My, How Times Change

Remember when the Democrats told us that ObamaCare was not a step in the direction of government-controlled single-payer healthcare? Well, that statement is now inoperative.

The Washington Examiner reported the following yesterday:

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., has asked the Congressional Budget Office to analyze the effects of shifting all healthcare costs onto the federal government, a first step toward the “Medicare for all” legislation sought by progressives.

…Yarmuth said in a statement that his request for the score is aimed to inform House hearings on “single payer,” proposals. Such hearings would be the first step in the process toward passing legislation enacting single payer systems, a top goal pursued by progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

The article concludes:

The study concluded that overall spending, not just government spending, would be $2 trillion less compared to where spending is projected under the current healthcare system, but that would come mostly through cutting payments that hospitals and other providers were getting from private insurance by about 40 percent. Higher taxes may be under consideration to have Medicare payments align more closely with those of private insurers.

Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., had asked CBO to score the Medicare for All Act introduced by Sanders. In taking up various requests, CBO analysts tend to focus on bills that are closer to passage.

If you read this blog on a regular basis, you have seen this quote before, but here it is again:

Milton Friedman, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Britain has single-payer health care. In March 2017, The Daily Wire posted an article about the problems with the British health care system.

These are some of the highlights from the article:

“Pressure on all services is rising and care is increasingly being rationed. Waiting lists should not be rising, and yet they are,” said Mark Porter, council chair of the British Medical Association (BMA).

“Doctors always want to deliver the best possible care for our patients, but we can’t continuously plug gaps by penny pinching and poaching from elsewhere in an overstretched NHS.”

…A study conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concluded that around 750 patients a month – one in 28 – pass away due to subpar quality of care, which includes “inattentive monitoring of the patient’s condition, doctors making the wrong diagnosis, or patients being prescribed the wrong medicine.” In other words, patients needlessly die as a result of the incompetence of the NHS.

For example, in January an elderly woman died from cardiac arrest after waiting 35 hours on a trolley because there was a shortage in hospital beds. A 73-year-old man also died from an aneurysm in the same hospital as he languished in the waiting room.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. Note that single-payer health care is government-controlled. Do you really want the government controlling your health care?

This Is What Single-Payer Healthcare Looks Like In Real Life

The U.K. Telegraph posted an article today about plans for National Health Service policy in Britain.

The article reports:

The NHS (National Health Service) will ban patients from surgery indefinitely unless they lose weight or quit smoking, under controversial plans drawn up in Hertfordshire.

The restrictions – thought to be the most extreme yet to be introduced by health services – immediately came under attack from the Royal College of Surgeons.

Its vice president called for an “urgent rethink” of policies which he said were “discriminatory” and went against the fundamental principles of the NHS.

…In recent years, a number of areas have introduced delays for such patients – with some told operations will be put back for months, during which time they are expected to try to lose weight or stop smoking.

But the new rules, drawn up by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in Hertfordshire, say that obese patients “will not get non-urgent surgery until they reduce their weight” at all, unless the circumstances are exceptional.

The criteria also mean smokers will only be referred for operations if they have stopped smoking for at least eight weeks, with such patients breathalysed before referral.

I realize that smoking and obesity are not good for your health, but should that disqualify you from needed healthcare? What about drinking soda, drinking alcohol, eating sweets? This is an example of rationed healthcare. It really doesn’t matter what the basis for the rationing is–it is still rationing. And if the concept of rationing is accepted, there is no reason why the basis can’t change on a whim. This is another reason why the free market rather than the government should be making healthcare decisions.

Learning From The Mistakes Of Others

The debate on single-payer healthcare in America has been going on for a while. ObamaCare was designed to fail and be a step in the direction of single payer. So how well does single-payer healthcare work?

On September 8, 2016, Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about nationalized healthcare in Britain. There were some serious warnings in the article about nationalized healthcare.

The article reported:

Before you embrace the idea (single-payer healthcare), you might want to look at what’s happening in Britain right now.

There, some hospitals are moving to ration care for those who are officially deemed obese — that is, anyone who has a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more. Oh, and while they’re at it, they will also ration care for smokers, too.

Why? “To plug a funding black hole,” as the British Telegraph newspaper put it. Translation: Britain’s National Health Service faces such a serious financial crisis that it now has to deny care to some people, despite its claims of “universal care.” And who better to deny care for than two of the most despised groups in today’s modern society — those who are obese and smokers?

This new plan to bar overweight people and smokers from most surgery for up to a year is getting its first tryout in North Yorkshire. But, as Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons has warned, rationing will soon become the norm across Britain as the health care system deals with soaring costs and failing care delivery for its patients. And the impact will be broad: The Telegraph, working off population data, estimates more than half of Britain’s population will be considered obese in the coming decades.

