Tag Archives: Universal health care

Government Health Care Comes To New York City

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The Daily Wire is reporting today that New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has announced that the city will begin a ‘universal’ health care program that will provide for health care for all uninsured New York City residents, “regardless of their ability to pay or their immigration status.”

The article reports:

ABC News reports that de Blasio’s new plan, NYC Care, isn’t exactly a “universal health care” plan, but rather a “guarantee” that the city will pay for preventative medical care for an estimated 600,000 who do not have insurance, but live within the boundaries of New York City.

Health care, De Blasio announced, is now a “right” for anyone who gets sick in NYC.

“We recognized that obviously health care is not just in theory a right,” de Blasio told media ahead of his announcement. “We have to make it in practice a right.”

“Health care is a human right. In this city we are going to make that a reality,” de Blasio repeated at a press conference on the expansion Tuesday morning.

The plan, which isn’t precisely a plan — details are scant on how the system will actually work — will cover everything from mental health services, to well visits, to maternity care for New Yorkers who choose to go without insurance, or who can’t afford even the basic, public insurance option that New York City already offers, and aren’t signed up for “Obamacare” options on the state exchange.

The article mentions Mayor De Blasio’s estimate of the cost:

As Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro pointed out on Twitter, de Blasio’s government estimates the plan will cost the city no more than $100 million per year — an amount that de Blasio says precludes having to raise taxes to cover the program. But the $100 million number assumes either that not all 600,000 uninsured individuals will need medical care, or that medical care will be provided at far below market value.

If anyone wants to start a pool on how long it is before New York City has to raise taxes to pay for this, I’m in. I wonder if this new service (and its cost) will speed up the exodus from New York.

If The Democrats Gain Control Of Congress…

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The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today about one aspect of the Democratic legislative plan if they retake control of Congress. This is something all of us might want to consider as we vote.

The article reports:

A wealthy Democratic donor club plotting the future of the liberal movement hopes to be fighting for reparations by 2022, according to a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the Democracy Alliance‘s fall conference this week in Atlanta.

The desire was stated in the invitation for a Monday reception during the biannual conference, which was attended by top Democratic Party officials such as DNC chairman Tom Perez, former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, and Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.).

The reception, “Way to Win: 2022 Victory Party,” was presented as a look forward at what’s possible if Democrats can be effective in coming elections.

“It’s 2022 and we are celebrating policy victories across the nation: Medicare for All and Free College, and next on the agenda is Reparations,” the group projected, according to an invitation to the event.

This is simply another scheme to take money away from those who have earned it and give to those who have not earned it.

The article continues:

The group further predicts that the successful implementation of universal health care and free college will lead to more sweeping election victories, including the governorship in Texas and its electoral votes in the 2024 presidential election.

“Because we’re governing with gusto, we’re seeing victories up and down the ballot—including winning a governorship in Texas and putting 38 electoral votes in grasp by 2024,” it says. “Stop in 2020 and 2019 when local power builders turned Arizona and Florida solidly blue and established Virginia as a progressive governance juggernaut.”

The event was headlined with a speech by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who the group predicted would “set the course for a new wave of leaders.” She was pictured on the night of the event with McAuliffe, who was also a featured speaker at the conference and is considering a run for president in 2020.

Abrams has not publicly backed plans for universal health care or free college tuition, both policy positions supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). She has also not come out in support of reparations, a policy proposal that even Sanders has come out against.

I predict bankruptcy for America if these people gain control of Congress.

Are We Rapidly Losing The Constitution?

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On Saturday Forbes Magazine posted an article titled, “Government Takeover: White House Forces Obamacare Insurers To Cover Unpaid Patients At A Loss.”

Because of what has happened with Americans having their health insurance cancelled and not being able to enroll in ObamaCare because of website screw-ups and other glitches, the Obama Administration is attempted to force health insurance companies to hand out free health care—at a loss—to those whom the White House has rendered uninsured.

The article reports:

On Wednesday afternoon, health policy reporters found in their inboxes a friendly e-mail from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announcing “steps to ensure Americans signing up through the Marketplace have coverage and access to the care they need on January 1.” Basically, the “steps” involve muscling insurers to provide free or discounted care to those who have become uninsured because of the problems with healthcare.gov.

…“What’s wrong with ‘urging’ insurers to offer free care?” you might ask. “That’s not the same as forcing them to offer free care.” Except that the government is using the full force of its regulatory powers, under Obamacare, to threaten insurers if they don’t comply. All you have to do is read the menacing language in the new regulations that HHS published this week, in which HHS says it may throw otherwise qualified health plans off of the exchanges next year if they don’t comply with the government’s “requests.”

What we have here is an out-of-control administration that learned politics in Chicago. Until someone in Congress or the private sector has the intestinal fortitude to stand up to this thuggery, it will continue. Meanwhile, ObamaCare gets a little worse every day.

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When Reality Gets In The Way Of Promises

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Remember the promise that ObamaCare would eventually make health care cheaper for everyone because universal coverage would make us all healthier? Well, it seems as if we tend to be as healthy as we want to be regardless of whether or not we have universal coverage.

On Friday the Daily Beast reported that a study on Oregon’s Medicaid expansion showed that the people who were now eligible for medical treatment had no improvement in their health (as measured by basic health indicators such as like blood pressure or cholesterol).

The article reports:

…health insurance doesn’t actually improve access to necessary treatment that much.  If someone else covers the cost, it can help with the financial burden of health care.  But uninsured people will mostly find a way for the most important treatments, the ones we know improve health, from stitches to control bleeding, to antibiotics, to blood pressure medication.  It’s the expensive stuff on the frontier–the stuff that’s as likely to be useless, or harmful, as it is to help–that the uninsured mostly forego. 

When you consider the fact that hospitals are not permitted to turn away patients because of their inability to pay, this makes sense.

The article concludes:

…But I think it’s instructive that the political campaign for Obamacare leaned so heavily on claims about death and untreated suffering.  Whether or not we should provide that sort of insurance, I don’t think that Obamacare would have passed if its backers had said “The best study available shows that we’ll probably get a nice reduction in depression and catastrophic expenses, but no statistically significant improvement in diabetes, mortality, or cardiovascular health.”

That should give us pause.  We passed a big, complicated piece of legislation on the assumption that Medicaid expansions like Oregon would make us healthier–so much helathier that we’d obviously be able to measure it.  It just made gut sense, after all.  And that shouldn’t just make us pause and think about Obamacare. What other policies are we pulling out of our intestinal loops?

Frankly, I think the best thing the government could do for the health of Americans would be to get out of healthcare. Repeal ObamaCare, and set up a system that subsidizes low income people who need insurance and let the free market run healthcare. There would have to be some basic guidelines set up for pre-existing conditions, but the healthcare industry knows much more about healthcare than the government does. Let’s let them take care of America.

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