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Obama and His Lowered Expectations of Obamacare

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“More than 16 million uninsured Americans have gained health coverage,” Obama recently tweeted, while simultaneously neglecting to mention that this is exactly what you’d expect when you force people to buy insurance.

Force, as I’ve always said, is the heart-and-soul of all (so-called) progressive ideology.

For those who, like me, are being nailed with a “penalty tax” — which, in case you’ve forgotten, is not actually a tax — and likewise for those people who have gotten cancellation notices or have seen premium increases, the news, unfortunately, is not quite so rosy as Obama and his clownish administration would have you believe, all their propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the absurdly obvious: namely, forcing people off existing plans in order to force them into more expensive (and inferior) plans does not, to any sane person, constitute success. In fact, that sort of thing only occurs in the minds of bureaucrats and all other similarly insane people.

Here’s what Barack Obama’s tweet actually translates to:

“Forcing people into my bureaucratic nightmare worked even better than I thought it would” (Barack Obama, March 25th, 2015).

Which is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that health “insurance” — i.e. pre-paid healthcare — is the primary reason healthcare is so wildly expensive in America today.

If there’s anyone out there who truly believes Obamacare is a good thing, ask yourself:

Which plan is Obama and his family on?

Ask yourself further:

If Obamacare is so excellent, why are Democratic Senators begging for another delay?

Prediction: we’ll only hear crickets chirping in response to my challenge for anyone — anyone — to defend to me this bureaucratic monstrosity known as Obamacare. And the reason we’ll only hear crickets chirping is that anyone who attempts to defend this will, in effect, be defending the wild notion that the IRS has and should have legitimate control over your health.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.” — Barack Obama, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013.

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Single-Payer Falls Apart In Vermont

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin
Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin

 

Vermont, which is an extraordinarily liberal state with at least one openly socialist senator, was at one time regarded as America’s frontrunner for single-payer healthcare. But that frontrunner status just changed.

Single-payer, a disastrous idea on dozens of different levels, means that everyone pays for everyone else’s healthcare, and Vermont has just discovered one of the reasons that single-payer is, in fact, disastrous: taxes must rise.

Quoting the liberal mag Politico:

Advocates of a “Medicare for all” approach were largely sidelined during the national Obamacare debate. The health law left a private insurance system in place and didn’t even include a weaker “public option” government plan to run alongside more traditional commercial ones.

So single-payer advocates looked instead to make a breakthrough in the states. Bills have been introduced from Hawaii to New York; former Medicare chief Don Berwick made it a key plank of his unsuccessful primary race for Massachusetts governor.

Vermont under Shumlin became the most visible trailblazer. Until Wednesday, when the governor admitted what critics had said all along: He couldn’t pay for it.

“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”

Vermont’s outcome is a “small speed bump,” said New York Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who’s been pushing single-payer bills for more than 20 years. But opponents says it’s the end of the road.

“If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state will,” said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business.

“There will never be a good time for a massive tax increase on employers and consumers in Vermont, so they should abandon that silly idea now and get serious,” Mozloom added.

 

Might hurt the economy, Governor? I think you can bet your health on it.

 

 

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Rebel MD

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There are several factors that contribute to the absurd costs of healthcare in America today — and all those factors are, without exception, a result of government intervention, in one form or another. But one factor alone stands out above all others. That one factor is the third-party payment system.

It doesn’t matter if the third party is an insurance company, or if that third part is a government bureau: by placing a middle-man between patient and doctor, you create this nightmarish scenario of $20,000.00 emergency room visits for an elbow injury.

As Dr. Jeffery Singer (MD) recently explained:

Last week, researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth released a report estimating that health care costs will continue to grow faster than the economy for at least the next two decades. This is a tremendous burden on average Americans, who already spend nearly a fifth of their average annual pre-tax income on health care.

Why can’t Obamacare stop this trend? Because the law doubles down on one of the biggest contributing factors to the high price of medical care: Health insurance.

