- It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:
- Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
- Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
- Americans smoke too much.
- Americans do not exercise enough.
- The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
- Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
- Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
- Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
- Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.
But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.
These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.
1) We have previously reported on how the state of Maine took things into its own hands when it came to Medicaid and proved highly successful in reducing its Medicaid bills while providing much better healthcare support for many, many more of its citizens. That post and the details of this great effort can be accessed at:
https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/03/march-2017-part-2the-unfolding-disaster.html
The following summarizes what they accomplished:
- In six years, the state has reduced its Medicaid program enrollment by 24%.
- Its annual growth in Medicaid costs is down to a respectable 2% a year, compared to the national annual cost growth rate of 6% a year.
- The growth rate in 2017 is expected to be just .7%.
- At the same time, funding for nursing home facilities has increased by 40%, home care funding has increased by 60%, and an additional $100 million was found to support state citizens with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
- In addition, the state increased its financial support for primary care to better help individuals with chronic diseases while also increasing support for those with mental illness.
- And despite slashing the Medicaid enrollment levels, the uninsured rate in the state has actually declined.
But when you make changes like this, even if they are the right changes, embedded interests, who have long thrived off the use of taxpayer wealth, tend to get a little pissed off. Such is the case in Maine as hospitals that have seen their Medicaid payments drop are not happy with the governor who has accomplished so much:
- According to Paul Chesser, writing for the Liberty headlines website on October 27, 2017, Maine Governor Paul LePage is in a confrontation with hospitals in his state over Medicaid.
- Apparently, CEOs of Maine hospitals have been pushing hard to expand Medicaid in the state and thus, expand their revenue streams.
- Although the Maine legislature has voted to expand Medicaid in the state five times since 2011, Le Page has vetoed the proposed legislation every time.
-While advocates claim that expanding the Medicaid program in the state would be richly supported by matching Federal taxpayer funds, LePage disagrees: “It’s obvious the CEO of Maine Med and other hospitals do not care about taking resources away from our most vulnerable Mainers—including our elderly and intellectually and physically disabled people—just so they can give free, taxpayer-funded healthcare to adults who should be working and contributing to the cost of their own health insurance.
Medicaid expansion will cost Mainers $500 million over the next five years. The last time Maine expanded Medicaid, the elderly and disabled were sent to the back of the line so working-age adults without dependents could get free healthcare. Now Maine Med and other hospitals want to do it again.
These CEOs make millions of dollars a year, and now they want to raise taxes by $500 million on the backs of hard-working Mainers who will have to pay the bill. Shame on them. Hospitals are only concerned with their pocketbooks, and they don’t care about the hardships it will cause for taxpayers, the elderly and the disabled. Hospital CEOs claim the federal government will pay 90 percent of the costs of Medicaid expansion, but it’s not true. The 90 percent only covers a portion of those who would be added to Medicaid rolls: able-bodied adults without children.
Since hospitals are nonprofit organizations, they don’t have to pay taxes on much of their vast real estate holdings. Mainers do not have that luxury—in addition to paying their own high premiums and deductibles, they will have to pay to give ‘free’ healthcare to adults who should be working. As I always say, ‘free’ is very expensive to somebody. If hospital CEOs have their way, that somebody would be Maine taxpayers.”
Bravo to the governor. He understands that Obama Care was a disaster when it comes to Medicaid. Medicaid was designed to support the truly, truly, needy in our society, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, not the non-poor, not the non-disabled, not the non-elderly.
We have given this analogy before: Medicaid is like a 50 year old truck that was designed to haul up to two tons. Obama Care came along and without fixing this old truck, expects it to now haul four tons. It is not going to work and LePage realizes it. He knows that Medicaid costs will skyrocket and the less capable in his state will suffer along with the state’s taxpayers if it is not kept under control. Medicaid now eats up over 30% of the state government budget in four states, he does not want that monster to do the same in his state as a result of Obama Care.
2) The National Review website on October 12, 2017, ran an article entitled, “the Most Wasteful Health Spending is Also the Most Popular.” It was an extensive essay on the current status of health care in this country today but let me just pull out a few relative facts:
- The author claims that about half of the health care expenditures spent today in this country are wasted expenses: “That half, approximately, of all U.S. health spending is wasted, is simultaneously scientifically uncontroversial, ignored by health-policy experts, and totally absent from public debate. But that’s not the worst part. In fact, it could be good news in a way: The magnitude of the problem suggests that there’s a lot of room for improvement.”
- The article points out how simpler, more direct ways to save lives and improve healthcare were ignored by the Obama Care advocates: “One of the most celebrated pieces of health-care journalism in recent years has been Atul Gawande’s New Yorker exposé on the Herculean efforts by a handful of scientists to get intensive-care physicians to implement basic hygiene measures so as to stop hospital-borne diseases, which kill about 100,000 people per year according to the CDC. The “checklist” was of no cost to the doctors, and its scientific rationale was unquestionable. Doctors still resisted it with all their might because they found it mildly inconvenient.”
- And finally, do we need to rethink the reality that a lot of medical and healthcare does not need the expensive use of highly paid doctors: “Countless procedures that doctors have a legal monopoly on could just as well be performed by less skilled experts. This is hugely wasteful, but it only scratches the surface…. In Africa, which suffers from a dire doctor shortage, there are examples of professionally run clinics that deliver a first-world standard of care to hundreds of patients without a single doctor.”
Three simple, effective ways to reduce healthcare costs, and deaths, in this country: eliminate current wasteful spending, have doctors wash their hands, and reexamine where we REALLY need a highly trained doctor for medical care. Three ways that Obama Care never addressed, more concerned with applying an insurance solution to a public health problem.
The disaster that keeps on unfolding. One more summary of disasters tomorrow.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
www.loathemygovernment.com
It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
No comments:
Post a Comment