August, 2019, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Payer Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

Most months for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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 copays 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.

Two posts ago we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly. 

In our previous post,we showed the numbers and realities around the world of how single payer healthcare systems always fail to provide effective and efficient health care to its citizens. Despite these realities, many Democratic candidates for President want to implement a failed system like this in this country. Today we will continue that discussion of failed single payer healthcare systems from other countries, further proof that this approach to healthcare is a bad, bad idea.

1) Before we go into the more general aspect of single payer failures, I actually have awareness of a personal story of someone who was failed by such a system in England. I have a friend whose brother moved to England decades ago, ended up marrying a British subject and living under England’s single payer system. In the fall of 2016, he became ill and was told he had cancer that was working its way through his body.

One year later, in October of 2017, he was finally scheduled for and received surgery in which the doctors removed more than one bodily organ and the parts of another organ. Fortunately, he has so far survived. 

But as always with a single payer system, it rations and delays treatment way out into the future. How much easier, how much less suffering, how much less expensive, and how much higher would his survival rate had been if he had not had to wait over a year to get treatment for cancer?

It is no secret that survival rates from cancer and other treatments in England is much lower than elsewhere in the world. This example shows why. 

2) Canada has had a single payer government controlled health care system for a long time. Keeping that in mind, consider the fact Angela Johnson, president of Medical Confidence, Inc., just written a book entitled “Step by Step Guide to Navigating your way through Canada’s Health Care System and Minimizing Your Wait Time.” The book is billed as “a first of its kind and must read for Canadians, providing them with 14 valuable tips to overcome these issues and "minimize their wait times.” If you have to read a book in order to understand and cope with medical wait times, maybe the single payer system is not the most efficient way to deliver health care.

3) Let’s stay with Canada’s single payer system. In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, that “1,195 children and youth are waiting for mental health outpatient and outreach services at CHEO and the Royal, up 10 per cent from 1,082 a year ago,” according to an article in the Ottawa Citizen. The wait time for mental health treatment Canada could be up to a year. Not a good situation when our mental health needs might go a year before being addressed, never mind cured.

4) As previously discussed,England also has a single payer system, the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS recommends that no cancer patient in Great Britain should wait more than 62 days to start their cancer treatment. That does not mean you will be treated within 62 days, the 62 days is just a recommendation.

However, the Daily Mail recently reported just over 9,900 British cancer patients waited longer than that in the first six months of 2014. Like the mental health patients in Canada, waiting for cancer treatments is never a good thing since according to a recent article in the journal, Radiotherapy and Oncology, where the researchers assert that for breast cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 1.0% per month of delay” and for head and neck cancer there is an “increase in the risk of recurrence of 3.7% per month of delay.”

5) Staying in Great Britain, the Daily Mail reported last August that the “number of patients languishing on NHS waiting lists for operations is at its highest for six years…There are 3.2 million people awaiting surgery – a rise of 700,000 compared with 2010.” Not only are their 3.2 million people on the wait list for surgery, 809,000 patients were waiting for a diagnostic test and 15,600 operations were cancelled at the last minute in the second quarter of 2014. And these numbers may be an under count due to errors and incomplete records. Delays, cancelled tests, sounds just like our own government’s mistreatment of our veterans.

6) Some final points for today’s discussion relative to Canada’s single payer system:

• Every year it is estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 Canadians come to the United States to have their dire health conditions treated since enduring the long wait times for treatment in Canada, even for simple diagnostic tests such as an MRI, could be fatal.
• And while advocates of single payer systems in the Democratic Party claim often that healthcare in Canada is free, the reality is nothing is free in this world, “free” healthcare is paid for by high Canadian taxation levels.
• And the single payer system in Canada is not comprehensive in that the basic single payer coverage does not cover dental, eye care, and some aspects of sickness which means that Canadians have to buy extra healthcare insurance to cover these uncovered needs.

So more bad news for single payer healthcare systems again today: high costs, spotty coverage, high taxation, long wait times for cancer and other life threatening health issues, and high wait times for mental health treatment. More single payer horror stories to follow.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

August, 2019, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Payer Health Care Systems Around the World

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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 copays 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) In our previous post we reviewed the many, many failures and disasters of Obama Care, probably the worst piece of legislation ever passed when it comes to comparing it to its objectives and its promises. This was the Federal government’s most recent and deepest attempt to try and control the healthcare of Americans and it has ended badly.

