Love My Country, Loathe My Government: single payer system

Showing posts with label single payer system. Show all posts

Friday, August 16, 2019

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

Sunday, August 11, 2019

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

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
Americans smoke too much.
Americans do not exercise enough.
The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and 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.

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

Friday, January 18, 2019

January, 2019, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Bad Health Care Priorities in California and NYC

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.

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.

Today's post is not so much the failures of Obama Care but the health care idiocy elsewhere in the political class across the country:

1) We have often talked about what bad shape California is in across any number of perspectives:

It's unfunded state government liabilities is over $200 billion.
Some of its larger cities have massive homelessness problems.
In Los Angeles, over 40% of its residents make so little money that they qualify for Medicaid.
The state’s infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) is falling apart, like every other state’s.
It’s public schools severely under educate its kids.
It has just suffered through massive wildfires that have killed, maimed, and made homeless many of its citizens.
Like other states, many of its citizens do not have healthcare coverage.
It’s high speed train dream project has been a massive and expensive failure.
Out migration is a large problem has productive citizens flee the state because of its high taxes and shaky future.

Certainly a state in sad shape financially. But what does the new governor want to do in the face of these sever problems relative to its American citizens living in the state, at least those that are still there:

Newly sworn in governor, Gavin Newsome, announced that he will expand the state’s Medicaid program to cover the health care needs of young adult illegal immigrants.
Other illegal immigrants already are covered by the state’s Medicaid program so he has just added an extra expense to cover MORE illegal immigrants.
Obviously, tax paying citizens at some point will have to pay for this additional coverage of illegal immigrants’ healthcare needs.
According to Newsome: “People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe — they all hang in the balance. The country is watching us, the world is watching us. The future depends on us, and we will seize this moment.”

Funny how another liberal politician seems to care more about illegal immigrants than his own constituents. Just once I would like to see people like Newsome have the same urgency, the same compassion, the same “seize the moment” energy about his own Americans.

And the problems that affect real citizens that we listed above will have less resources to support and help real citizens’ needs in education, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. and those limited resources will go to help illegal immigrants.

2) Oh, but wait! In case you thought that illegal immigrant health care was strictly a California problem, you would be wrong. According to the Money and Markets website:

J.T. Crowe, writing for the website on January 8, 2019, reviewed how New York City is thinking about taking taxpayer money to fund health care for all of its citizens including illegal immigrants.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed that $100 million of taxpayer wealth be diverted to provide affordable “health care for all” in the city.
His plan would cover 600,000 people including illegal immigrants.
According to the article: “The plan, called “NYC Care,” will offer public health insurance on a sliding scale based on income, and will begin later this year in the Bronx before being available to all New Yorkers by 2021. The plan will cost about $100 million once it reaches full enrollment, the mayor’s office said.”
Apparently, if you are in this program, you would not have a choice of doctors, a doctor would be assigned to you whether you liked him or her or not.
The theory is that this plan would eventually save the city money by reducing emergency room visits and by improving overall public health.

So many problems with this plan:

Both Obama Care and its forerunner in Massachusetts promised that emergency room visits would go down once government intervened in the healthcare market.
But those reductions never occurred and a case could be made that emergency room visits actually increased.
De Blasio also said that, “We wanted one large solution for everyone. We are trying to avoid people getting health care the wrong way,’ which is another inane comment since “one large solution” will NEVER fit everyone’s needs (Obamacare prove that) and he pretends that he knows what is the “right” solution for everyone.
But the really stupid aspect of this plan is the math.
He wants to spend $100 million a year to cover the health care needs of 600,000 people.
Do the math, Bill, $100 million means that every one of those 600,000 people will get….about $167 worth of healthcare a year, or a paltry $14 a month.

Either de Blasio is very bad at math and has no concept that $100 million will come nowhere close to covering the healthcare needs of 600,000 people or he is using the time tested political trick of low balling the cost estimate of a project, knowing that the cost will be much higher and by then the program will be embedded into the bureaucracy. If he is using the trick, then a lot more taxpayers are going to pay a lot more to cover the astronomical costs of 600,000 people, many of whom should not even be here from an illegal immigration perspective.

Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration along with other countries' single payer health insurance plans have proven that politicians, government bureaucracies, and massive government programs have no chance of being efficient, effective, and worthwhile. And yet people like Newsome and de Blasio somehow think that they can do what massive government efforts in the past have failed to do. Insanity.

