“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism”, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened..I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”
-Norman Thomas (November 20, 1884 – December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
We are now much closer to a gigantic new health care entitlement. I have a few questions. Why wasn't dentistry and orthodontics included? Chiropractic? Accupuncture? Herbal remedies? Democratic claims that massive govt intrusion into a system where their previous intrusions have driven up prices, will now somehow increase efficiency and cut costs are laughable. But is anyone laughing? I'm not.
If this does actually go through, govt healthcare outlays will significantly increase as every small business drops healthcare, finding the penalty cheaper than insurance premiums. In the future, there is little question that Drs will be paid less as there salaries will be set by congress, or some newly appointed govt agency, which will decide that Drs are overpaid. There is no doubt that some currently practicing physicians will quit, and when America's bright minds are studying in college, trying to make up their minds what career path to follow, do you think the same number and quality of people will elect to choose the path of Govt Medical enslavement over banking, business, or law school?
From the National Inflation Association:
Medicare was created in 1966 at a cost of $3 billion per year and the House Ways and Means Committee estimated in 1966 that in 1990 the cost of Medicare would reach $12 billion per year. Instead, the actual cost of Medicare in 1990 was $107 billion (792% more than what was projected) and today Medicare costs $408 billion annually. In 2003, the White House Office of Management and Budget estimated that the Iraq War would have a total cost of $50 to $60 billion. So far, we have already spent $713 billion on the Iraq War (over 1,000% more than what was projected).
The Congressional Budget Office is estimating that the healthcare bill will cost $940 billion over the next 10 years, but if history is any indication, the actual cost will likely be several trillion dollars. NIA believes the healthcare bill will be the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy and will just about guarantee that we will see hyperinflation by the year 2015.
Below is IMO, a better plan for healthcare reform
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1. Roll Back the Regulations: The effect of decades of red tape and regulations in adding to the costs of care can’t be underestimated. Real health care reform begins by undoing many of the thousands of counterproductive laws and restrictions laid on by federal and state governments.
2. End the Tax Bias Against Individualized Coverage: Health insurance is primarily tied to employers because of the difference in tax deductibility. We must break the government- created insuranceemployer linkage and give individuals and families the ability to direct their care.
3. Enact True Medical Malpractice Reform: The president’s plan throws a few million dollars at studying medical liability reform. We already have a study: It’s called Texas. The positive results of its reforms are clear for all to see.
4. Reduce Prices Through a National Market: Combined with tax fairness in government’s treatment of individual and family coverage, the right to purchase insurance across state lines will enable insurers to compete for customers, thus driving down prices.
5. Embrace Consumer-Driven Plans: Consumer-driven plans are a major step toward enabling consumers to shop and save for care, exercising personal responsibility for their health.
6. Ensure Genuine Portability of Insurance: Losing health insurance should never be a concern or drive decisions about where you work or live. Insurance plans must be fully portable, regardless of where you live and whether you are employed.
7. Reform Medicare and Medicaid: Medicare and Medicaid are broken, insolvent systems that saddle taxpayers with the costs of massive waste, fraud, and abuse. We must reform them dramatically while ensuring benefits for those who are currently in the system.
8. Ensure Access to Affordable Coverage for Small Businesses: Make small group health insurance collectively renewable and require pooling of each carrier’s entire book of small group businesses so that no small group can be singled out for termination.
9. Assist Those with Pre-existing Conditions: High-risk pools and a fully guaranteed renewable insurance contract can help protect consumers with pre-existing conditions against heightened costs, giving them the right to buy future policies at lower rates.
10. Protect Consumers Through Transparency: Third-party payment radically reduces transparency in health insurance. The best force for ensuring contracts are honored and prices are competitive is an open, transparent marketplace.
Prepared by Benjamin Domenech, managing editor of Health Care News and www.healthpolicy-news.org, projects of The Heartland Institute. He can be reached at bdomenech@heartland.org.
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10 problems w Obamacare
1. You Can’t Keep Your Plan Even if You Like It: The president promises you can keep your plan and doctor if you like them—polls show the overwhelming majority of Americans do—but independent analysts found Obamacare would cause a change of plan or doctor for as many as 56 percent of currently covered employees. Additionally, your doctor may not want to keep you. (See Point No. 8.)
2. Your Insurance Premiums Will Go Up: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found Obamacare will increase the average family’s premiums by as much as 13 percent by 2016, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers found an increase of $4,000 by 2019.
3. You May Be Among the Hundreds of Thousands Who Lose Their Jobs: The nonpartisan Lewin Group predicts the massive new employer mandates would cause as many as 600,000 workers to lose their jobs under Obamacare. Other sources predict even more.
4. Your Tax Burden Will Increase: The Senate bill contains as many as 19 new taxes. The entire proposal functions as a massive regressive tax falling on the young and lowerincome workers, making them beholden to subsidies and punishing success.
5. You Will Be Forced to Pay for Abortions: The president promised no taxpayer dollars would go toward funding abortions. But the Senate bill specifically allows for such funding, and House leaders acknowledge they will not attempt to restrict abortion funding in the final bill.
6. Your Health Care Will Cost More: Obamacare’s attempt to “bend the cost curve” and slow the pace of rising health care costs is a sham. In reality, the only reductions in cost come through reduced government reimbursements to hospitals and doctors, who will be forced to lower the quality of care and pass more costs on to the taxpayers.
7. Your Employer Will Have to Pay More to the Government: Forget that raise you were hoping for. It makes economic sense for small employers facing burdensome new requirements to stay small, and for large businesses to fire permanent employees and hire contractors.
8. Your Doctor May Quit: A survey by Investor’s Business Daily found 45 percent of doctors said they “would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement” if Obamacare passes. Seventy-two percent of doctors oppose Obama’s health care plan.
9. You Will Be Forced to Purchase Insurance Approved by Bureaucrats: Do you like Medicare Advantage? Gone. Like your high-deductible HSA plan? Forget it. The bureaucrats in Washington will tell you what you can buy, and you will be required to buy something.
10. You and Your Children Will Pay for Trillions in Added Debt: Democrat Sen. Max Baucus admits the cost of Obamacare is more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years. Claims that the bill is deficit-neutral are based on budgetary gimmicks. We will pay the tab for generations to come.
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Other links for today
party time for elites
Gold is money
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
~~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931- 2005