Health insurance is a complicated system that serves patients’ needs last. It introduces a third party into the doctor-patient relationship. This can be a private company—such as modern insurance companies—or the government—such as in Medicare and Medicaid.

“Obamacare’s architects expanded a health insurance system that artificially increases costs and decreases choice.”

Third party entities don’t spend money like you and I do. We care about two things when we buy a product: quality and affordability. Insurance providers aren’t overly concerned about either. Affordability isn’t their biggest concern because they’re spending someone else’s money—their members’ premiums. They’re also not concerned as much about quality because they’re spending that money on someone other than themselves—the patients receiving treatment.

This is a basic reflection of human nature.

The failure to understand this has been a fatal chink in all Republican arguments against ObamaCare:

You can’t denounce one form of third-party payment only to favor another, since any form will invariably drive up costs.

Remember: what we call “health insurance” in America today is not actual insurance. It’s pre-paid healthcare. Insurance is something you buy in the unlikely event of an emergency. Actual insurance, free from government regulation, is legitimate.

All of which I mention because if there’s any good thing that’s come out of the whole ObamaCare dog-and-pony show, it’s that it’s brought many of these issues to the forefront — and people are beginning to realize exactly what’s at issue here.

It’s also spawned (at last) a number of doctors to become more forceful and philosophical in the defense of their own lives and labor, which, incidentally, is the fundamental and inarguable principle at stake in all questions of socialized medicine:

Do doctors and nurses possess the right to their own life and labor, or do they not?

Rebel MD is the most recent website I’ve come across the defends, forcefully though somewhat inconsistently, the principle of individual rights in medicine.





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April Fool

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Have you ever wondered how to run a proper propaganda campaign?

Then don’t follow the example of the Obama administration, who, for six solid months, told us repeatedly that they didn’t have any good idea how many people had actually enrolled and paid for an ObamaCare exchange policy — or how many of these same paid enrollees were previously uninsured — but who, suddenly today, announce that “7.1 million Americans have now signed up for plans…”

Barack Obama’s press conference today may very well have made Barack Obama the greatest April Fool in American history. It was a joke of colossal proportions.

“Truth is,” Barack Obama said today, “even more folks want to sign up” — though in reality the overwhelming majority of Americans loathe ObamaCare, and for good reason.

“Making affordable coverage available for all Americans, including those with preexisting conditions, is now an important goal of this law,” Barack Obama also said — pretending he doesn’t know that years before ObamaCare came along insurance companies have been required by law to insure people with preexisting conditions.

“Seven point one million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through these marketplaces,” said Barack Obama.

Note, first of all, that in using the word “marketplaces” Barack Obama is simply and poorly propagandizing for his exchanges, which in fact are the diametric opposite of “marketplaces”:

Marketplaces do not force you to buy anything. His exchanges, however, do precisely that.

Note also that in order to really believe his figures, you must ignore the millions of Americans who, precisely because of ObamaCare, had their policies cancelled.

You must ignore as well all the delays, extensions, and waivers this administration has enacted or granted.

Finally, you must ignore that the target number was not what this catastrophic bill was ever about:

It was about insuring the uninsured and reducing costs, neither of which it does or can ever do.

“This law is working… All of which makes the lengths to which critics have gone to scare people, or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative, so hard to understand. I’ve got to admit—I don’t get it.”

No, you don’t get it, and never have.

And that is why your April Fool’s speech sounded so much like a man whistling through the graveyard.








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ObamaCare: The Resistance Endures

cannonMichael Cannon is Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies and an indefatigable crusader against socialized medicine. Recently, he wrote an excellent article concerning the continuing resistance against ObamaCare, the need to maintain that resistance, and the relative success of that resistance so far:

Former Romney adviser Avik Roy now advises conservatives “to accept the defeat of the movement to repeal Obamacare.” Conservatives should instead shift their energies to “the most desired conservative outcome of all: a fiscally sustainable, fully reformed set of health-care entitlements.”

