No - Medicaid Is Not Being Eliminated, No - Millions Of Americans Are Not Going Top Die From Medicaid Cuts, Yes - Corrupt and Wasteful Government Spending Needs To Be Axed

 It is budget time in Washington these days and of course, lies, misinformation, and political posturing are in the air. These people can never agree to do the right thing and they use every opportunity, always to the detriment of citizens and taxpayers, to get political equity and an edge in their favor.

And this year it is no different. Democrats, liberals, and legacy media types have been feeding the lie machine as it applies to Medicaid. Claims range from Medicaid being totally eliminated to Medicaid recipients are going to see significant cuts in coverage and lose much of their health care coverage. 

Specifically, Democrats in  Congress have  claimed that the current Medicaid budget proposal is “the largest cut to healthcare in American history” and have insanely suggested more than once that Americans will die as a result of the current budget proposal. Of course, those propagating the lies never provide any proof to their claims, just unfounded hysterics.

And think about it, would Republicans be so stupid to eliminate the health care coverage for tens of  millions of American voters? And even more inane, they would let Americans die? Seriously, think logically. This is why the Democratic party and legacy media approval ratings, as found by public opinion polls, show both entities are at historical lows when it comes to being trustworthy.

So let’s look at some different opinions on how Medicaid is not going to go away or be significantly reduced. How pregnant women, disabled citizens, etc. will still have Medicaid coverage. The first challenge to the lies comes from a local Florida Congressman of mine, Gus Bilirakis. He recently sent out a dedicated Medicaid email to his citizens  to disprove the hysteria discussed above:

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Recently, my office has received inquiries regarding the legislation passed by the House, specifically regarding changes to the Medicaid program. Given the misinformation circulating, I want to ensure you have accurate information about this legislation and how it may affect Floridians. 

Below are some frequently asked questions:

QUESTION: Did Republicans cut $880 billion from Medicaid?

ANSWER: No. The $880 billion number comes from the entire House Energy & Commerce Committee’s instruction to find $880 billion in savings, including other policy areas like energy, environment, and telecommunications. This portion of the bill puts an end to waste, fraud, and abuse, so that the program can work for the Americans it was designed to serve. 

QUESTION: Did the Reconciliation bill cut aid to mothers, children, seniors, and people with disabilities?

ANSWER: Absolutely not. This bill strengthens and secures Medicaid for those who need it most. There are no cuts to Medicaid for mothers, children, people with disabilities, or elderly Americans. Instead, it ensures illegal immigrants, able-bodied adults choosing not to work, and people who aren’t actually qualified for Medicaid aren’t draining the already-burdened system. 

QUESTION: Will tens of millions of people lose Medicaid coverage?

ANSWER: No. Prior to the final bill, liberals asked the Congressional Budget Office to score a number of policies that were not included in the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s portion of the bill, completely misrepresenting the impact of the legislation. In reality, the only Medicaid enrollees losing coverage from this bill are illegal immigrants, people who are not actually eligible for Medicaid but receiving coverage anyway, or able-bodied adults choosing not to work.  Furthermore, Florida is not an expansion state – meaning – the only groups that have ever been eligible to receive Medicaid are low income seniors, children, disabled adults, pregnant women, and post-partum women.  These groups are exempted from any of the changes in the reconciliation bill.   This means, that in Florida, the only people who will lose coverage are illegal immigrants and people who have never actually been eligible for Medicaid.  This is what we mean when we say we are eliminating fraud.

QUESTION: Are the bill’s work requirements too burdensome?

ANSWER: Able-bodied adults without dependents or co-occurring exclusions should work, pursue education/training, or perform community service in order to receive taxpayer subsidized Medicaid coverage. The following populations are exempt from work requirements: pregnant women, foster youth or former foster youth up to age 26, members of a Tribe, disabled individuals, and individuals who are a parent or caregiver of a dependent child or an individual with a disability. In Florida, able bodied adults, who don’t fall into one of the exempted categories above, have never qualified for Medicaid and thus the new requirements do not change Florida’s Medicaid eligibility.

QUESTION: Does this bill pay for tax cuts for billionaires?

ANSWER: The historic tax cuts included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) impacted every American family. It is vital that we extend TCJA and prevent Americans’ taxes from going up. But independent of the need for tax certainty, our Medicaid program is on the brink. This bill also eliminates billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse and refocuses Medicaid on those who need it most.

