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.

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