February, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Medicaid Disasters and Obesity As A Root Cause

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.

Two disasters today to be discussed:

1) One of the disasters of Obama Care was the reality that it loaded up and overwhelmed the Medicaid system with far more people than was expected. We have previously made the analogy that Medicaid was like a thirty year old pickup truck that was designed to haul two tons and Obama Care forced it to haul four tons without doing any improvements to the pickup’s engines, tires, or shocks. As a result, it does not work like one was promised it would work.

We have also previously reported on these three realities:

1. At the state level, the annual cost of the Medicaid program is accelerating much faster than expected, stripping state government budgets of funding that is needed elsewhere for schools, infrastructure, law enforcement, etc. In fact, we have already reported that in at least four states, the annual state government Medicaid budget is now over 30% of the entire state budget with no end insight of how high that percentage could go. Furthermore, according to research from Pew Research, the number of states that were dedicating a higher proportion of their state budgets in 2013 vs. the year 2000 was 49 states, i.e. only one state was spending less on a percentage basis in 2013 vs. 2000.
2. At the Federal level, the national cost of Medicaid is also growing much faster than inflation and the economy putting a significant burden on the out of control national debt levels. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one out of every six dollars spent on healthcare in this country falls under the Medicaid program, a trend that is getting worse, not better.
3. Since only about two thirds of the doctors in this country accept Medicaid patients, quite often Medicaid patients have Medicaid coverage in theory but are nowhere close to or have access to a doctor, especially a specialist, that will accept them as a patient.

It is a bad program going fiscally bankrupt that delivers inferior care. Wow, cannot get much worse than that. But an aspect of Medicaid that is quite distressing is that much of its costs and resources are used by immigrants to this country, quite often in a much higher proportion that what is being by citizens. The following is not a discussion on national immigration policy but a rendering of the facts that underlie a lot of the financial strains that Medicaid is under, a program that Obama Care stressed even more:

• According to an article by Frank Vernuccio, writing for the Townhall website on January 31, 2018, a 2014 report by the Center For Immigration studies found that 42% of the growth in Medicaid enrollment from 2011 to 2013 was from immigrants and their children.
• The number of immigrants and their U.S. born kids on Medicaid grew twice as fast as the number of U.S. citizens and their kids on Medicaid from 2011 to 2013, 11% vs. 5%.
• The rise in Medicaid enrollment among immigrants and their kids now cost the American taxpayer $4.6 billion on an annual basis.
• By 2013, 25% of immigrants and their kids were on Medicaid while only 16% of native Americans and their kids were on Medicaid.
• A 2007 Congressional Budget Office research study found that: “State and local governments incur costs for providing services to unauthorized immigrants and have limited options for avoiding or minimizing those costs […] Rules governing many federal programs, as well as decisions handed down by various courts, limit the authority of state and local governments to avoid or constrain the costs of providing services to unauthorized immigrants […] The tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants.” In other words, immigrants are a newt negative when it comes to tax revenue and the costs of their Medicaid treatment.

Again, this is not meant to be a debate on immigration policy. But Obama Care took a shaky program that delivered inferior care at a very high cost, partly because of the higher than proportional care and costs being spent on immigrants, both legal and illegal, and dumped millions of more Americans onto the Medicaid failing pickup truck. All of which resulted in just another unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.

2) One of the main root causes of higher and higher healthcare costs in this country is listed above, namely that Americans are overweight and in many cases, obese. This extra weight being carried around by the majority of Americans directly causes a ton of health ailments including respiratory diseases, diabetes, failing joints, etc. 

These overweight/obesity related ailments require more and more healthcare resources to be used, i.e. it drives up demand, which in turn drives up the prices and costs of healthcare. It is a simple outcome of basic supply and demand economic theory. As we have always preached about Obama Care, it never attacked the root causes of our high healthcare costs in this country, a root cause like being overweight. And in any endeavor if you do not address and attack the root causes you will likely never resolve the problem you are facing.