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There you have it, a fact based  answer to the crazy theories that Democrats,  liberals and  legacy media types have been spreading. If you do  not trust Congressman Bilirakis, then please do some research on your own to see what you can find without accepting the lies without any backup evidence.  

The need in this and every future federal budget process is to  eliminate wasteful and useless spending, be it stupid government programs, inefficiency within the Federal  bureaucracy, or criminal fraud. The national debt is fast approaching $37,000,000,000,000 and if the brakes are not put on this out of control government spending, the country and its democracy will soon vanish.

Don’t  believe Billirakis? Consider the take of Senate Majority John Thune who apparently has actually read the current budget numbers: “Medicaid was designed to serve a particular population, and what’s happened is [that] it’s evolved and morphed into this thing now that covers a lot of people that weren’t supposed to be covered in the first place, including illegals and the Medicaid expansion population. It’s really just making these programs, strengthening them, improving them, and targeting them to the people who you know Medicaid was designed to serve in the first place.”

He went on to say: “The House really honed in on the waste, fraud and abuse in the program, and the people who are benefiting from the program in a way that in for whom it wasn’t designed.  That’s where your work requirements come in. And we think that’s a natural assumption that you would make.”

If that is the reality, how can anyone possibly disagree with the intent: save the program by returning the program to its roots and get rid of those that do not need it and do not deserve to be in the program, sucking up limited taxpayer dollars.

However, if you think that everyone should be allowed on the Medicaid rolls, that anyone who is able to work does not have to, that it is okay to have inefficiencies and criminal fraud in government programs, that the ballooning national debt caused by Washington  politicians not able to control out of control spending is okay, then what Thune and Bilirakis have to say is not important to you. You would rather have others do  your thinking for you.

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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:

https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom

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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/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

August, 2019, Part 7, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure of Single Pay Health Care Systems Around the World, Continued

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.

Six 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 subsequent posts, 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.

We continue that discussion today, the failures of the single payer healthcare model:

1) Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit, Phd, writing for the Heritage Foundation on August 13, 2018, laid out a perfect illustration why socialized medicine/single payer healthcare systems are almost always expensive. But first, a look at some of the real numbers the authors talk about and how government run healthcare makes a bad situation worse:

• Depending on the assumption set used, this country will be looking at a doctor shortage of anywhere from between 43,000 to 121,000 doctors within 12 years.
• A root cause of this shortage is the reality that doctors today spend more and more time on non medical, regulatory, and administrative activities, leading to frustration, burnout, and premature retirements.
• Socialized medicine increases these frustrations while reducing the freedom to treat patients the way doctors are trained to treat them while capping their compensation.

So single payer health care plans, government control over health care decisions, make it difficult to get enough supply of high quality doctors to enter the field, making health care quality even worse, as we recently saw in England during the recent flu season:

• Back in October, 1975, a British politician, Labor Minister David Cohen, had a rare insight into why his government’s actions, in this case the creation of socialized medicine and a single payer government run healthcare system would fail miserably: “The health service was launched on a fallacy. First, we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service- it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”
• Fast forward to the winter of 2018 where a very bad strain of influenza hit the country.
• British hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed which is not surprising since a survey conducted by the British Medical Association found that 82% of its members felt their workplaces were understaffed, which is not surprising given the point we made above about doctors not wanting to stay in the field due to overt government interference in the medical process.
• Listen to one doctor describe his personal flu experience: “I came on to shift yesterday afternoon and there were patients literally everywhere. The corridor into the hospital was so busy we couldn’t have got a cardiac arrest patient through it into the resuscitation room. To say staff were at the end of their tethers would be a complete understatement.”
• This pre-existing doctor shortage situation in a single payer system combined with the flu outbreak resulted in 50,000 surgeries being cancelled because limited resources were diverted to flu patients.
• This in turn further endangered those that needed the surgery, likely making their medical conditions more expensive and dangerous to treat later.
• By March, 2018, British emergency rooms had 15.4% of their patients waiting over four hours before seeing anyone for treatment.
• This was the worst performance ever recorded.
• Back in the real world, the number of ailing British citizens waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35%, from 128,575 in 2016 to about 362,000 in 2017 to 490,000 patients in 2018. 
• Thus, half a million people in this single payer government run system had to wait four and a half months to get treatment.
• Even worse, 2,755 sick folks had to wait OVER A YEAR to get treatment.

