Understanding Healthcare Reform
With efforts underway to reconcile the Senate’s healthcare plan with that passed in the House, it seems appropriate to outline briefly the purpose of the bill and what it will mean for America.
President Obama campaigned on a promise to provide universal healthcare coverage to “47 million uninsured Americans.” Shortly after being elected, he amended that number to “31 million,” upon learning that the overwhelming majority of Americans did not consider illegal immigrants to be Americans , as apparently he did.
Of the remaining 31 million Americans, 9 million earn $75,000 or more; 10 million are already eligible for a government sponsored program (such as Medicare, Medicaid, or SCHIP); and 3 million are in American prisons. That leaves 9 million Americans without affordable insurance options, or about 3 percent of the population.
Rather than simply buy private insurance for this 3 percent (a Nixonian idea that fell victim to Watergate), President Obama and company decided it better to overhaul the entire healthcare industry, and with it a full one sixth of the American economy, all in the name of progress.
Obamacare seeks to achieve universal coverage by adding 15 million people to Medicare’s already overburdened rolls, and, in a stroke of genius, forcing the remaining 16 million to either buy insurance or face penalties including fines and even imprisonment. Additionally, the bill places greater economic burdens on health insurance companies, which will result in a rise in premiums. Worse yet, the bill does nothing to meet the increased demand for medical care by increasing the amount of providers (doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc.), meaning that rationing of healthcare resources is inevitable.
But if nothing else, congressional Democrats report that this bill will be deficit neutral. Unfortunately, that claim is nothing more than fiscal sleight of hand.
First, to achieve “deficit neutrality,” half a trillion dollars will be cut from Medicare, even though it was already expected to go bankrupt by 2019, and 15 million people will be added to it. This will destroy Medicare, a program currently relied upon by 45 million Americans.
Second, half a trillion dollars will be added in new taxes on the rich: which is to say, the very people who provide the jobs that our economy now so sorely lacks. In other words, the private sector will be expected to provide more jobs with less money.
And don’t think the middle class and the poor won’t get soaked. Obamacare pretends to be less expensive than it really is by shifting a greater burden onto state governments to fund Medicaid. California, for example, which is already running a $20 billion deficit, will have to add approximately $1.4 billion in new spending. Pennsylvania will had to add about $1.5 billion, and Texas nearly $3 billion, to name a few. (Nebraska, conversely, will not have to pay anything after Senator Ben Nelson (D) took the courageous position that he simply could not support any bill that funds abortions… unless his state received $80 million per year in kickbacks. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D), not quite as adept as Nelson, accepted $100 million in federal bribe money, but the increased cost to her state is expected to be $400 million per year).
To meet these increases, states will have to cut services (which tend to be for the benefit of the poor), and/or raise taxes. And because states receive a disproportionate share of revenue from sales and property taxes, these tax increases will affect anyone who wants to buy anything or own real property. So much for Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.
Even then, the bill is only deficit neutral for the first ten years. During that time the federal government will collect the new taxes every year, but only pay benefits for the last six years. At no point are the expected annual revenues generated from the new taxes expected to exceed the benefits paid out, meaning that immediately after the first decade of this bill’s existence it will begin to add to our already crippling national debt. As it stands, our national debt is already at approximately $12 trillion (which is four times our annual revenue), and is expected to reach $18 trillion in just five years, or about $60,000 per citizen. Regrettably, it seems the only realistic way for this debt to be satisfied is to effectively wage economic warfare on ourselves: i.e., printing more money to intentionally devalue the dollar, thereby inflating away the debt (and, incidentally, our savings). Our largest creditors, such as China, have been buying American dollars in order to prevent this, and along with it the total collapse of our currency. But they can only do that for so long.
And so, after nearly a year of campaigning, deliberating, negotiating, and late night talk show politicking, this is what the Democrats have given us: healthcare reform wherein half of the uninsured are placed into a Medicare program whose insolvency has been hastened, the remaining uninsured will be forced to buy their own insurance or be penalized, insurance premiums will rise, state budgets will be compromised, and everyone’s taxes will be increased. Plus, the greatest economic superpower in world history will be even deeper into an insuperable debt, on a crash course with hyperinflation, at the mercy of a communist nation. No wonder the most recent Quinnipiac poll shows 36 percent of Americans favor the plan, and 53% oppose it. In their zeal to improve national health, the Democrats have given us a cure worse than the disease.
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Madame Speaker is full of tidbits today from her interview with Elizabeth Vargas on “This Week”.
No, I didn’t gloss over the story she told about the woman wearing her dead sisters dentures. That was just such an extremely lame story, it barely is worth mentioning. But, I suppose if we get our socialist ObamaCare bill passed, we will all get shiny new dentures with a hope and change symbol right on the front! I know i can’t wait.