But according to an article in the October 20, 2017 issue of The Week magazine, you can now add another costly ailment that being overweight causes: cancer:

• The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) analysed data from the U.S. Cancer Statistics database.
• They found that “cancers related to being overweight now account more than a third of diagnoses for this disease [cancer] in the U.S.”
• From 2005 to 2014, obesity related cancers increased 7% while cancers with no link to obesity decreased 13%.
• There are currently 13 types of cancers associated with “excess body fat” including cancers of the brain, breasts, ovaries, uterus, thyroid, and other organs.

Imagine how much healthcare costs, specifically expensive cancer healthcare costs would go down, if you could reduce the number of cancer patients by one third by eliminating the obesity problem in this country? Again, the law of supply and demand comes into play: reduce the demand for cancer healthcare and the cost for cancer health care, and overall health care, would go down. 

Obama Care never understood how better off the country would from a health, cancer, and cost perspective if they had attacked just this single root cause. Instead, they concocted a Rube Goldberg insurance solution to what is truly a public health problem, which of course, led to its failure.

So, two Obama Care failures today: the failure to fix a failing Medicaid system, especially its higher than proportionate costs going to immigrants vs. U.S. citizens and its failure to recognize the root causes of high healthcare costs in this country. More unfolding disasters to follow.

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Replacing Obama Care With Something That Actually Works, Part 1

Over the past two weeks we have reviewed in detail the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. We cited dozens and dozens of Americans, industry experts, and the realities of this disastrous piece of legislation. The first in that long series of posts can be accessed at:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2013/10/october-2013-obama-care-disaster-update.html

For a good summary of how bad this legislation is, consider the following general conclusions we have reached over the past two weeks:

• Many, many Americans are reporting on how their health insurance rates and deductibles are going up dramatically as a result of Obama Care despite the promise from Obama that the average American family would see their annual health insurance costs go down by $2,500.
• Many, many Americans are losing access to their doctors and hospitals despite the fact that Obama promised that if you like your current doctor, you would be able to continue seeing that doctor under Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are reporting that their current insurance policies are being terminated as a result of Obama Care.
• Many, many businesses and other organizations across America have curtailed hiring, stopped hiring, or have fired existing workers in order to stay profitable, a condition severely threatened by Obama Care.
• Many, many Americans are having their work hours curtailed as a result of Obama Care and are being turned in to part time workers.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are deplorably designed and fraught with errors, down time, and other technical problems, resulting in extremely low successful attempts to actually sign up for insurance.
• The data systems and websites that were deployed to support the sign up process for insurance through Obama Care health exchanges are likely turning into identify thieves’ paradise because of faulty or non-existent security protocols.
• The expected long term cost of Obama Care has tripled in just three years.
• The legislation will add trillions of dollars to the already too high national debt over the next decade or so.
• Many components of the failing legislation have already been terminated ( e.g. CLASS) for a variety or reasons or have been postponed because of implementation obstacles.
• In order to make the Obama Care financials look good, the legislation steals over $700 billion in proposed funding for Medicare over the next decade, further endangering the financial health of that government process.

Since we reached these conclusions, the situation has gotten even worse as more and more people find out how much more they are going to have to pay for insurance as a result of Obama Care and we learn more and more about what an epic failure the rollout has turned out to be, especially the website where all of the magic was supposed to happen. We will cover those latest instances of disaster in November.

But if not Obama Care, what? There is no debate that health care costs are going higher and higher in this country for less and less quality and service. Something has to be done. Today and tomorrow we will propose a problem solving approach that was first laid out in our book, “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.”  The twin philosophies of this approach include the following tenets:

1. Understand the root causes, the underlying causes of a problem because without that understanding you cannot resolve those problems.
2. And a favorite saying, “Try to pare things down. Few moves do a lot.”