The nightmare stories of bungled care and needlessly dying patients are already legion for the NHS, which is notorious for delivering substandard service to its patients.

The article explains the impact of ObamaCare on insurance companies:

The problem isn’t ObamaCare per se,” wrote Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration, in a blog post. “It lies in the structure of private markets for health insurance — which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. ObamaCare is just making this structural problem more obvious.”

This is a classic example of blaming the victim for your own crimes. Aetna takes a hit of nearly half a billion dollars from a system Reich’s leftist pals in the Democratic Party created, and then Reich blames insurers for greed.

The Democrats who wrote the ObamaCare law knew they would be destroying the private market for health care. But they don’t care. And they don’t care to learn from others, like Britain’s National Health Service, that have already gone down this dangerous path.

Americans would be very wise to heed Britain’s warning, and just say no to single-payer.

Good advice.

There Are Two Things In Play Here

Special interests are important in Washington; lobbyists and lobbyists’ money have a lot of power. However, educated voters also have a lot of power. We are about to see a clash between special interests (lobbyists, big business, the political establishment, etc.) and educated voters. The clash is going to take place before September 30 and will involve the repeal of ObamaCare.

ObamaCare is a nightmare for many Americans–their insurance premiums and their deductibles have risen drastically over the past six years, and some middle-class Americans are forced to choose between paying their mortgage or paying their health insurance bill. ObamaCare has failed, and the Republicans in Congress have thus far broken their promise to repeal it. Democrats are offering single-payer healthcare which will break the bank, but at least the are offering something. Voters have given Congress an approval rating of about 15 percent.  Next year is an election year for all of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. Congressmen (and Congresswomen) have a choice–who do they represent? Some Republicans may be getting the message that voters are important.

The Washington Examiner posted an article today with the following headline:

Mitch McConnell asks CBO to score Obamacare overhaul

That is the sound of a Congressman who is beginning to feel the impact of the grassroots of the Republican party. Someone in Washington is beginning to understand that the Republican party will go the way of the dinosaur if they do not start listening to their base. Lobbyists may have money, but there are a lot of angry voters out there.

The article reports:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has asked the Congressional Budget Office to quickly score an Obamacare overhaul bill introduced this week, his office confirmed Friday.

The bill would take revenues from Obamacare and distribute them as block grants to states so they could write their own healthcare plans. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., introduced the bill along with Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Dean Heller of Nevada, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

This is not a perfect bill, but it may have conservative support because it moves money out of Washington and back to the states.

The article states:

Supporters hope the bill can be passed through the reconciliation, would need just 50 votes to advance and pass in the Senate, assuming a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Pence. Reconciliation is a budget measure that allows passage with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes needed to block a filibuster. The Senate faces a Sept. 30 deadline to use reconciliation, according to the Senate parliamentarian.

There are three choices–leave ObamaCare in place, single-payer healthcare or this bill. This bill is not perfect, but it is the best choice of the three. If the Republicans do nothing, they will lose badly in the mid-term elections.

It is ironic that many Republican Congressmen are spending more time opposing President Trump than they did opposing President Obama.

When The Government Decides Who Gets To Live

The U.K. Guardian is reporting today that Charlie Gard‘s life support will be turned off to prevent him for suffering any further.

The article reports:

At an emotional hearing, in which lawyers as well as relatives were in tears, Charlie’s mother was invited to give a statement before the court.

Standing at the front of the room, choking back tears, with Chris Gard beside her, she told the packed courtroom that the couple had only ever wanted what was best for their “sweet, gorgeous and incredible boy”.

She said the care by Gosh had been second-to-none but that it was now too late to give Charlie the treatment that she and her husband believe would have benefited him

“Charlie is Charlie and we wouldn’t change him for the world. All our efforts are for him, we only want to give him a chance at life,” she said. “There’s one simple reason for Charlie’s muscular deterioration [and] that was time.”

She went on: “We knew in July [the treatment could work] and our poor boy has been left there to lie in hospital without treatment while court battles are fought.”

Herman Cain reports:

Gard will now be moved to pallative care where the NHS will guarantee he dies with dignity.

Essentially, what happened here is that the UK government “ran out the clock” by trapping these poor people in a maze of red tape. Time was of the essence and whatever hope Charlie had dwindled as the days passed. Now, the longshot treatment that was available in the U.S. will no longer work – so they’ve ended their efforts.

This is the future of American healthcare if ObamaCare is not repealed.

If It’s Not About Money, Exactly What Is It About?

We have all heard the story of little Charlie Gard who is in the hospital in Britain suffering from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes brain damage and prevents muscles from developing. His parents want to remove him from the hospital and seek treatment in America. The hospital (under the British healthcare system) wants to let him ‘die with dignity.’ The parents have offers of medical treatment and care from the Vatican and from medical facilities in America. The parents evidently have the financial means to get him where he needs to be to receive the treatment. Taking him from the hospital where he currently is creates no financial burden for the hospital. So why won’t the hospital let the parents take Charlie Gard out of the hospital? To me, that is the million dollar question.