National Review, that conservative icon that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” seems a strange venue for encouraging conservatives to accept defeat. Roy also has a curious understanding of conservatism’s goals, which as I recall have more to do with protecting freedom than with administering the entitlement state. But when Roy likened ongoing Obamacare resistance to Teruo Nakamura, “the last known holdout from the Imperial Japanese Army, [who] finally surrendered” on a Pacific island some 30 years after his team lost World War II, I nearly spat out my sushi.

Perhaps I can bring my friend around to the view held by most Obamacare opponents:This thing is still vulnerable. And even if we fail to stop it, trying to stop it will do more to protect liberty and improve social welfare than a strategy of accepting, legitimizing, and “redeeming” it.

After three years, Obamacare remains unpopular. Both the raw numbers and the intensity favor its opponents. Last month, for the first time ever, Gallup found that a majority of Americans oppose a government guarantee of health insurance for all. The ongoing resistance to Obamacare is a grassroots phenomenon. It has probably intensified since the election, as many disappointed voters (and non-voters) have sought an outlet for their frustrations.

Resistance will grow later this year as a result of “sticker shock” at Obamacare’s “startling rate increases” of 30 to 40 percent in the individual market and 100 percent (!) for young adults.

Officials in nearly half the states have joined the resistance thus far, by declining to establish the health-insurance “exchanges” essential to the law and/or to implement its costly Medicaid expansion. If states hold the line, then insurers, hospitals, and such — who were counting on those subsidies to offset Obamacare’s taxes and Medicare cuts — will join the chorus demanding that Congress reopen the issue.

The Obama administration probably won’t be able to get exchanges up and running by October in those two dozen states. A Xerox official who makes money implementing those exchanges for states said of the logistical task HHS faces, “These are systems that typically take two or three years to build. The last time I looked at the calendar, that’s not what we’re working with.”

Obamacare still faces a barrage of lawsuits. Those challenging the contraceptives mandate and the Independent Payment Advisory Board won’t kill the law. But they might improve it. Either way, they will keep its negatives high. The Pacific Legal Foundation’s challenge to the individual mandate could take down the entire statute. Kaiser Health News says Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt’s lawsuit is “by far the broadest and potentially most damaging of the legal challenges” related to Obamacare, and “even some health law supporters concede [it] seems correct as a literal reading of the most relevant provisions.” If Oklahoma prevails, “the whole structure [of] the health care reform law starts to fall apart.” Look how panicked the law’s supporters are. Tell me again why now is the time to “accept defeat”?

Continuing to insist on repeal can also help to avoid the looming debt crisis. Congress desperately needs to cut spending. The easiest stuff to cut is (a) unpopular spending that (b) hasn’t started yet and therefore isn’t protected by the kind of organized constituencies that protect existing spending. Obamacare fits both criteria. Since the administration won’t be able to implement it on time anyway, Congress should enact a two-year delay of its new entitlement spending. That would be a huge victory and reduce federal deficits by $160 billion. Opponents are more likely to get that delay if they keep demanding full repeal.

Following Roy’s advice would prevent opponents from capitalizing on any of these opportunities. Obamacare’s entitlement spending will begin flowing in 2014, and we will never stop it.

Fortunately, as I travel the country speaking about this law, I find that Obamacare opponents are solidly in the Frederick Douglass camp: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

(Link)





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Barack Obama Versus Barack Obama

In 2009, the so-called Individual Mandate was, according to Barack Obama (and I quote), “absolutely NOT a tax increase”.

Listen:



Magically, however, in 2012, two short days ago, in fact, that exact same Individual Mandate was, according that exact same Barack Obama, after all a tax:

Barack Obama: “By the way, if you’ve got health insurance, you’re not getting hit by a tax,” the president said during his Friday rally in Roanoke, his third Virginia campaign event of the day. “The only thing that’s happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies can’t drop you when you get sick.”


Give them enough rope, they hang themselves every time.



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Obama Versus Obama: A Losing Battle

In his attempt to fully socialize American medicine, Barack Obama’s blatant and outright contradiction of himself — regarding, in particular, the Individual Mandate — damages him irreparably, in my opinion, and it’s long surprised me that this fact hasn’t been hammered home more completely.