These are obviously two tenets that Obama Care never understood. Those that created this monstrosity never understood the underlying root causes of escalating health care costs. Thus, their failure to resolve those causes. Second, the original legislation was over two thousand pages long and the regulations the law spawned are well over 10,000 pages and counting. Remember, few moves do a lot, over 10,000 pages do not.

Today and tomorrow, we will outline what we perceive are the true root causes of our high health care costs and propose steps to address and resolve those causes. After these two posts, we will review three alternatives to Obama Care as proposed by Republicans in Congress that have never seen the light of day because of  the mainstream media bias.

Root Cause #1 - Americans eat too much and eat too much of the wrong kind of food. On October 17, 2013, the health.com website ran an article based on the latest obesity results and research from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reported that about one in three U.S. adults are obese from a body weight perspective. 

This obesity epidemic costs the nation’s economy  an estimated $270 billion a year due to health care costs and loss of productivity associated with obesity and overweight, according to a 2011 report produced by the Society of Actuaries. This cost burdens every U.S. household with an average cost of almost $2,400 a year.

$270 billion a year, unreal. Imagine how much less heart disease, heart attacks, and diabetes health care costs could be avoided if the obesity monster was successfully addressed. Basic economic theory tells us if you reduce the demand for a product or service, in this case medical services for obesity's byproducts, the price of that product or service has to decrease. Obama Care does little, if anything, to address this $270 billion cost. 

Unfortunately, the Federal government is a top culprit in this obesity issue. Go to your pantry and refrigerator and read the ingredients on the label. How many of them of high fructose corn syrup (i.e. sugar) as a main ingredient? 

The U.S. government heavily over subsidizes the growing of corn in this country, resulting in extremely inexpensive fattening corn syrup that often ends up in our food chain, helping make people obese in just about every meal they eat. A quick, thirty second review of my refrigerator and pantry uncovers at least five products where high fructose corn syrup is a major ingredient, from tomato sauce to pancake syrup to jelly to soda to peanut butter.

 For a staggering view of how this fructose obsession and infestation works, I suggest that you view the documentary, “King Corn,” a scary review of how government subsides encourage the fructosing of our food supply.

So, how do we attack this root cause:

• Eliminate Federal government farm subsidies and no longer support the overgrowing of corn which ends up as inexpensive high corn fructose which ends up in our food chain which ends up as an obesity statistic.
• If farm subsidies are needed, they should be target specifically for bringing down the price of fresh vegetables and fruit, not the creation of obesity friendly foods and ingredients.
• Put together a five year plan that encourages food companies to phase out and remove damaging obesity ingredients such as high corn fructose from their product lines. Those companies that decide not to do so would face ever stiffening penalties, taxes, and fines for not dong so. 
• Those fines would be circulated back into education programs on health and diet for consumers. 

This root cause is really a public health issue which requires a change in behavior. It should be treated like the seat belt problem from decades ago to change behavior, steadily and logically over time. You need a rational, long term plan which eventually changes behavior at the farm level, the food processing level, and the consumer level. 

Find a way to leverage the food scientists at the food companies and challenge them to come up with new ingredients that provide the flavor without the obesity, especially since they would no longer be able to rely on cheap high fructose corn syrup. Failure to do so would eventually result in heavy fines, taxes, and penalties for those companies. 

Also, rather than hiring thousands and thousands of IRS agents to track down citizens that do not purchase health insurance under Obama Care, you would only have to hire hundreds and hundreds of government food scientists to ensure that the food companies are making their products healthier. This would result in  a substantial personnel cost savings for the Federal government.

Obama Care never understood this root cause. Even if it was able to get all Americans health insurance, those Americans would still be obese and would still be incurring the heavy medical price of being so. The root cause would be unchanged.

Root Cause # 2 - Americans smoke too much. How much cost savings there would be if no one smoked? Much less lung cancer, much less throat cancer, much less mouth cancer, much less heart disease, and much less of other types of diseases that inhaling smoke into your body causes. 

Much like the obesity problem, this root cause is a public health issue, not a health insurance issue. You can have all of the insurance in the world but if you still smoke, you are still likely to get a variety of cancers and diseases, you have not reduced the demand and cost for medical services. 

