January, 2020, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Stupidity Of Medicare For All Continues

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 the 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 wasteful 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.

When we started this theme many years ago, it was all about the failure that is Obama Care. Over time, many of the failures that we predicted or other smart people predicted came true. Obama Care did not reduce annual health insurance premiums by up to $2,500 as promised. Obama Care did not bend the cost curve of health care as promised. Obama Care did not get insurance for over 21 million Americans as promised. And Obama Care did not allow you to keep your doctors, your hospitals or insurance plans as promised.

But with the failure of Obama Care has come a much worse idea, “Medicare For All.” Thus, most of these types of posts going forward will focus on this inane idea since the previous big healthcare inane idea, Obama Care, has basically collapsed in failure.

1) In our previous posts and many posts before that we pointed out the reality of what happens when government and politicians take over the healthcare industry in a country: 

1. Costs go up.
2. Quality of care goes down.
3. Access to health care goes down.
4. People suffer more pain for longer periods of time.

This is not a guess, it is based on real life experiences of ordinary citizens living in Canada, England and elsewhere were somehow, someone thought that government bureaucrats and the politicians who direct them can be more efficient and effective than the free market and individuals making decisions based on their own needs and wants.

And yet, Democrats and liberals around the country, including those running for President, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, think that the so-called “Medicare For” all concept, basically abdicating all health care decisions and responsibilities to the Federal government, is a good idea despite the failure of similar concepts around the world.

One of the main but false selling points of Medicare For All is that ordinary Americans would be better off financially under this system because 1) politicians would get rich in this country to pay for the program and 2) this program would be much more efficient and thus, overall, families would pay less vs. what they pay today.

A couple of problems with this scenario:

• Many research and analysis efforts have shown that the cost for such a program would require the Federal government to obtain over $3 TRILLION a year in extra taxes to pay for this $3 TRILLION Medicare For All program.
• We have shown in previous analyses that you cannot cover these extra Medicare For All costs even if you confiscate all of the wealth of the rich in this country, never mind just raising their taxes.
• And this approach is not more efficient since in other countries where this approach was actually implemented, the wait time for a doctor appointment, the lead time to get an operation, and the lead time just to get a simple X-ray or MRI is eons longer than the wait times in this country.
• This is why rich folks from other countries come to this country for medical care, they do not want to wait and suffer the long lead times in their own socialized medicine countries.

Medicare For All is a plan stupid idea, as pointed out from a financial perspective in a recent Heritage Foundation analysis:

• This research found that the majority of American families, possibly three out of four, would be worse off financially under a Medicare For All program.
• Obviously, if this analysis is right, then far more than just the wealthy will be paying more out of pocket expenses than what Warren and Sanders are promising.
• The Heritage analysis found that under the Medicare For All effort some families would be paying more for than what they currently pay for electricity, gas for their cars, and possibly their food budget while abdicating their decisions for healthcare to nameless and faceless government bureaucrats guided by mostly inane and ignorant politicians.
• The total bottom line of the analysis found that 73.5% of Americans families would have less money in their pocket under the Medicare For All program than under the current healthcare market structure that exists today with likely worse healthcare quality.
• The analysis used the financial method used by other countries to finance their nationalized health care systems, payroll taxes.
• American households who currently get healthcare coverage via their employer healthcare program would be hit the hardest, seeing their after income tax take home pay shrink an average of about $10,544 a year, leading to the finding that 87% of those Americans currently getting employer sponsored health care being financially worse off under the Medicare For All plan.
• Lower-income working families, which currently get health care through government programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would also be worse off to the tune of seeing their average household income shrink by about $5,592 a year. 
• Nationally the analysis found that Medicare For All would “require an additional tax of 21.2 cents on every dollar that every American earns. (Right now, most workers and their employers pay 15.3 cents on the dollar in payroll taxes.)”
• Combining this 21.2 cents for every dollar earned with current income tax rates, Social Security taxes, and Medicare taxes, the Federal government would likely be taking over 50% of your annual household income under the Medicare For All program before the state and local governments take even more.
• The Heritage Foundation analysis was kind to the Medicare For All Program because it assumed that Americans would still continue working as hard and to the same number of hours despite having over half of their income confiscated, a shaky assumption since most level headed people would work less and less as the government took more and more.
• The Heritage Foundation got down to the real nitty gritty of what would happen to certain types of Americans under Medicare For All, not just high level, gross estimates. 
• For example, Olivia Williams, an unmarried mother of two earning $31,000 a year, would be worse off by $1,547 or a decrease in income by 5.3%, the amount she spends on electricity every year.
• The Suarezes, a median-income married couple earning about $98,000, with two kids and employer health benefits, would be worse off by $9,201, or a reduction in their income of 13.3%.
• The Joneses, a lower-middle-income married couple earning nearly $50,000, with two kids and employer health benefits, would be $1,619 worse off or 4.4%, the amount they spend annually on gas for their cars.

You get the idea, we would be spending more and getting less in terms of healthcare quality and quantity. Now, some might say that the Heritage Foundation is biased towards free market solutions and they would probably be right. But until Sanders and Warren come up with detailed analysis on how Americans will be better off under Medicare For All, something that have not done, then the Heritage Foundation, and others like it which show how stupid Medicare For All is, have the final say in how bad this concept is. Or as summarized by the Heritage Foundation: “Those pushing for Medicare for All have left out some essential details. No legislative sponsor of this plan has offered a way to fully pay for its promises. Instead, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have put out plans that don’t fully pay for what they’ve promised to provide, and they dramatically overestimate the revenue that new taxes on the rich could raise.”

2) And even if after all the analysis we have shown, above, the previous post, and other posts, you still think that the concept of government control of your health care decisions is a good idea, consider the following realities:

• A Georgia Congressman actually spoke out in a televised Congressional hearing that he thought the island of Guam could actually tip over in the middle of the ocean if too many Navy resources were deployed there.
• A Texas Congresswoman proclaimed that the Constitution is 400 years old (it isn’t), that her Congressional district sits 50 feet below sea level, (it doesn’t), and that she was curious if one of the Mars Rover vehicles would be going anywhere near where Neil Armstorng walked on the moon.
• A Speaker of The House once proclaimed that Congress had to pass a piece of major legislation (i.e. Obama Care) to actually see what was in it.
• A New York Congresswoman had no idea what the three branches of our government was and could not accurately define how to calculate the basic unemployment rate despite having a business college degree.

I do not know about you but I do not want stupid people determining every aspect of my healthcare. The way to fix the healthcare problems in this country is to first understand the root causes of high healthcare costs, as listed above, and then attack those specific root causes. Throwing TRILLIONS of dollars at a problem without attacking the root causes is a recipe for financial disaster.

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https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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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