American Crossroads, however, has just released a video that captures pretty well the essence of what I’m talking about:




As you know, oral argument for and against the Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate began today, and the stakes could not be higher.



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The ObamaCare Provision That Compels You To Pay For My Contraception


The storm of controversy surrounding the provision in ObamaCare that will force America’s many Catholic institutions to fund, for example, sterilizations, contraceptives, and morning-after pills for their employees — “despite each of these being fully athwart fundamental Catholic doctrine on sexuality, abortion and life,” as Rex Murphy eloquently put it — has many people like me wondering the following:

Why suddenly the big furor now? I mean, this is socialism:

I don’t pay for my own medicine, because it’s not my responsibility: it’s yours.

This is exactly what you voted for when you voted for Barack Obama.

Please don’t insult us by being surprised now, after all the time we spent trying to tell you.

Governmental compulsion: it’s the American way.

“We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free-market principles.” — Barack Obama, 2009



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The Best Day Yet For Individual Freedom — By Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant and advisor to the Multi-National Force in Iraq. The following article, which is brief and well-done, appeared June 8th, 2011, on the CATO website:

In the most important appeal of the Obamacare constitutional saga, today was the best day yet for individual freedom. The government’s lawyer, Neal Katyal, spent most of the hearing on the ropes, with the judicial panel extremely cautious not to extend federal power beyond its present outer limits of regulating economic activity that has a substantial aggregate effect on interstate commerce.

As the lawyer representing 26 states against the federal government said, “The whole reason we do this is to protect liberty.” With those words, former solicitor general Paul Clement reached the essence of the Obamacare lawsuits. With apologies to Joe Biden, this is a big deal not because we’re dealing with a huge reorganization of the health care industry, but because our most fundamental first principle is at stake: we limit government power so people can live their lives the way they want.

This legal process is not an academic exercise to map the precise contours of the Commerce Clause or Necessary and Proper Clause — or even to vindicate our commitment to federalism or judicial review. No, all of these worthy endeavors are just means to achieve the goal of maximizing human freedom and flourishing. Indeed, that is the very reason the government exists in the first place.

And the 11th Circuit judges saw that. Countless times, Judges Dubina and Marcus demanded that the government articulate constitutional limiting principles to the power it asserted. And countless times they pointed out that never in history has Congress tried to compel people to engage in commerce as a means of regulating commerce. Even Judge Hull, reputed to be the most liberal member of the panel, conducted a withering cross-examination to establish that the individual mandate didn’t help that many people get affordable care, that the majority of people currently without coverage would be exempt from the requirement (presumably due to their income level).

In short, while we should never read too much into an oral argument, I’m more optimistic about this case now than any other.

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Massachusetts: The Canary in the Coal Mine for ObamaCare — By Doctor Paul Hsieh

Dr. Paul Hsieh
Doctor Paul Hsieh, an MD who practices in the south Denver metro area, has a deep grasp of the philosophical roots of freedom, both political and economic, and for this reason he despises the left almost as much as he despises the right. Almost. Which is why he infuriated so many of us in 2008 with his outrageous equivocations — equivocations that he’s dearly paying for now.

His equivocations, however, do not preclude him from writing with great limpidity about the subject of healthcare — about which he, being a doctor, is an expert.

The following passage is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the healthcare crisis that we’re now in — and have been in for many decades — and which ObamaCare will only exacerbate a thousandfold.

Massachusetts: The Canary in the Coal Mine for ObamaCare

The ongoing failure of the “universal health care” plan in Massachusetts serves as a clear warning to the rest of America

Five years ago, Massachusetts adopted its “universal health care” plan, which served as the template for President Obama’s subsequent national health care legislation. However, Massachusetts’ problems of rising health costs and worsening access foreshadow similar problems for the rest of America — as well as how to avoid them.