And just like with high fructose corn syrup, the Federal government is a major culprit. Every year, American taxpayers allow the Washington political class to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in farm subsidies to …tobacco farmers.. These farmers than grow tobacco that ends up in tobacco products which ends up in people’s bodies which causes costly medical expenses, disease, and death.

According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, every year the tobacco industry gets about $190 million in Federal money subsidies. This past summer, the Federal Health and Human Services department announced a $54 million campaign to get people to stop smoking. Talk about insanity, one part of the government is paying farmers to grow more tobacco and another part of the government is trying to get people to stop using tobacco. You cannot make this stuff up.

There are five steps needed to address this root cause:

• First, stop the insanity of paying tobacco farmers to grow tobacco. This will drive up tobacco production costs and hopefully stop some people from smoking from an economic perspective.
• Second, put a two prong research effort in place. One part of that research would be to more fully understand the smoking habit and addiction and find ways and treatments to reduce the desire and addiction to smoking, 
• The second research effort would be to find a way to either use tobacco products in non-lethal ways (e.g. bio fuels) or find a way to encourage tobacco farmers to switch to other, more profitable crops, further reducing the supply of tobacco.
• Third, continue and expand existing smoking cessation programs as much as possible, spending a little money up front to keep people from smoking and saving a lot of money down the road from treating their medical conditions from smoking.
• Fourth, put together a sustained public health program that discourages smoking at all ages, specially targeting the younger generation before they start smoking.
• Five, make tobacco users pay substantially more for their health insurance, let the cost causer be the cost payer. Maybe if the true medical cost of smoking was actually borne by smokers there would be less smoking. Obama Care actually tried to institute this type of policy but like everything else in this horrid piece of legislation, this component has been postponed for at least another year.

Public health efforts, supply and demand techniques, scientific research, easier and more effective approaches to this root cause than the Obama Care approach of making sure that people have health insurance but not reducing the levels of medical services needed to treat tobacco related diseases.

Would these public health approaches work? Consider the assertions made by the head of the world renowned Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delose Cosgrove, in a Forbes magazine interview in 2010:

• In our current health care industry there is no incentive for staying well. 
• Obesity in America accounts for 10% of all health care costs. 
• Smoking, diet, and lack of exercise, according to Dr. Cosgrove, contribute to 40% of premature deaths in this country, 70% of chronic diseases such as heart disease, and cancer account for 75% of the nation's total health care. 
• At the Cleveland Clinic, all deep fryers were removed from the cafeterias, the menus were made healthier, the candy and soda machines were removed, free exercise programs were initiated for Clinic employers, free Weight Watcher memberships were made available, and in the first year of this transformation, Cleveland Clinic employees lost 120,000 pounds of weight, 60 tons. 
• From a smoking perspective, smoking was banned on the entire grounds of the Clinic, free smoking cessation classes were offered to both employees and the entire county where the Clinic is located, a lobbying push was made to ban public smoking everywhere in Ohio, and the Clinic stopped hiring smokers. In four years the smoking rate in the county went from 28% to 18%, a little less than the national average of 20%.

Wow, no 10,000 pages of regulations, no failed and expensive government website, no one losing their current health insurance, just good, old-fashioned  root cause analysis and solutions. In this case, the solution was focused on a public health effort to change behavior for the better and for the healthier, not to install an unworkable Rube Goldberg insurance process that did nothing to reduce the demand for health care services. 

Imagine how much heart disease was avoided because there was 60 fewer tons of fat stressing people’s bodies. Imagine how many cancer cases were avoided because the smoking rate in a county went down form 28% to 18%. Again, simple economics: reduce the demand, reduce the cost and price. Reduce the demand/need for health care services the cost of those services goes way down. Obama Care completely missed this simple fact of life.

