increasingly a casino, with a focus on short term profits. Anybody, in the minds of many, would be better than Bush.
But things did not improve. Mr. Obama used his honeymoon period to expand the reach of government. Soon after being sworn in, he signed an $860 billion stimulus package that was used primarily to retain unionized government employees. The American auto industry was bailed out, cavalierly (and perhaps illegally) ignoring the rights of bond holders, while saving union jobs. Banks were saved, but “too big to fail” became institutionalized. AIG was essentially nationalized. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, principal causes of the collapse, were left intact, as were the politicians who aided and abetted in their growth and reach. A Cap-and-Trade Bill proved even too much for Democrats and was fortunately defeated. Our nation’s debt grew expeditiously, with little to show for it, in terms of economic growth. Crony capitalism persisted, only in different forms; it now combined big business, big government and big unions. Left out were small businessmen and women, the engines of employment and the foundation of our democracy. Divisiveness in Washington and the country has grown worse.
Nowhere is this desire for statism better manifested than in Obamacare. The Bill passed without a single Republican vote. The Bill ignores the role of choice for consumers and excludes competition among insurance companies – a system that helps provide members of Congress with a far better plan than that which they have foisted on the public . It leaves intact the current tort system, a boon to trial lawyers and a bane to providers of health services, including doctors, labs and hospitals. It boldly assumes that government is more efficient than the market place.
There are no easy answers. The fact that Congress’ own deficit commission turned up empty-handed (and the third such commission in the last year to do so, or to be ignored) suggests that the consequences of overspending have not yet been fully felt – that more pain will have to be suffered, before answers are found. The Federal Reserve has abetted this masquerade by keeping interest rates unnaturally low. The true costs of our much larger government have not yet been felt, but that will change. Rates will rise before deficits decline. If Obamacare is not rescinded, the impact on all our lives will be less growth and a decline in our standard of living. Keep in mind, government spending is unconnected to productivity improvements. There is time to change, but the opportunity for doing so is slipping away.
Thought of the Day
“Obamacare – It is not too Late to Reverse Course”
November 29, 2011“We have to pass the healthcare bill so that you can find what is in it.” No matter how long Nancy Pelosi lives, she will never say anything that so marvelously combines sanctimony, idiocy and a lie. It is sanctimonious that Ms. Pelosi thinks of us as children and government as a benign parent. The statement was idiotic, in that she was obviously planning to vote for something she did not understand, let alone the rest of us. And it was a lie, because a year and a half after its passage we still do not know all of the Bill’s features. And, of course, the full costs of the Act are not scheduled to become effective until 2013, conveniently after next year’s Presidential election.
Last week, conservative radio host Mark Levin took a call from a man who stated he was a neurosurgeon and had attended a meeting in Washington to review the new healthcare plan, as it applies for advanced neurosurgical care for patients over 70. The caller referred to a document allegedly issued by the Department for Human and Health Services. Assuming the call was true, it was chilling, especially for one of my age. According to the caller, if one arrived at an emergency room with a brain trauma and was on government supported healthcare, the individual would get “comfort care”, in accordance to the determination of an ethics panel or committee. Like something out of George Orwell, patients were referred to as “units.
End of life care consumes the bulk of spending for the typical Medicare recipients (or patients in any other plan, for that matter.) In fact, on average, about forty percent of one’s lifetime spending on healthcare is done in the last month of one’s life. While it may sound callous, most of that spending does little other than to buy a few more weeks. In the last couple of decades, hospices have been providing palliative care to an increasing number of patients. The purpose is not to cure the patient, but to make him or her comfortable. Perhaps the hardest thing about living is knowing that at some point we die. And, while no one can foretell how they might feel when the moment arrives, I certainly hope that I recognize that money spent prolonging my life by a factor of a few weeks would be better spent on my grandchildren. Nevertheless, decisions should be made on the basis of condition, not age, and are better made by the patient and his or her family rather than by some bureaucrat. And, the patient should always be considered a person, not a unit.
Whether that caller was legitimate or not, mystery continues to enshroud the 2,733 page bill. Kansas Republican Tim Huelskamp wrote two months ago in the Washington Examiner that the level of shock from each new discovery in the plan “never seems to recede.”
The Bill has important components – for example, extending healthcare coverage to millions who are denied coverage because of “pre-existing conditions” and to adult children who are unemployed and living at home – but it is based on a lie: that it would reduce overall healthcare costs. We Americans may be rubes, but we are not stupid. We recognize an entitlement when we see one. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that existing programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupt, or will soon be. Obamacare simply speeds the process. We know the numbers and we know that when additional services are provided, costs go up. Also, as everyone knows, the effect of Obamacare will be to divert money from private insurers toward Medicaid. The ultimate goal, as was made clear, is a single payer – the federal government. As Mitch Daniels writes in Keeping the Republic, “Obamacare reflects in crystalline form the worldview of our Benevolent Betters. It assumes that Americans are too dim-witted and too intimated to make their own decisions, even (or, perhaps they would say, especially) in this most personal of life’s realms.”
