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We Surround Rochester
Aug 28, 2010, Washington DC
By Robert E. Moffit
New York Post
AT the White House’s urging, Congress is going to try to overhaul America’s health-care system — a sixth of the entire US economy — in the next three weeks. The 1,018-page House bill and the 615-page Senate bill are now available for your reading pleasure.
Plenty of juicy and unpleasant details will come dribbling out over the next few days, as analysts and reporters plow through the mind-numbing texts and parse the fine print. But the basic picture is clear — and it’s ugly.
If President Obama signs either bill into law, he’ll be breaking a host of promises. Neither the House nor Senate would guarantee that you can keep your private health plan if you like it. Or that patients will retain their relationships with their doctors.
And that bit about cutting the typical family’s health costs by $2,500 a year? A howler, if there ever was one. Deficit neutrality? Level playing field for plan competition? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Each bill would create a new government health plan to compete against private insurers. In the House version, this “competition” would take place via a “national health insurance exchange,” a new entity run by a “Health Choices Commissioner.” In the Senate, a “public plan” would compete against private health plans through federally supervised state entities called “gateways.”
Either way, taxpayers would assume the risks. The private plans would be heavily regulated by the government, but otherwise “on their own” — in a highly qualified matter of speaking.
In the House bill, the government plan would pay doctors and hospitals on the basis of Medicare rates — rates that are so low that more and more doctors have stopped taking new Medicare patients.
The bill would collect an estimated $818 billion in new taxes over 10 years.
The problem with soaking the rich, though, is that sooner or later you run out of rich people.
These impressive tax and spending schemes, combined with fines and penalties, lie deep in the bills’ complex provisions. The congressional leadership hopes that you, like the lawmakers who passed the giant stimulus bill, won’t read them. Fool them, and find out what they plan to do to you.
Robert E. Moffit is director of Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org.)
All POW-MIA
5 responses so far ↓
1 R U Serious // Jul 16, 2009 at 10:25 am
So what is the alternative?
Do nothing and continue to let insurance companies get between a Dr and patient?
Do nothing and keep letting people get dropped by their insurance companies for “pre-existing conditions”?
Do nothing and continue to let hard working Americans go bankrupt do to serious illness?
Do nothing and keep paying astronomical rates for health care because like it or not we already pay for the uninsured now?
I hear a lot of complaints about the attempts to reform opur health care system yet I hear no alternative ideas coming from the complainers.
Granted, perhaps this plan is not the best but what is the alternative idea?
2 phantomlord // Jul 17, 2009 at 7:35 pm
As opposed to letting a federal bureaucrat get between doctor and patient?
The solution is to make insurance cover catastrophic events and leave routine maintenance up to the patient like with cars.
You know why a doctor visit costs $120? Because the patient pays $5 or 15. You know why you get sent for tests you don’t need? Because you don’t have to pay for them out of your pocket. The patient is completely disconnected from the costs so they don’t care how much they waste.
Government CREATED the HMO system and mandates the coverage they have to provide. Government created Medicaid and Medicare (which is due to run out of money in 2016). Government IS the problem, not the solution.
3 phantomlord // Jul 17, 2009 at 7:37 pm
BTW – how about sticking to one nickname? Maybe even register an account for yourself…
4 R U Serious // Jul 18, 2009 at 10:30 am
Well, right now an insurance company’s profit is between a Dr and patient so I am honestly not sure which is worse.
Personally I have never been sent for a test I don’t need. In fact the only time I have ever been sent for tests they have been needed and I needed to get pre approval from some insurance company bureaucrat to get the test. I know that guy wasn’t figuring what was best for me in his calculations either.
I agree that the gov’t could mandate that insurance companies can no longer refuse to cover patients for “pre existing conditions” etc. But that leaves a couple of issues, in that that will seriously cut into an insurance companies bottom line and possibly force insurance companies out of business leaving who exactly to cover medical expenses? Not to mention, in cases of catastrophic illness, most insurance companies cover only a fraction of the astronomical costs associated with treatment anyway. Which still leaves the issue of hard working families going bankrupt due to illness. When people that actually pay for insurance still end up bankrupt you have a problem. And this is exactly the case.
And aren’t gov’t mandates to private industry still basically gov’t involvment in the system that you oppose?
Imo a single payer system would be best. We could learn from the mistakes that other countries have made in trying to implement this type of system and cover all Americans while reducing costs in the long run. If it is done right.
Now…..the question for me is, do I have faith that our elected officials could create an effective system like this? Probably not. Kinda sad really.
As for keeping the same nickname and registering? Meh. Not so much. I like changing it up. And I don’t really have any interest in registering or participating in the forums here.
5 phantomlord // Jul 18, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I oppose government mandates in the insurance industry, I don’t believe they should mandate insurers carry people that are a net loss to the system. I want government to be in a pure oversight role if it is involved at all.
Here’s how insurance works: You have 10 people. One of them is going to have a problem that costs $10,000 to fix. Each of the 10 people pays $1,000 in the system knowing that it will cost them more than if nothing is wrong with them, but won’t bankrupt them if they’re the one person with the big expense. When you factor in someone that is almost definitely going to be another $10,000 expense to the pool, you now have 11 people contributing for $20,000 in expenses. That raises the premiums of the 9 people that won’t get sick to $1818. Suddenly, they start questioning whether or not is worth it to pay into the pool. One of them drops out (that actually represents me – I dropped my insurance coverage because it got ridiculously expsnsive and I’m in the lowest risk group). Now, you have 10 people covering $20,000 in expenses. That one person guaranteed to cost the system doubled the premiums for everyone in it.
Those costs don’t go away if the government mandates private insurers cover them, or whether the government covers them with some kind of socialized plan… all that happens is the costs get hidden. Either prices go up, taxes go up or care goes down to make up the difference.
A single payer system WOULD work best, but it’s not the single payer you’re thinking of. YOU should provide the health care for you and your family, not the government. As long as someone else is paying, you are divorced from the true costs of your care. Further, you have to pay for the care of people that willfully DON’T take care of themselves because they know you’ll pick up their expenditures (smokers, alcoholics, drug abusers, daredevils, morbidly obese people, etc).
The best fix we have is Health Savings Accounts. You (or someone on your behalf) puts away tax exempt money to save for your future health care needs. Much like a ROTH IRA or other investment, you gain from the long term effects of compound interest, letting it multiply until the time when you actually need to use it.
I think we need catastrophic insurance… the type of thing that covers you if you have some major incident (heart attack, severed arm, aneurysm, organ failure, etc) to cover what the HSAs might not be able to. But again, I think that is a role for private industry, not the government.
Our current health care system is the DIRECT RESULT of government intervention. In the 30s, FDR put caps on how much employers were allowed to pay workers. In return, employers started providing health care benefits to give workers extra incentive to stay with them. In the 60s, Congress decided that it wasn’t fair that working people had health coverage, so they created Medicare and Medicaid to cover people outside the workforce. In the the early 70s, in an effort to make a name for himself, Ted Kennedy authored the legislation that created the HMO system because Medicaid/Medicare outdid the private sector’s offerings and workers were upset that while they were getting lemon coverage, they were paying for Cadillac coverage for other people. Then in 2001, you had Congress once again vastly expand Medicare by providing prescription coverage.
Truth is, much like Social Security, Medicare is running out of money really, really quickly. It’s a mere 7 years from total bankruptcy… and that’s with them already cutting doctor reimbursements, forcing private insurance to cover the losses they generate from treating Medicare/Medicaid patients (which is why many doctors won’t take Medicaid/Medicare patients in the first place).
ObamaCare will DESTROY the entire health care industry… for all the problems we have, people from all over the world come to the US for their care… especially since they can’t get the quality of care we get here in their home countries with socialized medicine. Obama himself said that if something happened to his family, he wanted the best care, not the most cost effective… So, he wants one system for me and you, and another for the political elite, wealthy and well connected. It won’t improve care for the worst off amongst us, it’ll bring the care you and I get down to the level the worst off people currently get.
Why? Well, it all comes down to this progressive ideal of population control. They believe that life is unsustainable at current population levels… and through things like eugenics, forced abortions and forced sterilization, they can help reduce population numbers all while not taking blame for it themselves. Obama’s “Science Csar” wrote a book in 1977 declaring that he wanted exactly that. It’s one of the underlying motivations of the green movement, of which Obama and most of his cronies are devout followers. They have already proposed legislation that would provide publicly funded abortions (which I know you said you disagree with), they want to control who gets health care (controlling who lives and who dies), they want to control who can get loans so they can decide which sectors of the economy are allowed to grow (see the entire banking takeover), etc.
It’s all about control… they want control over you, me and everyone else. The government was supposed to be subservient to the people, but we’ve been on the road to returning to a people slaved to an aristocracy for a while, and Obama is accelerating it. Any time we give government more power, government takes away some of our freedom. We’d be idiots to give them the power to control who lives and who dies. We might as well put the shackles back on ourselves.
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