For more on Dr. Cosgrove and an example of a town in Minnesota that got their citizens together to get the whole town healthy, go to the following link:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/healthy-solution-to-our-unhealthy.html

We will finish up our root cause analysis tomorrow. You will see that addressing the true underlying causes of our high health care costs is not that hard but that Obama Care’s architects missed the boat completely. Remember: "Pare things down. A few moves do a lot." Ten thousands pages of unreadable government regulations accomplish very little.

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.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Obama Care - Still Constitutional and Still a Disaster: Part 4 - Bifurcating Medical Care and Concierge Medicine

We have spent the past several days reviewing why Obama Care is such a disaster, discussions that we will summarize tomorrow as we wrap up this depressing four part series on the disaster that is Obama Care. The past two days have been my thoughts and analysis based on my reading, research, and understanding of what Obama Care is about to do to just about every American.

However, I am by no means an expert on health care, just an average American who cares about his own family's future health care needs, the health care of friends and other Americans, and the fiscal future of our country and democracy. Today, I will present some work that has been done by an expert in the field of health care, as reported in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal. 

John Goodman is president of the National Center for Policy Analysis and the author of: "Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis" (Independent Institute, 2012). He wrote the following insightful analysis for the August 14, 2012 edition of the Wall Street Journal, "Why The Doctor Can't See You."

If you do not believe what I have been reviewing the past couple of days, take a look at what an expert thinks is going to happen under Obama Care and do two things for you own good:

1. Don't ever get sick.
2. Be very, very scared.

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August 14, 2012, 7:19 p.m. ET


John C. Goodman: "Why the Doctor Can't See You"

The demand for health care under ObamaCare will increase dramatically. The supply of physicians won't. Get ready for a two-tier system of medical care.
Are you having trouble finding a doctor who will see you? If not, give it another year and a half. A doctor shortage is on its way.

Most provisions of the Obama health law kick in on Jan. 1, 2014. Within the decade after that, an additional 30 million people are expected to acquire health plans—and if the economic studies are correct, they will try to double their use of the health-care system.

Meanwhile, the administration never seems to tire of reminding seniors that they are entitled to a free annual checkup. Its new campaign is focused on women. Thanks to health reform, they are being told, they will have access to free breast and pelvic exams and even free contraceptives. Once ObamaCare fully takes effect, all of us will be entitled to a long list of preventive services—with no deductible or copayment.

Here is the problem: The health-care system can't possibly deliver on the huge increase in demand for primary-care services. The original ObamaCare bill actually had a line item for increased doctor training. But this provision was zeroed out before passage, probably to keep down the cost of health reform. The result will be gridlock.

Take preventive care. ObamaCare says that health insurance must cover the tests and procedures recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. What would that involve? In the American Journal of Public Health (2003), scholars at Duke University calculated that arranging for and counseling patients about all those screenings would require 1,773 hours of the average primary-care physician's time each year, or 7.4 hours per working day. 

And all of this time is time spent searching for problems and talking about the search. If the screenings turn up a real problem, there will have to be more testing and more counseling. Bottom line: To meet the promise of free preventive care nationwide, every family doctor in America would have to work full-time delivering it, leaving no time for all the other things they need to do.

When demand exceeds supply in a normal market, the price rises until it reaches a market-clearing level. But in this country, as in other developed nations, Americans do not primarily pay for care with their own money. They pay with time.

How long does it take you on the phone to make an appointment to see a doctor? How many days do you have to wait before she can see you? How long does it take to get to the doctor's office? Once there, how long do you have to wait before being seen? These are all non-price barriers to care, and there is substantial evidence that they are more important in deterring care than the fee the doctor charges, even for low-income patients.

For example, the average wait to see a new family doctor in this country is just under three weeks, according to a 2009 survey by medical consultancy Merritt Hawkins. But in Boston, Mass.—which enacted a law under Gov. Mitt Romney that established near-universal coverage—the wait is about two months.