The American Thinker posted an article today about the impact of single-payer socialized health care on innovation and alternative medicine. The article reminds us that the passage of ObamaCare in 2009 helped establish the idea that health care is a right.

The article includes the following:

The day after the Obamacare vote, the senior member of the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), a strong supporter of government-run health care since he first got elected to the Congress in the mid-1950s, appeared as a guest on a local Detroit radio program. I learned about the Dingell interview courtesy of someone in Detroit who heard the broadcast and posted a comment about it at a blog that I stumbled upon. After some research, I was able to identify the Detroit talk show — it was the Paul W. Smith program on radio station WJR — and locate an audio file of the Dingell segment on WJR’s Web site before it scrolled offline.

Sure enough, as he gleefully celebrated the passage of Obamacare on Smith’s program, Dingell blurted out that the Democrats had finally learned how “to control the people:”

The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

As I previously noted, the hospital in Britain has no financial interest in keeping Charlie Gard as a patient until he dies–in fact, that is probably against their financial interest. It would seem that ‘control’ might be the only obvious reason for their policy–they don’t want to allow Charlie’s parents to control the medical care their child receives.

The article further reminds us:

Nationalized mandated health care has always been a goal of the collectivist, statist, communist model of governance.

Writing in 2007 in National Review Online, Mark Steyn put it succinctly:

Socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state.

The article concludes:

It remains to be seen if a new effort by the parents to appeal the court’s decision will prevail. In the meantime, the case illustrates several points. In a socialized, single-payer medical system like the one that has been in place in the UK since the NHS was mandated in 1948, the patient — or in this case, his parents — is not in control; the medical bureaucrats under the color of law have the final say over one’s life and death.

It is also noteworthy that innovative options that might help a patient like Charlie are emanating not from Britain — where socialism and the NHS have hindered medical innovation and impaired successful treatment outcomes — but from the United States, where the practice of medicine has yet to fall under the complete and suffocating yoke of socialism.

We are at a crossroads right now in America. We have a choice. Are we going to be the country envisioned by our Founding Fathers that was a beacon of freedom to the world or are we going to trade our freedom for government control sold to us under the guise of benefits. If the Republicans do not repeal ObamaCare, we can expect to see cases like Charlie Gard begin to appear in America.

 

Fool Me Once…

Breitbart.com posted an article yesterday about President Obama’s new executive order regarding guns. The title of the article is “3 Reasons Obama’s Claim to Support the 2nd Amendment Doesn’t Ring True.” The article reminds us of three past statements from the President that have proved to be lies even as they were being made.

The President stated in his speech yesterday:

Now, I want to be absolutely clear at the start — and I’ve said this over and over again, this also becomes routine, there is a ritual about this whole thing that I have to do — I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper. It guarantees a right to bear arms. No matter how many times people try to twist my words around — I taught constitutional law, I know a little about this — I get it. But I also believe that we can find ways to reduce gun violence consistent with the Second Amendment.

The article states:

Not a very convincing performance. Is there any other Amendment to the Constitution the president would downplay in this way? Saying, “It’s there written on the paper” would be an odd, dismissive comment from someone announcing plans to tighten up the 1st or 5th Amendment.

If the tone struck you as vaguely familiar, that suggests you’ve been paying attention. President Obama has often promised that he understood people’s concerns about a particular issue, only to reveal later it was all about getting his way.

President Obama stated repeatedly, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The article reminds us:

As it turns out, that was not true. In fact, it was always impossible based on the design of the law. When the president was called on the falsehood, he tried to move the goalposts. In November 2013, he said, “what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

That’s not what he said.

The article states:

It wasn’t the only politically expedient lie the president told about Obamacare. He also said explicitly that calling the public option a “trojan-horse” for single-payer healthcare was an “illegitimate” claim made by his opponents who were “not telling the truth.”

Unfortunately for the president, not all of his friends in Congress and the media were as disciplined. A number of them revealed the public option was a sneaky strategy for getting what the party really wanted: single-payer healthcare. Some who abetted the president’s lies at the time have since admitted that was the desired goal all along. The president tried to fool the American people, just as he had with the “keep your plan” promise. He almost got away with it.

The third reason has to do with President Obama’s stand on homosexual marriage.

The article reminds us:

Before he became president, Obama told Pastor Rick Warren, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.”

…(David) Axelrod writes that he knew Obama was in favor of same-sex marriages during the first presidential campaign, even as Obama publicly said he only supported civil unions, not full marriages. Axelrod also admits to counseling Obama to conceal that position for political reasons. “Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod writes.

How many times are we supposed to believe a President who seems to have a problem telling the truth on major issues?