September, 2018, Part 1, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Idiocy Of The Single Payer System and Frustrated Doctors

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 Freedom Outpost website had a recent article by Mac Slavo that again showed why many, many doctors hate Obama Care, a piece of legislation that has caused untold thousands of doctors to leave the industry out of frustration and idiocy:

• Doctors now spend two hours dealing with paperwork and administrative tasks for every hour spent actually treating patients.
• This result comes from a recent study by the American Journal of Medicine.
• Another finding was that just three years after Obama Care was implemented “Physician burnout increased significantly, from 45.5 percent to 54.4 percent.”
• A lot of the frustration comes from the electronic health records (EHR) requirement of Obama Care that required doctors use electronic health records which has caused the jump in burnout.
• Twila Brase, the President of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom explains: “The EHR is causing doctors to leave their patients. Congress forced doctors to buy and use computerized record systems to collect and report patient data to the government. And it’s wreaking havoc on their practices and their patients.”
• The study found that burnout in other industries was unchanged over the same time period: “Parallel studies of all U.S. workers during the same period showed no changes” and other studies “show the doctors spend more face time on their EHRs than with their patients. The hours spent cloning notes in a mandated doctor computer relationship leaves the physician unable to experience the best part of being a doctor.”

Another unfolding disaster from the worst piece of Washington legislation ever enacted. Rather than reducing costs as promised, the law is driving doctors out of the industry reducing the supply of doctors without changing the demand for health care, a simple economic concept that will raise, rather than lower costs.

2) Ph.D Robert E. Moffit recently took a look at Bernie Sanders idiotic plan to give the country a single payer health insurance system, a system that has failed miserably around the world, from England to Canada:

• Sanders’ plan would require the government to control ALL aspects of your healthcare and insurance and prohibit any American from having a private or employer based insurance system
• The cost of his plan is a whopping $32.6 TRILLION over the first ten years.
• This comes out about $3.3 TRILLION a year, which would require a sudden increase in Federal government taxation of about 75%.
• This study comes from Charles Blahous, a former member of the Medicare board of trustees, someone who obviously knows the industry.
• This estimate is consistent with other majors studies of a single payer plan in this country: The liberal think tank, the Urban Institute, estimated Sanders plan to cost $32 TRILLION over the first ten years and Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, a former advisor to Bill Clinton, estimated the cost at almost $25 TRILLION.
• The Sanders bill would force the government to create a new massive bureaucracy that would not only insure everyone under the age of 65 but would absorb the dysfunctional Medicare and Medicaid programs.
• It would set the rates that doctors and hospitals would charge within this massive government bureaucracy and totally control all patient/doctor relationships, reducing revenues going to doctors and hospitals, further driving disgruntled doctors out of the industry, see the above discussion.
• The INCREMENTAL $32.6 TRILLION would be equal to a whopping 12.7% of the nation’s GDP by 2031.
• Blahous’s analysis was very generous to Sanders’ benefit when doing his analysis but even his generous assumptions still got to a $32.6 TRILLION cost: “Even assuming gains from reductions in administrative costs, drugs, and the big reductions in provider payments, other features of the legislation, such as the abolition of all cost-sharing, would drive the costs of the program upward.”
• The Thorpe analysis, the most conservative estimate, estimated that additional taxes to cover the costs would be a whopping 20% of payrolls across the country and 70% of U.S, households would pay more than they do now for health care and insurance.
• Blahous says that even doubling all Federal individual and business income taxes would still not be enough to cover Sanders’ plans costs.

Oh, and by the way, the Federal government currently wastes $96 billion a year in Medicare and Medicaid from fraud and inefficiencies even though they have been operating these programs for about fifty years. Imagine how much more taxpayer wealth would be wasted if the government controlled ALL health care aspects in this country. 

Oh, and by the way, the Federal government already operates a healthcare process, the Veterans Administration, that often requires veterans to wait months just to see a doctor which has resulted in untold veterans dying from neglect.

Oh, and by the way, the health care quality and quantity in other countries like England and Canada with single paying systems also stinks.

The Federal government cannot operate a postal system or Amtrak efficiently and effectively, there is no way they can successfully operate a single payer healthcare system in this country. To deny the incompetence of the Federal government in anything it touches in the epitome of stupidity and ignorance.

3) Speaking of a single payer system consider this recent reality from the latest edition of Reason magazine: The British National Health Service, the government entity that operates that country’s single payer system, recently reported that 4.3 million patients are waiting for surgery, a ten year high. According to their own rules, no patient is supposed to have to wait no more than 18 weeks for nonurgent surgery. But in reality, 211,434 English medical patients have to wait over six months for surgery. 

So, a country that has been operating a single payer system for decades continues to get worse and worse performance from a quantity and quality perspective.What makes anyone think that the bozos in Washington can do any better than England?

In our next unfolding disaster review we will do an in depth comparison of Canada’s single payer system to the current U.S. system.Trust me, Canada loses in that analogy.

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