When people cannot find a primary-care physician who will see them in a reasonable length of time, all too often they go to hospital emergency rooms. Yet a 2007 study of California in the Annals of Emergency Medicine showed that up to 20% of the patients who entered an emergency room left without ever seeing a doctor, because they got tired of waiting. Be prepared for that situation to get worse.

When demand exceeds supply, doctors have a great deal of flexibility about who they see and when they see them. Not surprisingly, they tend to see those patients first who pay the highest fees. A New York Times survey of dermatologists in 2008 for example, found an extensive two-tiered system. For patients in need of services covered by Medicare, the typical wait to see a doctor was two or three weeks, and the appointments were made by answering machine.

However, for Botox and other treatments not covered by Medicare (and for which patients pay the market price out of pocket), appointments to see those same doctors were often available on the same day, and they were made by live receptionists.

As physicians increasingly have to allocate their time, patients in plans that pay below-market prices will likely wait longest. Those patients will be the elderly and the disabled on Medicare, low-income families on Medicaid, and (if the Massachusetts model is followed) people with subsidized insurance acquired in ObamaCare's newly created health insurance exchanges.

Their wait will only become longer as more and more Americans turn to concierge medicine for their care. Although the model differs from region to region and doctor to doctor, concierge medicine basically means that patients pay doctors to be their agents, rather than the agents of third-party-payers such as insurance companies or government bureaucracies.

For a fee of roughly $1,500 to $2,000, for example, a Medicare patient can form a new relationship with a doctor. This usually includes same day or next-day appointments. It also usually means that patients can talk with their physicians by telephone and email. The physician helps the patient obtain tests, make appointments with specialists and in other ways negotiate an increasingly bureaucratic health-care system.

Here is the problem. A typical primary-care physician has about 2,500 patients (according to a 2009 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), but when he opens a concierge practice, he'll typically take about 500 patients with him (according to MDVIP, the largest organization of concierge doctors): That's about all he can handle, given the extra time and attention those patients are going to expect. But the 2,000 patients left behind now must find another physician. So in general, as concierge care grows, the strain on the rest of the system will become greater.

I predict that in the next several years concierge medicine will grow rapidly, and every senior who can afford one will have a concierge doctor. A lot of non-seniors will as well. We will quickly evolve into a two-tiered health-care system, with those who can afford it getting more care and better care.

In the meantime, the most vulnerable populations will have less access to care than they had before ObamaCare became law.

****************************************

Don't think this will happen? Consider an August 6, 2012 article from the Washington Post. It discusses the research and analysis of Sandra Decker, an economist with the Center for Disease Control. She went through the 2011 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which asks thousands of doctors whether they would accept new Medicaid patients.

What she found could could reinforce the concept discussed above: 31% of the doctors in the survey said they will not be accepting new Medicaid patients, significantly higher than the percentage who said they will not be accepting new private insurance or Medicare patients.

Ms. Decker found that there is a somewhat strong relationship between doctors' willingness to take on Medicaid patients and the amount of money they get from Medicaid to take on these patients. In other words, doctors that get paid more to handle these types of patients are more likely to see these types of patients. Obvious.

Thus, this marketing rationing is already going on and will likely get worse and devolve into the two tier system described above.

Again, EVERYONE in this country should be able to get reasonably priced and reasonably available health care. Unfortunately, given how poorly Obama Care was thought out and written, this goal is not going to happen as a result of this legislation.


We invite all readers of this blog to visit our new website, "The United States Of Purple," at:

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The United States of Purple is a new grass roots approach to filling the office of President of The United States by focusing on the restoration of freedom in the United States, focusing on problem solving skills and results vs. personal political enrichment, and imposing term limits on all future Federal politicians. No more red states, no more blue states, just one United States Of America under the banner of Purple.

The United States Of Purple's website also provides you the formal opportunity to sign a petition to begin the process of implementing a Constitutional amendment to impose fixed term limits on all Federally elected politicians. Only by turning out the existing political class can we have a chance of addressing and finally resolving the major issues of or times.

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:

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http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment/