-By Warner Todd Huston
Governor Sarah Palin once complained of those “death panels” in the President’s healthcare policy, a scoff that infuriated Obamacare’s supporters. But the fact is, by its very nature a nationalized healthcare system like the one that Obama wants acts as a “death panel” by denying care to save money. We don’t have to guess at this eventuality, either. We have but to look to England’s health services and we’ll see the exact situation that Palin warned about.
A recent piece published in the Daily Mail reports that the British National Health Service is going to deny services to millions of Britain’s citizens in order to save twenty billion pounds of the NHS budget. “Millions of patients face losing NHS care as bosses prepare to axe treatments to make £20billion of savings by 2014, a top doctor has warned,” the paper warns.
British medical services will likely soon deny hernia treatments, joint replacement for overweight patients, ear procedures (even for children), nose and eye operations, varicose vein procedures, gallbladder and also carpal tunnel procedures. And this isn’t something new. The Brits already deny all sorts of modern medicines because they feel the costs are too high.
Some may say that the Brit’s failures may not be visited upon the nationalized healthcare system in the United States but Obamacare isn’t even fairly implemented and we are seeing mounting costs that far and away out pace the costs we were told that the policy would cost us.
One of the hidden costs nestled in the 2,400-page bill is the $3.4 billion hit that American businesses will be faced with upon the implementation of the new tax on benefits that many large corporations will have to pay.
Paul Howard of City Journal finds the irony in this new tax.
Here’s the irony. When Democrats removed the tax exemption for the subsidy, they claimed to be striking a blow against corporate welfare. What they ignored, however, was that the subsidy was actually a previous Congress’s attempt to protect taxpayers. In creating the Medicare Part D drug benefit in 2003, Congress added the subsidy—which amounted to about 28 percent of the cost of coverage—to encourage companies that already offered drug benefits to retirees to keep paying those benefits, rather than dumping them onto taxpayers. By taxing the subsidy, Democrats are effectively encouraging companies to scrap the benefit entirely and ask Uncle Sam to foot the bill.
So benefits that are now partly borne by corporations, partly by employees, and partly by a government subsidy will likely now either be wholly forced on the businesses — which will then raise prices of its product to cover costs — or will be wholly covered by the taxpayers through total assumption by government once corporations drop the benefit.
Howard sums up with a lament that shows that opposition to Obamacare is justified.
In short, Obamacare is barely two months old, and the nation is already discovering what opponents of the legislation argued all along: that it will cost taxpayers far more than expected and send health-care spending into the stratosphere.
And once all these “unexpected costs” (as Democrats will likely term them) become manifest the only solution will be to cut services just like the British are now doing.
Hence, Palin’s much feared “death panels” will appear full grown and authored by Barack Obama.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 200 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
Huston has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Huston’s work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neil Bortz, and Michael Savage. He has appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy show, dozens of local shows from coast to coast, and many blogtalk radio shows.
Mr. Huston has appeared on local TV news to discuss his writing, has been a guest of CNN’s blogger lunch, and has appeared on Breitbart TV’s B-Team show.
Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com and has a blog on the Tribune-Owned http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/publius-forum/ChicagoNow.com website. He is a well known writer on Illinois politics.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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