Long delays, poor quality, high costs, yeah, that is working out great. And yet despite this British reality and the unfolding disasters of Obama Care, some American politicians still want to bring single payer healthcare to America despite the failure of such a system across the world.

2) What if we are wrong? What if there is a set of numbers that track reality actually show that single payer systems, like the one in Canada, are actually pretty good? So let’s examine some healthcare numbers:

• In the U.S., 56% of the citizens have private health insurance, 35% are covered with government financed health insurance (i.e. Medicare and Medicaid), and 9% are uninsured.
• In Canada, the government provides “free” health insurance to 100% of the citizens but 67% of its citizens pay for additional, needed health insurance coverage.
• The Canadian single payer system, while promoted as "universal,” does not cover prescription drug costs. dental care costs, and other medical costs which leads to a majority of them shelling out additional money to supplement their "free" government insurance.
• Thus, according to the Canadian Institute for Health and Information, many Canadians go without drug insurance or dental care.
• According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States spent 17.2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2016 while Canada, on the other hand, spent less on health care, clocking in at just 10.3% of its GDP in 2016.
• In 2016, for instance, the average American spent around $10,345 on health care, including insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, and other out-of-pocket costs while the average Canadian spent nearly half that, paying about $6,299 that same year.
• According to a Fraser Institute study, Canadians on average wait 21.2 weeks to see a specialist after a referral from a GP doctor while in the U.S. the average wait time is 24.1 days in metro U.S. areas, according to a Merritt Hawkins study, i.e. it takes about seven times longer to see a medical specialist in Canada than in the U.S.
• The Fraser study also found that in Canada, patients wait 4.1 weeks on average to get a CT scan, 10.8 weeks for an MRI scan, and 3.9 weeks for an ultrasound scan.
• These Canadian wait times for basic diagnostics health tools is very, very much longer than in the U.S., long waiting times that could result in far more serious health and pain levels while waiting.
• The long wait times has led 63,000 Canadians to travel outside of Canada for these basic tests in 2016, travel costs and diagnostic costs that were not covered by their government insurance.
• According to University of Pennsylvania Wharton School professor, Mark Pauly, a professor of healthcare management, “the wait time for scans [in the U.S.] is minimal":“If you are in the ER and need a scan, you will get it right away. There may be some delay in scheduling at a particular facility if you want an elective scan. Though in any large city, I am sure you could find someone who would take you within a few days.”
• Pauly also pointed out in the article that Canadians patients are more likely to suffer from acute diseases, have less access to specialists, and experience worse health outcomes than in the U.S,. since the Canadian system emphasizes primary care vs. acute care medicine and health care: “If you are a basically healthy person and your needs can be satisfied with primary care, you're probably going to be better off under the Canadian system. On the other hand, if you are sick, and especially if you have a chronic condition, you're going to wait longer in Canada and have to hobble around in pain for a longer period of time than you would in the U.S.”
• Canadians have the 13th longest life expectancy rate, age 82, while Americans' expected life length at 79 ranks it 45th in the world.
• Infant mortality rates are also lower in Canada, 4.5 deaths per 1,000 live births vs. 5.9 deaths in the U.S.
• While about 1.7 million people in the U.S. are diagnosed with cancer every year with about 610,000 dying from the disease, according to the Canadian Cancer Society, last year only 206,000 Canadians were diagnosed with cancer with about 80,800 dying from the disease.
• However, since the U.S. has nine times as many people than Canada, the cancer diagnosis and cancer death rates are a little higher in Canada.
• Pauly stated in the article that “ordinary people in Canada are healthier than in the U.S., but outcomes for cancer and very serious illnesses are less good there. It's a great place to live as long as you don't get too sick, as one critic put it.”
• But he also stated that since Canada has many more primary care doctors that can catch bad health trends earlier, which may account for the better ordinary health care and the horrible acute health results.

So, a lot of data but let me summarize: if you are relatively healthy then the Canadian system is better for you. If you do not need specialists, diagnostic scans, prescription drugs, have good, strong healthy teeth, you do not need to travel abroad for basic tests, are willing to risk a slightly higher cancer rate of diagnosis and death, and are willing to wait longer and endure more pain and get sicker and sicker, possibly endangering your life, while waiting to get treated by a specialist for a disease that you do get, than Canada is for you. 