The federal budget today comprises about 25% of GDP, about one quarter of which is Medicare and Medicaid. The healthcare industry was 17.6% of GDP in 2009 and has continued to grow at double the rate of GDP. In 2009, the year before the Affordable Health Care Bill was passed and according to the California HealthCare Foundation, overall health spending grew at 4%, the smallest annual increase on record. However, and tellingly, Medicare spending grew by 7.9% and Medicaid by 9.0%, while spending by private insurers increased by 1.3%. The numbers suggest what most of us instinctively know – government is not the most prudent steward of our money.
The future of Obamacare is inextricably tied to the 2012 election. If the Democrats retain the White House and regain the House, socialized medicine will be the result, and the costs, as P.J. O’Rourke has pointed, out will skyrocket . Nobody knows how the election will fare; hopefully cooler heads will prevail and this Bill can be extinguished. Nevertheless, people have become frighteningly immured to the concept of an all pervasive government involvement with healthcare. Last week, I e-mailed a parody entitled Americans with no Abilities Act (AWNAA.) The piece of satire, brilliantly written, was sent to me by a doctor friend. The Act, according to this parody, is designed to provide protection to the estimated 50% of the population who “do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society.” The Act would create “25 million ‘middleman’ positions with important sounding titles, but little responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.” At least a dozen people e-mailed me back, asking if this was for real!
The election of 2000 had driven a wedge between the Parties. Democrats claimed they had been robbed of the White House. The 2008 Democratic nomination was expected to go to Hillary Clinton, but then Barack Obama came out of nowhere, winning the Iowa caucus, losing New Hampshire by less than three percentage points, and smoking Ms. Clinton in South Carolina 55.4% to 26.5%. People saw an attractive, well-spoken African-American who said he would bring us together. He spoke of “change” and “hope”; each of us heard what we wanted to hear. Once nominated, the mainstream press, which historically has played the role of the skeptic, lobbied blindly on his behalf. Mentioned, but left unexplored were his relationships with extremists such as Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright whose sermons were at times filled with diatribes against the United States. People wanted Mr. Obama to be something he was not – a centrist.
In my opinion, we Americans struck a Faustian deal when we chose Barack Obama to become President. The country, in 2008, was ready for a change. People were fed up with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sick of Americans dying. The rest of the world seemed to view the U.S. with alarm, claiming we had acted unilaterally, which we had. Divisiveness rent the populace. At home, the economy was in collapse, led by the housing industry, the source of most people’s wealth; the uncontrolled use of leverage and derivatives, fueled by a desire of politicians to provide homes to those without means, had almost brought the financial industry to its knees. Wall Street was increasingly a casino, with a focus on short term profits. Anybody, in the minds of many, would be better than Bush.
But things did not improve. Mr. Obama used his honeymoon period to expand the reach of government. Soon after being sworn in, he signed an $860 billion stimulus package that was used primarily to retain unionized government employees. The American auto industry was bailed out, cavalierly (and perhaps illegally) ignoring the rights of bond holders, while saving union jobs. Banks were saved, but “too big to fail” became institutionalized. AIG was essentially nationalized. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, principal causes of the collapse, were left intact, as were the politicians who aided and abetted in their growth and reach. A Cap-and-Trade Bill proved even too much for Democrats and was fortunately defeated. Our nation’s debt grew expeditiously, with little to show for it, in terms of economic growth. Crony capitalism persisted, only in different forms; it now combined big business, big government and big unions. Left out were small businessmen and women, the engines of employment and the foundation of our democracy. Divisiveness in Washington and the country has grown worse.
Nowhere is this desire for statism better manifested than in Obamacare. The Bill passed without a single Republican vote. The Bill ignores the role of choice for consumers and excludes competition among insurance companies – a system that helps provide members of Congress with a far better plan than that which they have foisted on the public . It leaves intact the current tort system, a boon to trial lawyers and a bane to providers of health services, including doctors, labs and hospitals. It boldly assumes that government is more efficient than the market place.
There are no easy answers. The fact that Congress’ own deficit commission turned up empty-handed (and the third such commission in the last year to do so, or to be ignored) suggests that the consequences of overspending have not yet been fully felt – that more pain will have to be suffered, before answers are found. The Federal Reserve has abetted this masquerade by keeping interest rates unnaturally low. The true costs of our much larger government have not yet been felt, but that will change. Rates will rise before deficits decline. If Obamacare is not rescinded, the impact on all our lives will be less growth and a decline in our standard of living. Keep in mind, government spending is unconnected to productivity improvements. There is time to change, but the opportunity for doing so is slipping away.
Labels: TOTD
posted by Thought of the Day @ 4:54 AM
0 Comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home