But despite this fiasco, many Democratic candidates for President want the Federal government to go even deeper into controlling our healthcare via a so-called single payer system. In such a system, the government controls virtually all of a country’s health care needs and requirements, greatly reducing an individual’s choice in their own healthcare needs. 

Somehow they think that more government control, and the increased taxation that comes with it, is a good thing despite the government’s failure to run any kind of health care program effectively and efficiently, be it Obama Care, Medicare, Medicaid or the Veterans Administration.

Today we have pulled out some material from previous posts on the pitfalls and utter failure of single payer systems from around the world. Despite the following shortcomings and failures of the single payer concept to deliver high quality health care at reasonable prices and taxation levels, still some Democrats think it is a good idea:

1) A couple of years ago, there was a flu epidemic in England, home to one of the oldest and worse single payer health systems in the world. How did their single payer healthcare system react to the flu epidemic:

• In short, the system was overwhelmed.
• People waited up to twelve hours just to see a doctor for a flu examination.
• The British Health Service, the operator of their single payer system, was so desperate that they cancelled over 50,000 non-urgent surgeries so that the limited and overworked doctors and other medical professionals could have their attention diverted to treating flu victims.
• Things were so bad that then Prime Minister, Theresa May, had to come out with a public apology of how bad the healthcare situation is in England today: “I know it’s difficult, I know it’s frustrating, I know it’s disappointing for people and I apologize.”

It is rarely a good thing when the leader of the country has to publicly apologize for the bad operation of a government bureaucracy.

2) But this English single payer fiasco should not surprise since back in 2015, the Independent newspaper in England wrote: “The UK has one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world according to a damning new report which said the nation has an “outstandingly poor” record of preventing ill health.

Hospitals are now so short-staffed and under equipped that people are also dying needlessly because of a chronic lack of investment. The verdict, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), will make embarrassing reading for (then-Prime Minister) David Cameron who denied the cash-strapped NHS is heading for its worst winter crisis.

Britain was placed on a par with Chile and Poland as countries still lagging behind the best performers in survival following diagnosis for different types of cancer. The UK came 21st out of 23 countries on cervical cancer survival, 20th out of 23 countries on breast and bowel cancer survival and 19th out of 31 countries on stroke.”

“Outstandingly poor, one of the worst healthcare systems, chronic lack of investment, lagging behind the best performers in survival,” etc. Still think Obama Care did not go far enough? Still think that far away faceless politicians and government bureaucrats know what is best for your healthcare? No way either Obama Care or a single payer system is efficient or effective, reality is the proof.

3) But England’s single payer system is not the only failure in the world. We have previously reported on the failure of Canada’s single payer system to deliver efficient, timely and effective health care. For example, we have already reported on how tens of thousands of Canadians come to the United States every year because it is far easier to get timely health care in the States than it is back home under Canada’s single payer system. 

Reason magazine provided a real life example of the single payer failure history in Canada:

• Joy Hataley, a doctor up in Ontario, Canada, recently had to refer a patient to a neurologist at Kingston General Hospital.
• Obviously a referral to a neurologist likely represents a potentially grave and dangerous situation.
• When the patient went to make the appointment on the doctor’s referral he was told it would be four and a half YEARS before he could even get an appointment, never mind whatever treatment might be necessary.
• The doctor was told that if this inane four and a half year waiting period was not acceptable they would try to get their patient in to see a neurologist in another city altogether.
• But if the wait time was four and half years Kingston General Hospital, what are the odds that the wait time in a different city would be much shorter?

Single payer systems always result in the rationing and the delaying of receiving medical attention. If someone needs to see a neurologist, it is doubtful that a four and a half year wait is an acceptable time frame to wait from a life and death perspective. The more government intervenes in the healthcare industry, be it Obama Care or a single payer system, the worst the health care that will be provided becomes.

Okay, that will do it for today but in the next post or two we will continue to show why a single payer health care system is a very, very stupid idea, despite what Democratic candidates might say. The proof is in the numbers and the reality that single payer systems fail to deliver high quality health care at reasonable costs and taxation levels.