The Massachusetts Medical Society recently reported that the state law has resulted in “longer patient wait times [and] continued difficult access to primary care physicians.” The average wait time in Massachusetts to see an internal medicine physician is now 48 days — double the national average. Over half of primary care practices are no longer accepting new patients. Fewer physicians are accepting the state-run Commonwealth Care and Commonwealth Choice insurance plans. So although Massachusetts politicians frequently boast that they have increased “coverage,” many patients cannot find doctors to provide them with actual medical care.

Meanwhile health costs continue to skyrocket out of control, both for the state government and for privately insured patients. In a recent Forbes article, Sally Pipes notes that over the next 10 years, the plan will cost the state government $2 billion more than predicted. Similarly, prior to the new law insurance prices in Massachusetts increased at a rate 3.7% slower than the national average; after the “reform,” they’re increasing 5.8% faster.

To cut costs, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed replacing the standard payment system with draconian “global budgets” where doctors and hospitals would be given a fixed amount to care for the patients assigned to them. The providers would then keep a portion of the savings if they came under budget (or suffer penalties if they ran over budget) — thus creating morally perverse incentives to deny care to their patients.

The access problems have gotten so bad that the state legislature even considered forcing doctors to accept government-controlled insurance rates as a condition of retaining their state medical licenses (regardless of whether or not the doctors lost money on each patient). As Massachusetts-based health policy analyst Jared Rhoads describes it, this would be responding to the failures created by the government’s insurance mandate by imposing a new “physician mandate.”

Given this hostile practice climate, it is no wonder that many Massachusetts physicians are considering opting out of the government-run system into “concierge practices” — or leaving the state altogether. Dr. Lorraine Schratz, a Massachusetts pediatric cardiologist, noted that half of physicians trained in the state are leaving due to the poor practice environment and poor reimbursements.

Because the ObamaCare national health plan is closely modeled after the Massachusetts plan, we are beginning to see early signs of similar problems developing nationally.

One of the ways ObamaCare will attempt to expand “coverage” will be via dramatically expanding the Medicaid program. But as Medicaid patient Nicole Dardeau recently told the New York Times, “My Medicaid card is useless for me right now…. It’s a useless piece of plastic. I can’t find an orthopedic surgeon or a pain management doctor who will accept Medicaid.” New Orleans ER physician James Aiken similarly noted, “Having a Medicaid card in no way assures access to care.” Once again, politicians can promise theoretical “coverage,” but this is not the same as actual medical care.

Please read the rest of the article here.

Read this to better understand how to truly reform healthcare.

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Second Judge Rules Individual Mandate Unconstitutional

Tad the bartender: Did they shoot your horse?

Tom Reagan: If there’s any justice.

— Miller’s Crossing (1989)

Well, thank goodness, there is still some, Tom.

This Monday, January 31st, 2011, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson became the second judge to officially recognize the painfully obvious: namely, that forcing people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

Judge Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called “individual mandate” went “too far” in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty, stating furthermore:

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”

Difficult decision? Seriously? This is a no-brainer.

Today was a small victory for my favorite lady, and yet Judge Vinson — who was so overwhelming correct in his ruling — makes me nervous with his equivocal language, leading to the real question:

How could any sane person actually believe that government possesses legitimate authority to force me or anyone to buy health insurance?


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Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: ‘The Health Care Bill Is A Disaster’

No shit.

The only real question here is this: what took you liberals so long to figure it out?

And, make no mistake, Evan Thomas is a liberal — about as liberal as they come, as a matter of fact, once even uplifting his hero Barack to the status of a deity.

From The Daily Caller:

“It ain’t because of Congress,” Thomas said. “The unemployment will go down a little bit but the game in Washington will still be this unreal game. Health care though – I got to say, is one place where I think where Republicans are right.”

Back in November 2009, Thomas admitted the health care reform bill had flaws, but still voiced his support for it. Now he has proclaimed it a failure.

“The health care bill is a disaster,” Thomas continued. “We’re sort of slowly learning – it’s not working. It’s interesting – they’re implementing it and it’s not working out at all as people anticipated. There’s all sorts of wildly wrong projections. As it’s being practiced – it’s failed.”

Read the full article here.

Watch the video here: