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, 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 co-pays 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.
Let's continue with more disasters today:
1) Although Obama Care and its socialistic tenets turned out to be a massive failure, liberals and Democrats want to go further down this road of failure to a single payer, socialistic health care system in this country. They like to point out that other countries, usually using the Scandinavian countries as an example, have a single payer system and thus, based on that fact alone, we should have it in this country.
But numerous times we have shown what a failure the single payer system is. Long delays to get in to see a doctor, waiting months to get a simple diagnostic test done. Higher and higher healthcare taxes to get less and less healthcare coverage. Citizens leaving a country to come to the U.S. because the wait times for a procedure is so long in a single payer system. Basically, expensive healthcare that makes you die younger.
But the Legal Insurrection website recently ran article that shows that single payer systems in Scandinavian countries are not all that liberals think they are or dream they are:
- The Washington Free Beacon reported: The government of Finland collapsed Friday “due to the rising cost of universal health care and the prime minister’s failure to enact reforms to the system.”
- This caused Prime Minister Juha Sipila and his entire cabinet to resign after his governing coalition could pass the necessary laws to reform the government’s single payer health care system.Much like the U.S., Finland has an aging population with 26% of its citizens expected to be over the age of 65 by 2030.An aging population almost always means higher and higher healthcare costs.
- To head off financial disaster, Finland has tried to cut costs and boost health care efficiency for years but has been unsuccessful in doing so, resulting in more and more financial distress for the government.
- And according to Reuters, Finland is not alone in this crisis: “Nordic countries, where comprehensive welfare is the cornerstone of the social model, have been among the most affected. But reform has been controversial and, in Finland, plans to cut costs and boost efficiency have stalled for years.”
- Other Nordic countries with single payer systems such as Sweden and Norway are facing similar health care financial stress.
So Sanders thinks that for $60 you can give birth to a baby in Finland and that $60 will cover hospital, doctor, nurse, and medicine costs for the birth. It does not cost $60, Bernie. It costs much more, it is just that the couple having the baby pay less while the rest of Finland society and taxpayers pay much more than $60. Are you that ignorant of finance or are you just a flat out liar? In either case, single payer systems are not efficient, effective, or healthy for sick citizens. Obama Care proved that and the Scandinavian countries, along with England and Canada, prove that every day.
2) Chris Pope, recently writing for the National Review website, wrote an excellent article that not only showed how bad Obama Care was but how bad Medicare For All would be, which is really Obama Care on steroids. Rather than review all aspects of his in depth and well researched and reasoned article, I encourage you to read it at:
My trying to summarize his analysis and logic would not do it justice. But let me pull out some facts and realities from his work that prove again that Obama Care is nothing more than a series of unfolding disasters, much like Medicare For All would be:
- Mr. Pope reminds us that Obama and the entire set of Washington Democrats promised us that Obama Care would reduce costs and improve medical and health care delivery.
- Obama actually promised that an average American family could actually see their annual health care insurance costs go down by up to $2,500 a year.
- Of course that did not happen, health insurance premiums skyrocketed, health insurance copays skyrocketed, millions of American lost access to their favorite doctors and hospitals and drug costs continued to escalate.
- By the numbers, health insurance premiums for individual health insurance programs under Obama Care doubled within three years of the legislation being passed.
- Premiums for Obama Care health insurance plans now average $4,700 a year, almost $400 a month, hardly the $2,500 reduction Obama promised.
- And yet Democrats want even more government intervention in the market even though Obama Care’s intervention was a disaster.
- The state of Vermont, a very liberal state that is the home of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a big Medicare For All advocate, tried to implement a single payer system in 2014.
- Thus, if any part of the country had any chance of making a single payer system work, it was Vermont.
- And yet, when the liberal politicians in Vermont ran the numbers and actually looked at the reality, they decided they could not afford a single payer system.
- The costs on a national level, costs that Vermont found out quite rudely, would add $3 TRILLION to the Federal government operating costs every year, more than double the amount that the Federal government collects in personal income taxes.
- This $3 TRILLION annual incremental cost was independently arrived by analysis done by both the liberal leaning Urban Institute and the conservative leaning Mercatus Center.
- Even Nancy Pelosi’s health policy advisor, Wendell Primus, notes that, “recently noted as fundamental obstacles to Medicare for All the large number of potential losers, widespread opposition from stakeholders, and the desire to reserve funds for other priorities. As the party’s presidential candidates for 2020 have jockeyed for position, many have endorsed proposals in full knowledge that they cannot be implemented. Indeed, even Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose state enacted single-payer but abandoned the plan when the scale of associated tax increases became clear, has refused to advocate abolishing the filibuster in order to enact Medicare for All.”
- One version of Medicare For All that is less expensive than the full blown Medicare for All theory is to allow people of all ages to “buy in” to the program, a facet of Medicare that already exists for senior citizens that have not contributed enough in payroll taxes over their lifetime to qualify for regular Medicare.
- However, this program would cost Medicare For All customers to currently pay $974 a month for Medicare Parts A,B, and D, hardly affordable for most Americans.
- Many Obama Care programs cost much less than $974 a month so things would be worse, not better, under Medicare For All.
- But as soon as liberals decide that the $974 should be subsidized then we are right back to an incremental $3 TRILLION a year in cost.
- And liberals never seem to talk about the reality, that according to Gallup, 80% of Americans rate their current health care as excellent or good so why would the vast majority of Americans want to give up their current excellent or good health care for a long shot, long odds program like Medicare For All?
- Plus, the average out of pocket costs that Americans pay as a share of average household consumption (3%) is actually slightly less than the average among developed countries, another reality that liberals like to ignore.
- Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson actually stated in a televised Congressional hearing that he was worried the island of Guam could tip over in the Pacific Ocean.
- Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee thinks the Constitution is over 400 years old, that her Congressional district is 50 feet below sea level (it is not), and wondered out loud if a Mars Rover mission would drive by the place where Neil Armstrong planted the flag on the moon.
- Democratic Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi once proudly stated that the Obama Care legislation had to be passed so that she and the rest of the country could see what was in it, like a Christmas present.
- And of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not know the simple definition of the unemployment rate, does not know how tax credits work, chased Amazon and its 25,000 high paying jobs out of her Congressional district, etc., etc., etc.
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