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:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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

September, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Idiocy Of The Single Payer System and Frustrated Doctors

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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 copays 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) The Freedom Outpost website had a recent article by Mac Slavo that again showed why many, many doctors hate Obama Care, a piece of legislation that has caused untold thousands of doctors to leave the industry out of frustration and idiocy:

• Doctors now spend two hours dealing with paperwork and administrative tasks for every hour spent actually treating patients.
• This result comes from a recent study by the American Journal of Medicine.
• Another finding was that just three years after Obama Care was implemented “Physician burnout increased significantly, from 45.5 percent to 54.4 percent.”
• A lot of the frustration comes from the electronic health records (EHR) requirement of Obama Care that required doctors use electronic health records which has caused the jump in burnout.
• Twila Brase, the President of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom explains: “The EHR is causing doctors to leave their patients. Congress forced doctors to buy and use computerized record systems to collect and report patient data to the government. And it’s wreaking havoc on their practices and their patients.”
• The study found that burnout in other industries was unchanged over the same time period: “Parallel studies of all U.S. workers during the same period showed no changes” and other studies “show the doctors spend more face time on their EHRs than with their patients. The hours spent cloning notes in a mandated doctor computer relationship leaves the physician unable to experience the best part of being a doctor.”

Another unfolding disaster from the worst piece of Washington legislation ever enacted. Rather than reducing costs as promised, the law is driving doctors out of the industry reducing the supply of doctors without changing the demand for health care, a simple economic concept that will raise, rather than lower costs.

2) Ph.D Robert E. Moffit recently took a look at Bernie Sanders idiotic plan to give the country a single payer health insurance system, a system that has failed miserably around the world, from England to Canada:

• Sanders’ plan would require the government to control ALL aspects of your healthcare and insurance and prohibit any American from having a private or employer based insurance system
• The cost of his plan is a whopping $32.6 TRILLION over the first ten years.
• This comes out about $3.3 TRILLION a year, which would require a sudden increase in Federal government taxation of about 75%.
• This study comes from Charles Blahous, a former member of the Medicare board of trustees, someone who obviously knows the industry.
• This estimate is consistent with other majors studies of a single payer plan in this country: The liberal think tank, the Urban Institute, estimated Sanders plan to cost $32 TRILLION over the first ten years and Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, a former advisor to Bill Clinton, estimated the cost at almost $25 TRILLION.
• The Sanders bill would force the government to create a new massive bureaucracy that would not only insure everyone under the age of 65 but would absorb the dysfunctional Medicare and Medicaid programs.
• It would set the rates that doctors and hospitals would charge within this massive government bureaucracy and totally control all patient/doctor relationships, reducing revenues going to doctors and hospitals, further driving disgruntled doctors out of the industry, see the above discussion.
• The INCREMENTAL $32.6 TRILLION would be equal to a whopping 12.7% of the nation’s GDP by 2031.
• Blahous’s analysis was very generous to Sanders’ benefit when doing his analysis but even his generous assumptions still got to a $32.6 TRILLION cost: “Even assuming gains from reductions in administrative costs, drugs, and the big reductions in provider payments, other features of the legislation, such as the abolition of all cost-sharing, would drive the costs of the program upward.”
• The Thorpe analysis, the most conservative estimate, estimated that additional taxes to cover the costs would be a whopping 20% of payrolls across the country and 70% of U.S, households would pay more than they do now for health care and insurance.
• Blahous says that even doubling all Federal individual and business income taxes would still not be enough to cover Sanders’ plans costs.

Oh, and by the way, the Federal government currently wastes $96 billion a year in Medicare and Medicaid from fraud and inefficiencies even though they have been operating these programs for about fifty years. Imagine how much more taxpayer wealth would be wasted if the government controlled ALL health care aspects in this country. 

Oh, and by the way, the Federal government already operates a healthcare process, the Veterans Administration, that often requires veterans to wait months just to see a doctor which has resulted in untold veterans dying from neglect.

Oh, and by the way, the health care quality and quantity in other countries like England and Canada with single paying systems also stinks.

The Federal government cannot operate a postal system or Amtrak efficiently and effectively, there is no way they can successfully operate a single payer healthcare system in this country. To deny the incompetence of the Federal government in anything it touches in the epitome of stupidity and ignorance.

3) Speaking of a single payer system consider this recent reality from the latest edition of Reason magazine: The British National Health Service, the government entity that operates that country’s single payer system, recently reported that 4.3 million patients are waiting for surgery, a ten year high. According to their own rules, no patient is supposed to have to wait no more than 18 weeks for nonurgent surgery. But in reality, 211,434 English medical patients have to wait over six months for surgery. 

So, a country that has been operating a single payer system for decades continues to get worse and worse performance from a quantity and quality perspective.What makes anyone think that the bozos in Washington can do any better than England?

In our next unfolding disaster review we will do an in depth comparison of Canada’s single payer system to the current U.S. system.Trust me, Canada loses in that analogy.

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:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Februrary, 2018, Part 2, the Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Death of the Obama Care Cousin In England

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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 copays 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) The failures of Obama Care have become so rampant and bad that even some of its original supporters are reluctantly admitting that it was a failure. But rather than learn from its failures, these folks want to double down and give the Federal government even more control over our lives, our health, and our freedom by implementing a so-called “single payer” healthcare system in this country. 

In a single payer system, Federal bureaucrats and politicians would control every aspect of your healthcare, from diagnosis to treatment, to cost to the massive amount of tax increases required to implement such a system. This type of system has almost always been a failure both around the world and in this country:

• In England, we have often discussed the reality that recovery times and mortality rates under their single payer system is always higher than in this country.
• In Canada, tens of thousands of their citizens come to this country every year for treatment since they have such long waiting times for even an appointment with a medical specialist that they give up and pay out of pocket costs for treatment in this country.
• When the Federal bureaucrats and politicians do have almost complete control of medical care in this country, e.g. the Veterans administration, Medicare, Medicaid, the costs are often out of control, the medical treatment is often delayed and inadequate, and the long term fiscal viability of these government health care systems are doubtful.

Let’s continue the British single payer discussion today using a recent Freedom Outpost website article by Mac Slavo on January 24, 2018:

• According to a recent BBC broadcast, hospital patients are dying in British hospital hallways according to 68 British doctors.
• These 68 doctors sent out an open letter that was addressed to the British Prime Minister which detailed what they called inhuman conditions that are occurring in the nation’s socialized National Health Services (NHS) hospitals.
• In addition, the doctors cited statistics that show that just in December, 2017 alone, over 300,000 British patients were forced to wait for more than four hours in hospital waiting rooms before being seen by medical personnel.
• And those folks did not include the thousands of others that were forced to wait hours in ambulances since they could not even fit into emergency rooms.
• The letter further noted that it was now routine for patients to be left on gurneys in hospital hallways for as long as 12 hours before getting a regular hospital bed.
• In further disgusting details the doctors showed that around 120 patients a day actually receive medical treatment while in public hallways and waiting rooms, and are “made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result….One patient reported having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients. “
• In the first week of 2018, over 97% of the National Health Service facilities were operating at levels deemed overcrowded which made them “unsafe.”

Pretty disgusting and discouraging stuff. Now, many people claim that if only more taxpayer money was spent, the single payer system in England would be great. But the article points out that funding for the single payer system in England has been quite robust and yet medical care is still atrocious. Funding for the system has gone up year after year since the turn of the century and yet failure is pervasive. 

Giving more and more money to a failed system run by failed politicians and bureaucrats is a formula for disaster. Obama Care, the Veterans Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid have proven this theory in the U.S. every day for decades.

2) Let’s get another view of the British single payer system from a recent Businessweek article:

• The NHS is currently being overwhelmed by patients and complaints while complaining about being underfunded.
• One driving force for all of this is that under their single payer system, everyone gets any medical treatment they can get to, no questions asked, even if those treatments are highly likely to be unnecessary.
• A year ago, the British Red Cross said the British single payer system was on the verge of a humanitarian crisis.
• And this observation/finding was before the current flu epidemic hit the NHS system.
• There are currently too many patients, whose overall average age is increasing along with the medical needs of an older population, and not enough medical staff.
• Britain has fewer doctors, CT scanners, and MRI units per capita than most European nations.
• It ranks near the bottom of European countries when it comes to infant mortality.
• Many other European countries score better when it comes to avoidable deaths, cancer survival, innovation, consistency of service, and other medical and health measurements.

