Obamacare: Repeal The Phony Healthcare System

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See part one here.

Why Not Go All The Way?

In 2009, while medical costs were up and a recession was getting underway, the government saw another opportunity to do something they’d been dying to do since Truman; a complete takeover of the medical insurance industry.

Here’s how the plan came together.

First, they never refer to the insurance takeover as a takeover or insurance. Call the takeover scheme “health care reform”.

Next, design a system that will fail rather quickly.

Wildly exaggerate results.

• For example, we are repeatedly being told that there are now 20 million people who didn't have insurance before that are now "insured."  That's not even a half truth.  First of all, millions lost jobs.  In doing so they lost their insurance.  thousands of companies either cut back hours, reducing workers to part-time because they could no longer offer insurance to employees, while other simply abandoned plans to expand for the same reason.

• Tens of millions of working age people gave up and left he workforce.  Many of them now qualify for Medicaid.  And that is where they and many others already below a certain level ended up.  So many millions of the so-called insured are actually just Medicaid recipients.  That IS NOT a net plus by any measure.

• So, truth be told,  far less than 20 million are on any kind of new insurance, and most who are, are heavily subsidized by others.  The others are the people who must not only buy insurance at wildly inflated rates for themselves, based on their own risk viability, they must also pay considerably more to take care of the so called 20 million  "newly insured,"

  • Update/NOTE:  As it turns out, my numbers are rather charitable and based on TV propaganda. As of 7 Jan 17, there are actually 11 million people (about .3% of the population) signed up for one of the "exchanges" under healthcare.gov.  So, if there are 20 million people now covered under Obamacare, and I doubt there are, that means about 9 million were added to the Medicaid roles.  That, my friends is a portrait of a miserably failed system.  Source: Washington Post, quoting HHS figures.  You have to love WAPO.  The article starts out saying how wonderful Obamacare is.  They throw percentages around in a way that would impress the credulous.  All that is to cushion the upcoming truth.  Or they are hoping you'll quit reading before you get to the bad stuff.  But their own numbers reveal very few people are actually buying into the system. If there were no underlying fear of reprisal, fewer still would be buying.

Continuing With the Obamacare Plan

Uh...oops!

When the whole "market exchange" idea fails, and it will, the left can say, “Look at all the good things we’ve done. But all the greedy hospitals and insurance executives and doctors still ruined it! We need universal government ‘health care’!”

That is precisely what was perpetrated under Obamacare.  Single payer government health care was the outcome intended by the designers of Obamacare.

One of the crises the Obamacare is now touting as a reason to rush ahead with the insurance scam is the 2009 recession. People were loosing their health insurance because they were losing their jobs. (An excellent reason to have never linked the two.) Ironically (?) the very same recession has been needlessly dragged out to the present day by things like Obamacare.

But, oh dear, what to do?

And now the Republicans are talking of “replacing” Obamacare with something they say will work better. They say their program will be better and will still include mandatory insurance for pre-existing conditions. But that too must fail. Or at least fail to stop the insane upward cost spiral we see today caused by Obamacare.

If you enact laws that says this is how you will insure people, you are already screwing the pooch. Insurance people, who are taking all the risk, know how to do that better than ANY government social engineer. And when you introduce your clever new insurance laws and don’t separate out pre-existing conditions and 26 year-olds on their parents plans (WTF?), you are simply creating Obamacare-lite. In other words, you haven’t fixed the problem. You’ve only delayed the collapse for a bit.

Here is the alternative that will work. You:

• Set a timetable for ending all the government mandates on medical insurance for all those above the poverty line and not on Medicare or insurance through the military.

• Repeal laws that prevent competition in the industry.

• End all subsidies and tax breaks for employment-related medical insurance. That’s just an extra impediment to the efficient bet between the customer and the insurance company. The money the employer saves in medical set-asides and compliance can be put into the employee’s paycheck. With that kind of money, an individual can create a serious health savings account.

• End all subsidies for wellness programs. They have been proven not to work. They are used as sops for doctors and others to suck up extra insurance money.

• Thwart jackpot justice in the form of egregious damage awards. The U.S. courts were not set up to ruin doctors.

• Along that same line, move first to eliminate those mandates that encourage doctors to practice defensive medicine.  Then eliminate all mandates.  It is not up tot he government to decide how much you pay, and for what coverage.  It is up to yo and the insurance company.

• Encourage people to seek minor, non-emergency treatment (no longer covered under our adult approach) from facilities that post their rates. Educate them to shop their medical dollar. You’ll be AMAZED at how inexpensive routine treatment will become.

This list is not exhaustive by any means. But by doing these things we take the billions of dollars sloshing around a bloated and mismanaged system and let it move much more effectively between patient, insurer and doctor. By extracting the government money from the system, the incentive to bilk the system as government systems always are bilked, is eliminated.

Don't dicker.  REPEAL!

In short, the plan should not be repeal and replace.  It should be repeal.  Give the industry a year or two to put real insurance offerings together and on a predetermined date, phase people off the government dole and into private policies designed to take care of CATASTROPHIC medial needs.

Once you’ve done all these things, if you want to still take care of those who are uninsured for reasons other than personal irresponsibility, you can do so at far less cost than under the Obamacare circus tent.  You provide them vouchers for care.

The one role the government has to play in this whole picture is punishing fraud. That is a legitimate role for any government. Fraud by insurers and doctors and fraud by people trying to get on a government program who don’t belong there. And punishments should be brutal. We can be confident that insurance companies in the United States can come up with selections of coverage and prices that work better than anything the federal government and the existing monstrosity, with its 2700 page law and 30,000 pages of regulation, have.

And the costs to the consumer would be dramatically reduced!  They will be lower than they were before Obamacare was ever conceived. Photo Credit: Thomas Altfather Good Flickr via Compfight cc Kindle Version, STREET POLITICS: It Ain't Your Daddy's GOP Anymore! Only $4.99

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