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

Sunday, December 23, 2018

December,2018, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Americans Say No To Single Payer Systems and A Texas Judge Says No To Obama Care

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.

In England, recovery from disease and health issues is almost always worse than in the United States.
In Canada, although everyone has “free” healthcare and health care insurance, the majority of Canadians have to pay extra for their health care since the “free” coverage is skimpy and it does not cover drug prescriptions, dental coverage, and vision coverage.
As a result, tens of thousands of Canadians leave the country every year to get medical care elsewhere in the world that they cannot get in real time in Canada.
While Americans wait hours or days to get basic tests (e.g. MRI scans, X-Rays, etc.), Canadians have to wait weeks or months for the same basic health care.

The following posts are just a sample of real data and reality of how bad single payer systems are:

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-2018part-2-unfolding-disaster.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2018/02/februrary-2018-part-2-unfolding.html

https://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/02/february-2017-part-5-unfolding-disaster.html

And in a sense we already have a single payer system in various forms in this country and they fail just like other countries’ single payer systems:

The Veterans Administration has been a failure for years as the VA executives got rich on bonus payments while veterans had to wait months to see a doctor, with many of them dying while they waited.
Medicaid provides skimpy coverage with narrow networks and about a third of doctors across the country refusing to take on Medicaid patients.
Medicare and Medicaid lose tens of billions of dollars every year from criminal fraud and inefficiencies.

Not a pretty sight. And it appears that it is not just me that thinks a single payer system in this country is a good idea:

According to a NewsMax article by Jeffrey Rodack on December 6, 2018, a recent Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans think that a single payer/universal healthcare system in this country is a bad idea.
54% of Americans polled would reject such a healthcare system in this country.
Only 40% were in favor of such a system for us.
Sentiment is quite different across political ideals since 85% of Democrats, say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure all have healthcare coverage while only 27% of Republicans say it is the government’s responsibility to ensure Americans have healthcare coverage.

Hopefully the political class in this country take a long hard look at the failure of the single payer model around the world, the failures of this country’s experience with single payer-like system and the reality as uncovered by Gallup that the majority of Americans do NOT want such a system in this country.

2) For those that have not heard, a Texas judge recently ruled the Obama Care legislation as un-Constitutional. His reasoning, according to Bloomberg reporting: “U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that the Affordable Care Act, the signature health-care overhaul by President Barack Obama, needed to be eviscerated after Congress last year zeroed out a key provision — the tax penalty for not complying with the requirement to buy insurance.”

Remember, the original Obama Care legislation forced every American to have health insurance coverage or become a criminal subject to progressively heavier fines as time went by. Most Americans who value freedom found such a requirement, i.e. government and politicians, forcing us to buy something that maybe we did not want, did not need, or could not afford, repugnant to free choice and an extreme overreach of a central, overbearing government effort.

While this was certainly a right call from a freedom perspective, and you know that Democrats will appeal this up to the Supreme Court, I had to laugh at a ludicrous statement made by a Democratic official out in California: “Today’s ruling is an assault on 133 million Americans with preexisting conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the ACA’s consumer protections for health care, and on America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Friday afternoon.

My gosh, such drivel on many different fronts:

First of all, Obama Care was targeted at individuals who did not have employer provided health insurance and who had to purchase insurance on the open, individual insurance market.
Those who get insurance from their employers do not have to worry about not getting covered because of pre-existing conditions.
There are nowhere close to 133 million Americans that a) have pre-existing conditions and b) need to get their insurance coverage on the individual market.
Thus, his 133 million number is a ridiculous lie.
Anyone who wants insurance via the Obama Care exchanges can still get it, the ruling just states that they do not HAVE to get it as the original legislation says.
So those 20 million people he refers to, assuming that the number is right which I believe is inflated by at least 100%, have nothing to worry about since they can still get Obama Care insurance and this ruling is on hold subject to appeals.
And the most idiotic statement of all, namely that “America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care” as a result of Obama Care could not be any further from reality.
Obama Care caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred health insurance options resulting in every growing premium and deductible costs, doing the exact opposite of what it was heralded to do, reduce health insurance costs.

As always, single payer systems in other countries and Obama Care in this country tried to resolve a public health issue with an insurance solution and failure was inevitable. Higher costs, lower quality have always been the result. Fortunately, Americans as measured by Gallup and the judge in Texas understand the reality, namely that government meddling in this area of life makes a bad situation worse.

