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

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

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

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

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

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care. To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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