What a mess. The article does try to make the case that more money might solve a lot, but not all, of these problems. But then it turns around and quotes a former government official who calls the NHS a “bottomless pit” when it comes to funding, implying that shoveling money at the problem will not resolve the lousy healthcare that the British people currently get for their tax dollars.

As always, in none of these articles do we see the simple truth that if you do not attack the root causes of high health care listed above, e.g. obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, etc., you will never get health care spending under control no matter how much money you throw at it. We learned that lesson under Obama Care, a program that was not supposed to not “add a single dime” to the national debt but according to the Congressional Budget Office will add almost $2 trillion to the national debt WITHOUT reducing the long term trend of ever higher health care costs.

One more post this month on the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care to follow in the next few days.

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

January, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care - The Disaster Of Single Payer Systems

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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 copays 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) For years we have been covering the many, many failures of Obama Care:

• Insurance premiums have gone up dramatically.
• Insurance deductibles have gone up dramatically.
• Competition has decreased.
• Policy selection has shrunk.
• Enrollment targets have not come close to being met.
• Millions of Americans lost access to their preferred doctors.
• Millions of Americans lost access to their preferred insurance plans.
• Millions of American lost access to their preferred hospitals.
• Medicaid budgets in some states have skyrocketed as a result of Obama Care.
• Over a trillion dollars more than expected will be added to the national debt.

But these disasters are not surprising since whenever Washington politicians get involved in an issue or topic they usually make the problem or issue worse and they usually make it worse in grand style. This is exactly what happened with Obama Care and the government intervention in our lives that it caused. 

But some people think that Obama Care failed because Washington and the politicians they did not have enough government intervention in our lives and the healthcare marketplace. They yearn for the so-called single payer insurance system where government bureaucrats control ALL aspects of our personal health care.

But we have previously shown how bad and inefficient these so called single payer plans are around the world. And today we have another example of failure:

• In the face of a flu epidemic in England, that country’s single payer insurance system is being overwhelmed.
• People are waiting up to twelve hours just to see a doctor for a flu examination.
• The British Health Service, their single payer system, is so desperate that they have cancelled over 50,000 non-urgent surgeries so that the limited and overworked doctors and other medical professionals can have their attention diverted to treating flu victims.
• Things are so bad that even the Prime Minister, Theresa May, had to come out with a public apology of how bad the healthcare situation is in England today: “I know it’s difficult, I know it’s frustrating, I know it’s disappointing for people and I apologize.”

But this latest fiasco of a single payer health care system should not surprise since back in 2015, the Independent newspaper in England wrote: “The UK has one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world according to a damning new report which said the nation has an “outstandingly poor” record of preventing ill health.

Hospitals are now so short-staffed and under equipped that people are also dying needlessly because of a chronic lack of investment. The verdict, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), will make embarrassing reading for (then-Prime Minister) David Cameron who denied the cash-strapped NHS is heading for its worst winter crisis.

Britain was placed on a par with Chile and Poland as countries still lagging behind the best performers in survival following diagnosis for different types of cancer. The UK came 21st out of 23 countries on cervical cancer survival, 20th out of 23 countries on breast and bowel cancer survival and 19th out of 31 countries on stroke.”

“Outstandingly poor, one of the worst healthcare systems, chronic lack of investment, lagging behind the best performers in survival,” etc. Still think Obama Care did not go far enough? Still think that far away faceless politicians and government bureaucrats know what is best for your healthcare? No way either Obama Care or a single payer system is efficient or effective, reality is the proof.

2) But England’s single payer system is not the only failure in the world. We have previously reported on the failure of Canada’s single payer system to deliver efficient, timely and effective health care. For example, we have already reported on how tens of thousands of Canadians come to the United States every year because it is far easier to get timely health care in the States than it is back home under Canada’s single payer system. 