More Obama Care disasters to be discussed in the following posts.

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:

Friday, October 5, 2018

September, 2018, Part 2, By The Numbers: Medicare Insanity and Crime, Gun Control Causes Gun Violence and More

On a semi-regular basis we do a post under the theme, “By The Numbers.” Under this theme we analysis the crazy ways that politicians use numbers, from making them up outright, to using them inappropriately, to using them to lie to us. The problem for them when they do that is it is so easy to show how either stupid they are or how conniving they are.

As an FYI, as you read my analysis of the misuse of numbers, keep in mind that I have a masters degree in statistics and for most of my life have been involved in analyzing numbers and stats. Politicians misuse of numbers and statistics is taken as a personal and professional affront to me and my profession.

1) Canada has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world and has had them for a while. The mayor of Toronto recently said that more gun control restrictions were needed. Byt according to the BBC: “Gun-related homicides and gun violence have increased. Firearm offences have also been on the rise in Canada in recent years. In 2016, there were 2,465 criminal violations involving firearms, an increase of 30 percent since 2013, according to figures released by the federal government.”

Much like Chicago, the more politicians put restrictions on guns the higher the violence level goes. Coincidence? I think not.

2) Many Washington politicians want to create a single payer health insurance system in this country where they and the Federal bureaucracy control EVERY aspect of EVERY American’s healthcare. Never mind that this kind of system has failed miserably in just about every country around the world where it exists.

They have coined this process of their's “Medicare For All” as if this is a good thing. But we have pointed out too many times to mention that Medicare is infested with criminal fraud and inefficiencies. Consider some sobering statistics from a recent AARP publication:

Medicare fraud alone is about $60 billion a year.
This comes out to about a $400 cost for every U.S. household every year.
The Medicare fraud level itself is larger than the Federal budgets for the EPA, Nuclear Security Administration, Department of the Interior, NASA, Pell College Grants, NIH Medical Research, and the Department of Homeland Security.
In fact, that $60 billion fraud loss is larger than the budgets of the EPA, Nuclear Security Administration, Department of the Interior, and NASA combined.

And some in Washington want to expand the Medicare program many times over. Can you imagine how large the fraud would become if that happened?

3) AARP also recently reported on some medical people that actually got caught defrauding the Federal government within the Medicare program:

A Floridian doctor, Salomon Melgen, was sentenced to 17 years in jail for stealing $73 million from Medicare.
Houston doctor, Earnest Gibson III, was sentenced to 45 years in jail for stealing $158 million from Medicare.
A Fort Worth doctor, Noble Ezuknma, got 16 years in jail for being part of a $50 million Medicare scheme.

The thing that amazes me about these numbers is how much was stolen from Medicare before the crime was caught. These criminals are stealing millions and millions of dollars before getting caught. Is there no simple check point within the Medicare process that says that maybe claims for $158 million down in Houston is a little over the top? And these are the bozos that got caught, how many hundreds or thousands of other, smarter people are stealing from the Medicare system and taxpayers that are too smart to get caught

4) Hate him or love him, the numbers prove that Trump has presided over a massive economic boom time for this country and it citizens. Strong economic growth, low inflation, low unemployment, tax cuts, stable gas prices, the list of economic positives goes on and on. Compare his results to the anemic Obama economic results, as recently pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article:

In the previous economic 11 recoveries after a recession prior to Obama, the lost jobs during the recession were, on average, recovered in 27 months after the recession began: for Obama’s recovery, it took more than six years, 76 months.
Even the severe recession during the Reagan years recovered all of the lost jobs in just 35 months, half the time of the Obama recovery.
In those previous pre-Obama recoveries, GDP recovered on average in a little over a year: in the Obama recovery, that GDP recovery too three and a half years, twice the length of the severe Reagan recovery.
GDP growth averaged 2% over the Obama years, a third lower than the long term growth trend while Trump has gotten growth back over the 3% level in many quarters.

As we have pointed out so many times, Obama had no concept of how to help foster economic growth. Rather than reducing taxes and regulations, he did the opposite with the numbers above showing how terrible those policies of his were.

5) We have pointed out many times that three states, California, Illinois, and New Jersey my former home state, are in a race to see how fast they can become fiscally and economically insolvent. All three states have spent well beyond their means and tax bases, have shown no inclination to rein in spending and thus, their road to financial ruin is well underway. The only question that remain is when will that ruin become official and which state gets there first.

My money is on New Jersey. That state has a new governor, Patrick Murphy, and according to a summer Wall Street Journal article, he has shown no interest in all at reducing out of control state spending:

He wants to spend $50 million a year on “free” community college for state residents. How spending $50 million and saying it is free still eludes me.
He wants to increase annual school spending by over a quarter billion dollars a year.
He wants to bump up the top state income tax rate to 10.75% from 8.97%, an act that Obama proved is usually counter productive to economic growth and vitality.
Note: when Maryland did the same thing several years ago, the wealthier state residents just moved out of state, resulting in less income tax revenue despite higher tax rates.
But his tax insanity does not stop with the income state raise: he wants to raise the state sales tax to 7.5% from 7% and he wants to raise the state’s corporate tax rate to 13% from 9%, making it the highest corporate tax rate in the country and likely driving many businesses, and the jobs they create, out of the state.

And keep in mind that New Jersey probably has the worst funded pension and public employee retirement plans in the country, funding only 31% or so of its future pension liabilities. This is a classic numbers death spiral: politicians in the state have spent too much while not saving enough, they are raising taxes to cover their shortfall which will cause the wealthier residents and businesses to leave the state because of higher taxation which will reduce tax revenue which will mean that taxes need to be raised more which will drive more people and businesses out and boom, the death spiral is in place with no way out.

Oh, and by the way, New Jersey already has the highest property taxes in the country so it will not leave much wiggle room for those taxes either.

Whether at the state level of Federal level, it is obvious over and over that politicians have no concept of how to manage budgets, organizations, or economic growth. Their programs are ineffective and crime infested, their economic and tax policies are counterproductive to economic growth, and their ineptness results in economic distress to state and Federal income statements and balance sheets. The numbers do not lie even if politicians do.

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:

Thursday, September 27, 2018

September, 2018,Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Comparing The U.S. And Canadian Health Care Systems

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.

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.

Today we will just focus on the highlights of a recent article by Carlin Becker from September 18, 20918 that appeared on the Independent Journal Review website. The article took a great, in-depth look at whether ot not the current U.S. approach to health care was worse or better than the long term single payer system that Canada has lived under for years and years.

It has been our opinion in this blog that the Canadian single payer system, like every other single payer system, provides expensive, low quality, and low quantity health care. But I was willing to have my statistic and reality based conclusions upset if the article could make the case, numerically, that a single payer system is better. So let’s start examining the numbers:

In the U.S., 56% of the citizen 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 system while promoted as "universal” does not cover prescription drug costs and dental care 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 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.

But if you need specialists and need them quickly, your teeth are a problem, you need prescription drugs, you do not have the resources to travel abroad for cheaper care, you want the pain and sickness to go away as soon as possible, but have to pay a higher price the U.S. is for you.

Or the best solution of all: stop treating health care as an insurance problem like the single payer advocates, Obama Care, and Bernie Sanders want to do.

The health care crisis in this country is a public health issue: Americans eat too much, American eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans smoke too much, Americans are too drug and opioid addicted, and Americans do not exercise enough. Fix those problems, and the other root causes listed above, and the American health care costs will go down dramatically while still retaining quick and quality access to scans, specialists, and life saving and pain saving treatments without delay. It is that simple, you cannot resolve a public health crisis with an expensive and eventually ineffective and inefficient insurance solution.

Or as we have said many times before: given that people like Bernie Sanders and his 500 peers in Congress cannot operate an efficient and effective postal system or Amtrak line, tiny, tiny minute industries vs. health care, what in the world makes anyone think that they can handle the health care needs of every American? Absurd to even entertain that idea. Fix the root causes and the costs take care of themselves.

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

Love My Country, Loathe My Government

Friday, August 16, 2019

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

Sunday, August 11, 2019

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

Friday, January 18, 2019

January, 2019, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Bad Health Care Priorities in California and NYC

Sunday, December 23, 2018

December,2018, Part 1,The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Americans Say No To Single Payer Systems and A Texas Judge Says No To Obama Care

Friday, October 5, 2018

September, 2018, Part 2, By The Numbers: Medicare Insanity and Crime, Gun Control Causes Gun Violence and More

Thursday, September 27, 2018

September, 2018,Part 2, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Comparing The U.S. And Canadian Health Care Systems

Blog Archive

About Me