Thus, the numbers do nothing to change our conclusions: single payer systems cause more pain, cost more, have much more bureaucracy which cuts down on the efficiency of providing healthcare. If you are working under the Canadian single payer system, you are going to wait for a very long time just to get a single diagnostic test, tests we take for granted and expect to be done immediately in this country.

We are seven posts into this theme and we still have more to discuss on how badly single payer healthcare systems are in Canada, England, and elsewhere in the world. Stay tuned.

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, 2018, Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Failure Of The Single Payer Health Care System and Why There is NO Such Thing as Free Health Care

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) We have often discussed the reality that single payer/government run healthcare in England, so-called socialized medicine, is a disaster. Government bureaucrats decide who lives and dies, there are long and dangerous wait times in ERs, treatment wait times are excruciating long, and medical results are always less robust than in the U.S. 

Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit, Phd, writing for the Heritage Foundation on August 13, 2018, laid out a perfect illustration why socialized medicine is almost always expensive and a failure, which sounds a lot like Obama Care’s qualities. But first, a look at some of the real numbers the authors talk about and how government run healthcare makes a bad situation worse:

• Depending on the assumption set used, this country will be looking at a doctor shortage of anywhere from between 43,000 to 121,000 doctors within 12 years.
• A root cause of this shortage is the reality that doctors today spend more and more time on non medical, regulatory, and administrative activities, leading to frustration, burnout, and premature retirements.
• Socialized medicine increases these frustrations while reducing the freedom to treat patients the way doctors are trained to treat them while capping their compensation.

So single payer health care plans, government control over health care decisions, make it difficult to get enough supply of high quality doctors to enter the field, making health care quality even worse, as we recently saw in England during the recent flu season:

• Back in October, 1975, a British politician, Labor Minister David Cohen, had a rare insight into why his government’s actions, in this case the creation of socialized medicine and a single payer government run healthcare system would fail miserably: “The health service was launched on a fallacy. First, we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service- it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”
• Fast forward to the winter of 2018 where a very bad strain of influenza hit the country.
• British hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed which is not surprising since a survey conducted by the British Medical Association found that 82% of its members felt their workplaces were understaffed, which is not surprising given the point we made above about doctors not wanting to stay in the field due to overt government interference in the medical process.
• Listen to one doctor describe his personal flu experience: “I came on to shift yesterday afternoon and there were patients literally everywhere. The corridor into the hospital was so busy we couldn’t have got a cardiac arrest patient through it into the resuscitation room. To say staff were at the end of their tethers would be a complete understatement.”
• This pre-existing doctor shortage situation in a single payer system combined with the flu outbreak resulted in 50,000 surgeries being cancelled because limited resources were diverted to flu patients.
• This in turn further endangered those that needed the surgery, likely making their medical conditions more expensive and dangerous to treat later.
• By March, 2018, British emergency rooms had 15.4% of their patients waiting over four hours before seeing anyone for treatment.
• This was the worst performance ever recorded.
• Back in the real world, the number of ailing British citizens waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35%, from 128,575 in 2016 to about 362,000 in 2017 to 490,000 patients in 2018. 
• Thus, half a million people in this single payer government run system had to wait four and a half months to get treatment.
• Even worse, 2,755 sick folks had to wait OVER A YEAR to get treatment.

Long delays, poor quality, high costs, yeah, that is working out great. And yet despite this British reality and the unfolding disasters of Obama Care, some American politicians still want to bring single payer healthcare to America despite the failure of such a system across the world.

2) One of the stupid reasons put forth for single payer systems is that healthcare under such a system is free! Yes,under this reasoning free healthcare jumps out of the sky and no one pays for it! Amazing!

Of course this is plain stupid. Nothing is free in life including healthcare. While those eventually receiving healthcare services do not pay under this system at that time everyone paid for the services via their taxes. 

Check out the following link to get a simple straightforward explanation why saying healthcare is free in a single payer system is absolutely stupid:

https://libertyvideonews.com/reality-check-there-is-no-such-thing-as-free-healthcare/

That will do it for today: there is still no free lunch in the healthcare world and the single payer/government controlled system is still a road to shoddy and dangerous healthcare. More 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