The February issue of Reason magazine provided a real life example of the single payer failure history in Canada:

• Joy Hataley, a doctor up in Ontario, Canada, recently had to refer a patient to a neurologist at Kingston General Hospital.
• Obviously a referral to a neurologist likely represents a potentially grave and dangerous situation.
• When the patient went to make the appointment on the doctor’s referral he was told it would be four and half YEARS before he could even get an appointment, never mind whatever treatment might be necessary.
• The doctor was told that if this inane four and a half year waiting period was not acceptable they would try to get their patient in to see a neurologist in another city altogether.
• But if the wait time was four and half years Kingston General Hospital, what are the odds that the wait time in a different city would be much shorter?

Single payer systems always result in the rationing and the delaying of receiving medical attention. If someone needs to see a neurologist, it is doubtful that a four and a half year wait is an acceptable time frame to wait from a life and death perspective. The more government intervenes in the healthcare industry, be it Obama Care or a single payer system, the worst the health care that will be provided becomes.

3) One last single payer bashing today. I have a friend whose brother moved to England decades ago, ended up marrying a British subject and living under England’s single payer system. In the fall of 2016, he became ill and was told he had cancer that was working its way through his body.

One year later, in October of 2017 he was finally scheduled for and received surgery in which the doctors removed more than one bodily organ and the parts of another organ. Fortunately, he has so far survived. But as always with a single payer system, it rations and delays treatment way out into the future. How much easier, how much less suffering, how much less expensive, and how much higher would his survival rate had been if he had not had to wait over a year to get treatment for cancer?

It is no secret that survival rates from cancer and other treatments in England is much lower than elsewhere in the world. This example shows why. More failures from Obama Care, and single payer insurance schemes, to follow.

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

November, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Personal Horror Stories and More

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

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.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

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) Many people, mostly liberals and Democrats, have finally realized that Obama Care is a failure. But rather than admit that government bureaucrats and politicians meddling in the healthcare market makes things worse, they want to double down and increase government meddling in the market. 

Most frequently mentioned meddling efforts include the so-called single payer system used in such countries as England where the Federal government, and the bureaucrats and politicians that operate it, would be in charge of ALL health care decisions in your life. Given that these same people cannot operate a postal system effectively or a government railroad system (AMTRAK) efficiently despite decades or centuries of practice, doesn't bode well for letting them take over the country’s health care industry.

Recent news out of England shows what happens when the government is in charge of all of your healthcare needs:

• The largest government single payer system in the world, the British National Health Service, recently announced that it will no longer provide non-urgent surgery to people who smoke or who exceed a certain BMI level, i.e. they are fat or obese.
• The driver for this restriction is the need to get costs under control since the system is facing a severe shortage of money to spend.
• Before getting medical care, obese people will have to to lose enough weight to qualify for health care and smokers would have to have not smoked for at least eight weeks prior to getting care.
• Now, while these folks may have gotten themselves into these health conditions because of their actions, over eating, under exercising, smoking, etc., does it make sense to make them suffer by denying them health care when they probably need it most?
• Is it humane to make them wait longer for care, quite possibly making their eventual care more expensive, more painful, and more dangerous?
• Or as we discussed above, would it have been a better idea to attack the root causes of high healthcare ahead of time rather than afterwards?

Much like Obama Care, it appears that Great Britain tried to apply an insurance option against a public health problem with the net result being that root causes are never wiped out or reduced and eventually the system’s monetary resources start to cause cutbacks and rationing.

Lots of good questions that show a single payer system is not the answer to ever increasing healthcare costs. Plus, in a free country, do you want a government bureaucrat deciding whether or not you should see your healthcare needs taken care of even if you paid into that health care process via taxes for years and years? 

And one final question: while you may not care if someone dies or suffers because they were denied medical treatment as a result of being overweight or were a smoker because you are not overweight or a smoker, where does the bureaucracy stop in order to be financially stable? If you are a beer drinker, a pot smoker, a non-exerciser, someone with a bad gene, who knows, you may be next to be denied medical treatment in order to save a few bucks to keep the bureaucracy functioning.

Fixing healthcare costs in this country is not going to get done by creating government bureaucracies and deciding who and what gets medical treatment. It gets fixed by addressing the root causes and treating those causes as a public health crisis, not coming up with some Rube Goldberg insurance process doomed to failure.

