-By Dan Scott
President Barack Obama is seeking to help pay for his healthcare plan by sharply reducing the government’s medical spending, mainly by trimming payments to prescription drug makers, hospitals and other care providers and then hiking taxes.
…In his weekly Internet and radio address Saturday, Obama proposed cutting $313 billion from the programs over 10 years. That’s in addition to the $635 billion “down payment” in tax increases and spending cuts in the health care system that he announced earlier…
…He would cut $106 billion from payments that help hospitals treat uninsured people because his plan would cover nearly every American.
Source
Of course we could suspend our disbelief of Obama’s claim that he can insure 47 million people by cutting Medicare and raising taxes. Now I want someone to explain to me how you can cut Medicare reimbursements to doctors and hospitals and keep the same level of service when in fact the reimbursements are at or below cost to the medical providers? This is outright flim-flam to make such claims.
Now if Barack Obama were interested in saving Medicare, which is in dire need in eight years, then he should focus on some basic reforms there instead of taking over the entire healthcare industry. The reason why a majority of medical expenses occur in the last years of life is due to nursing home costs. Medicare foots the bill in a nursing home when a person exhausts their financial resources and essentially become indigent. It’s not surprising that a senior goes bankrupt in a nursing home paying in excess of $6000 a month, plus meds and special procedures. That’s where the bulk of costs are located. The only way to cut costs in Medicare is to change the nursing home and ALF (Assisted Living Facility) admissions policy. It is far less expensive to care for a person with end of life or long-term care issues via home healthcare in an ALF than in a nursing home.
The idea that senior citizens will overcome the effects of a lifetime of habits via prevention in their late stages of life is nonsensical. In terms of longevity, prevention in senior citizens essentially consists of keeping active through walking and not smoking. The hard truth of becoming a senior is things take much longer to heal due to age and the difficult heart wrenching realization that any disease condition is merely a hastening of the inevitable end. No matter how long you live, eventually you must die and therefore in the meantime any medical condition if untreated will likely hasten that end. Unless there is a technological breakthrough on causing the body to accelerate healing in older people, significant cost savings through prevention are a farce.
…The problem for liberal Democrats is ideology. The Medicare Part D program is based on competition among private insurance plans, whereas they are determined to model health reform on government-run, price-controlled Medicare Parts A and B or on Massachusetts’ individual-mandate plan.
But, as the latest Medicare trustees report warned, Medicare’s hospital insurance plan (Part A) is scheduled to go bankrupt in 2017. And Part B, which pays doctor bills, is experiencing “steep cost increases” for taxpayers and will demand “unusually large premium increases” for seniors who can afford to pay.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts’ heavily regulated plan, while covering 355,000 previously uninsured residents, is costing much more than expected – 32 percent more in its first year and an anticipated 20 percent more this year…
…Obama wrote Congress that “health reform must not add to our deficits over the next 10 years,” though most estimates for covering the nation’s 47 million uninsured come in at $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Eventually, making the health system more efficient – with digital medical records and chronic disease management – may cut the costs. But in the meantime, Democrats are looking to Medicare provider cuts and taxing employer-provided benefits as answers…
Notice also the proposed cut in Medicare prescription drugs are completely paid for under Part D by premiums paid by seniors themselves!
House Health-Care Proposal Adds $600 Billion in Taxes (Update2)
Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid,…
…Obama has pledged that health-care changes won’t add to the deficit. To accomplish that, he’s proposed getting about $600 billion by reducing tax deductions available to the wealthy, and by trimming Medicare payments to insurance companies…
Setting aside the propriety of the figure 47 million uninsured, let’s look at the numbers tossed around:
$2,400,000,000,000 National spending on Healthcare (2007)
303,000,000 Population of US (2007)
$7,921 per year per person
Source
$1,000,000,000,000 raising taxes and cutting Medicare
47,000,000 Number of so called uninsured
$21,277 over 10 years
$2,128 per year per person
A typical modest insurance coverage costs per person around $450 a month or $5,400 a year not including co-pays and the deductible. So are we to believe that the so-called uninsured can receive quality medical coverage at a 1/3rd the current average? Clearly not going to happen. Furthermore, taking Obama at his liberal demagogue word we are lead to believe it is the fault of the rich that healthcare isn’t available for everyone and therefore 5% of country, namely 15 million Americans aren’t paying enough taxes (an extra $600,000,000,000 over ten years) to provide that healthcare. His claim still is the tax cuts only helped the wealthy, which also wasn’t true. Remember, Barack Obama’s gave his word that 95% of Americans were not to see a tax increase but also get tax relief of $500 per person. Based on the numbers, President Obama expects the rich to come up with an extra $4,000 per person per year. That’s $60 billion a year diverted from highly efficacious charitable giving to a dubious social program.
But let us now come back to the 47 million uninsured figure I so skeptically mentioned. Others have done an excellent job of dissecting the propaganda of President Obama and the Democrats, so I will leave you to read up on this for yourself. Now if one were to exaggerate the figures no one would take too much notice of a 10%, 20% or 30% padding. However, as we do some digging, the real number of uninsured is around 10 to 15 million people or a 1/3rd of the problem proclaimed. Isn’t that interesting, if the problem were actually 1/3rd, that would mean the money collected on behalf of the uninsured in extra taxes would come out to be $6,000 per person per year which is coincidentally more in line with current costs. Increasing the figure by 3 fold is not exaggerating, that’s just plain lying. We should not be surprised that President Obama and the Democrats have lied yet again to the American people, they have a track record of doing so. The real question is why did they lie?
There are estimated to be 13 million illegal aliens not covered by health insurance and not paying their medical bills. Guess whom they want to be paying those bills? You and me or rather the rich people. The real issue here is not the uninsured, but a dubious social program for illegal aliens. The entire healthcare debate is simply a ruse to help the Democrat Party’s new favorite constituency. A constituency that supposedly doesn’t have voting rights. Why the ruse? Because the vast majority of Americans would never agree to subsidizing illegal aliens when given a choice. The will of the people has been very clear for years, they don’t have our permission to be here, they are displacing our poor from jobs, they are committing multiple felonies by being here and we clearly told Congress we aren’t agreeing to amnesty with an emphatic NO! Apparently the idea of self-governance and majority rule is inconvenient to the Democrats agenda and thus they dispense with such inconveniencies by misleading the public with ruses.
Either we believe President Obama and the Democrats are delusionally naïve in thinking $2,128 will cover the annual health care costs of 47 million supposedly uninsured people or they are lying to cover up their advocacy of illegal aliens. Which is it? Neither alternative is a material qualification for running the country, both are disqualifiers. Come the 2010 elections, you have a choice to make on election day. Reward the incompetent or liar or clean house installing a firm conservative GOP majority to reign in on this foolishness. Divided government has always been the last line of defense in the checks and balances of our form of governance, someone has to quell the madness of the Democrat Party and the GOP is the only one that can do this.
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Dan Scott calls himself a “Member of the Global Capitalist Cabal preaching Capitalism and personal responsibility as the economic solution to world poverty.” He is also a member of the 14th Amendment Society — victimhood is a liberal code word for denying the civil rights of others. He is also a proud member of the Global Warming Denier Cabal, insisting that facts not agendas determine the truth.
Dan can be seen on the web at http://www.geocities.com/fightbigotry2002/ as well as http://www.geocities.com/dscott8186/saidwebpage.htm, And can be reached for comments at dscott8186@yahoo.com.
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White House Claim of 46 Million Uninsured ‘Americans’ Includes Almost 10 Million Foreigners
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49586
At a townhall meeting in Green Bay, Wis., last Thursday, President Obama twice referred to “46 million” people who lack health insurance, although in neither case did he describe those “46 million” as “Americans”—in one instance referring to them as “46 million people who don’t have health insurance” and in another instance as “46 million uninsured.”
Notice the parsing???
Five Health Care Myths
http://www.jlbghealth.com/blog/archives/68-Washington-Times-Opinion-Edition-Examines-Five-Health-Care-Myths.html
A point I did not make which is tangential to the central theme of the article is what President Obama and the Dems are proposing to the American people is a Faustian bargain. If everyone in the US was covered by a healthcare plan then the cost of their plans would drop. This is the kernel of truth spoken by Obama around which the rest of the ruse is wrapped. Indeed, without having to subsidize the 13 million some illegal aliens not paying their bills which hospitals are obligated to treat by law whether they can pay or not or whether they belong here or not, that cost must be passed on to someone. The hospitals must pass on that cost otherwise they would go out of business, supplies and wages must be paid. The Faustian Bargain comes in the form of making someone else pay, namely the rich. As in every Faustian Bargain, the $60 billion a year they will be forking out additionally will come at the cost of their investing that money thus cost jobs to the economy.
CBO: Kennedy Healthcare Spends Another Trillion
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32302
The CBO estimates the bill would cost a staggering $1trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) taxpayer dollars over the next 10 years and would only result in 16 million more people being covered by health insurance. This model assumes that only 10% of those now covered would lose their employer-funded health care and fall out of private insurance coverage due to a public plan being offered.
The 16 million additionally covered is a net figure.
So what happened to the 47 million uninsured figure? Why only 16 million by the CBO unless there never were 47 million uninsured? Notice that this 15 million figure includes and additional 10% who would opt to switch from their current health insurance plan. Once again this suspiciously looks like a plan primarily designed to cover 13 million illegal aliens.
New Dem Health Care Pitch: “We’ll Deny Treatment!”
http://slate.msn.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/04/17/new-dem-health-care-pitch-we-ll-deny-treatments.aspx
Friday, April 17, 2009
Democratic blogger Ezra Klein appears to be positioning Dem health care reforms as a way to cut costs, on the grounds that a reformed system will be able to make “hard choices” and “rational” coverage decisions, by which Klein seems to mean “not providing” treatments that are unproven or too expensive–when “a person’s life, or health, is not worth the price.” Matthew Yglesias’ recent post seems to be saying the same thing, though clarity isn’t its strong suit. (He must have left it on Journolist.)
Isn’t it an epic mistake to try to sell Democratic health care reform on this basis? Possible sales pitch: “Our plan will deny you unnecessary treatments!” Or maybe just “Republicans say ‘yes.’ Democrats say ‘no’!” Is that really why the middle class will sign on to a revolutionary multi-trillion dollar shift in spending–so the government can decide their life or health “is not worth the price”? I mean, how could it lose?
The reason why Medicare spending will explode is the demographics, greater numbers are retiring, senior citizens after retiring will require more healthcare as a consequence of their age. No matter how long a person lives, no matter what preventive healthcare they receive, they are going to die and in all probability will become sick before dying. There are very few circumstances in which doctors can prevent or reduce over use of medical facilities in the last year of life. We can only attempt to control the needless lengthy suffering using a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) where a person has made an individual choice for their life deciding not to live as a vegetable or be kept physically alive where there is no hope of recovery other than bedridden with excruciating pain. By coincidence a DNR will save money for medical procedures not performed. No one in government is allowed to make that decision and nor should they EVER be allowed to do so. Do you consider euthanasia as a legitimate form of cost control? Apparently, denying medical treatment will be the call of the government.