2) As we do with most monthly reviews of the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care, let's hear from real Americans who suffered some real trauma, medical and financial, as a result of the failure that is Obama Care. As always, our source for such agony is the following website:

www.ourhealthcarestories.com

Jerry - Arkansas:  When Jerry Buckley of Marion bought a health insurance plan for him and his wife two years ago, he wasn’t worried about whether he would be able to keep it after new regulations took effect under the federal Affordable Care Act.

“I didn’t pay any attention to that because the president kept telling you, this won’t affect you if you like what you have,” Buckley said last week.

A few months ago, Buckley received a letter from Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield advising him that his plan does not comply with new standards taking effect Jan. 1 under the health care law. Buckley was told that he and his wife could stay on the plan through the end of 2014, thanks to an extension allowed by the Arkansas Insurance Department, but after that they would either be rolled over into a plan with triple the monthly premiums or they would have to shop for another plan.

Plans that were in effect when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010, are exempt, but the Buckleys are among millions of Americans who bought plans in the individual market that are not grandfathered in because they were purchased after that date.

The issue is giving more ammunition to opponents of the health care law who have also been sharply critical of the myriad technical problems surrounding the roll out of insurance marketplaces, including breakdowns in the national national website built to provide information and take applications for coverage.

Critics say President Obama’s repeated pledge that people who liked their insurance could keep it were at best misleading, as some Americans — estimates range from 7 million to 16 million — are on insurance that cannot continue to exist in its current form under the Affordable Care Act.

Supporters of the law say the people in that group will end up with fuller coverage, and many of them will be eligible for subsidies to help them buy insurance through the new insurance marketplaces.

But Buckley, whose income makes him ineligible for subsidies, doesn’t see an upside to switching. He said he likes his current plan, which has a $400 monthly premium, a $7,500 deductible and 100 percent coverage after the deductible, plus 80 percent coverage for dental and vision services.

He said that if he switches to the most closely comparable plan available through the Arkansas Health Insurance Marketplace, his monthly premium will increase to $600, his deductible will increase to $8,000 and he will have only 70 percent coverage after the deductible. Dental and vision coverage are not included but can be bought separately.

Buckley would gain some new benefits, such as coverage for maternity, mental health and substance abuse services, but he said he and his wife, who are middle-aged, neither want nor need those benefits.

“Our plan was custom-designed for our lifestyle,” he said. “To sit there and mandate that every plan has to have maternity coverage in it is absolutely ridiculous.”

Barbara, New York: said Barbara Meinwald, a solo practitioner lawyer in Manhattan.

Ms. Meinwald, 61, has been paying $10,000 a year for her insurance through the New York City Bar. A broker told her that a new temporary plan with fewer doctors would cost $5,000 more, after factoring in the cost of her medications.

Ms. Meinwald also looked on the state’s health insurance exchange. But she said she found that those plans did not have a good choice of doctors, and that it was hard to even find out who the doctors were, and which hospitals were covered. “It’s like you’re blindfolded and you’re told that you have to buy something,” she said.

Kent, Nebraska: We had our long time blue cross policy cancelled because it was not good enough for Obama care. 

The policy we got offered cost us 25% more premium and increased our deductible from 5000.00 year put of pocket to 12,500.00 out of pocket. 

It had to include crap like birth control and maternity which 50 year old people do not need. To apply for a subsidy we had to give out all of our personal financial data to lord we do not even know who.

Fred, California: I am self-employed and had a modest but workable policy for my wife and two kids paying $350 a month or $4200 a year. The best we found this year under Obamacare was a Cigna policy at $1200 a month with a huge deductible. I have a small business and don't qualify for any subsidies [As if I would want them], so our premium went from $4200 to $14,400 or an increase of 342%, hardly affordable. So, we're part of a medical sharing program and we're paying the FIRST $5000 of our own medical expenses.

We've been knocked in the teeth by OBAMACARE.............not to mention the loss of freedom and the government coercion.

Sky high increases in premiums and deductibles, lost coverage, forced to pay for coverage that is not needed, and loss of access to favored doctors and hospitals: the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. More disasters sure to follow next month.

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