Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, and if you’re willing to set party politics aside, then read further about why we should stop Obamacare, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act, dead in its tracks.
I’ve been in the health insurance business most of my life. Since 1984 to be exact. I won’t claim to be any expert, just because I’ve sold heath insurance from 1984 to 2004. But I will use my experience, both as an agent, and with some of my encounters with politicians to explain why Obamacare is a bad deal and why it needs to be stopped.
First, let’s deal with the present. Many people, Democrat and Republican, feel resigned to thinking that because Barack Obama was re-elected for four more years on November 6, 2012, that there’s nothing we can do to stop Obamacare. After all, the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality last summer by one vote, that being the deciding vote cast by Chief Justice John Roberts. So what do we do about it now? We contact our statehouses and try to keep our states from setting up the exchanges. That will stop Obamacare dead in its tracks. So that’s what we do to try to carry on the fight.
Let’s look objectively at what’s wrong with Obamacare. This idea was tried before in 1993. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he immediately tried to get what was then known as the Health Security Act passed, which is almost word-for-word, the same thing as the current Affordable Care Act is now. In 1993, the Democrats in favor of this nightmare, got on buses and tried to promote it nationwide via a bus tour. It failed miserably, because the primary objective of it, single payer health care along with health care rationing, was overwhelmingly rejected.
I’m convinced people don’t know what’s in this legislation, now being called Obamacare. Most businesses don’t either, so they are forced to hire outside consulting firms to figure out how to be in compliance with it. The former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, even admitted that “we need to pass this legislation so we can find out what’s in it.” So our beloved politicians really didn’t write this piece of legislation. They just edited parts of Clinton’s failed Health Security Act and passed it while there were Democratic super majorities in the Senate and House. The primary objective of this legislation, ceremoniously mislabeled as the “Affordable Care Act,” is to so confuse the health care marketplace with its 2,700 pages of regulations, so that everyone wil give up trying to figure out how to comply with it, and demand single payer health care. Single payer health care, to the uninitiated, simply means government-run health care. I mean, if you can’t figure out whether the health care you’re required to buy, meets government standards for being adequate care, you are then required to pay a penalty, labeled by the Supreme Court as a “tax.”
I would argue that single payer health care has been what liberal politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been after, from day one. Neither one of those two politicians could explain any of the details of what’s in the bill. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the United States is in terrible financial condition. With Obamacare originally pegged at $800 billion to implement, and now the actual figures coming out suggest it will take $1.6 trillion or more to implement, the logical question anyone has to ask, Democrat or Republican, is, where is the money going to come from? If the government succeeds in implementing a single payer health care plan, where they provide the health care according to who they believe is in need of it, then the government can also demand that the subscribers pay their premiums to, guess where? The federal government, of course. So instead of paying a premium to a group insurer or a private health care plan, you’ll just pay a premium to the federal government. What usually happens when you have only ONE provider of goods and services? Either the cost goes up, or the provider of that good or service finds its supply is limited.
Health care premiums are exorbitant. I’ll be the first to admit that, having sold health insurance for roughly twenty years. The main reason they are is because there is no competition between medical service providers. If you need a hospital room, you’re not able to shop around for the best rate because your insurance dictates where you’ll be treated, in most cases. If the federal government can implement single payer health care and get you to pay health care premiums to them, instead of an insurance carrier, think of all the money they’ll take in. Will they use the money to pay only for health care, or is the money likely to go to pay for Congressmen’s inflated salaries, pensions and foreign junkets, like it already does with the Social Security Trust Fund? The Federal Government is the only place I know that will spend $800 to buy a toilet seat and $500 to buy a hammer. So by redirecting one-seventh of the U.S. economy from health insurers to the Federal Government, it gives our trillion-dollar-a-year deficit spenders a way to hide the money and dole out health “care” only to those deemed “cost efficient” enough to deserve it. It probably wouldn’t hurt to prove that you donated heavily to a politician’s campaign fund before you ask the Federal Government for treatment, if this single payer health care stuff ever comes to fruition.
Another thing worth mentioning about why the present health care system is so costly, is because of all the lawyers who have driven up malpractice costs. If anyone remembers in 2004 when Jonathan Edwards, Democratic candidate for Vice-President, ran for office, it was uncovered during that election cycle that Edwards had earned $27 million suing doctors. Democrats have never been in favor of tort reform which would limit the dollar amount of damages that patients could sue a doctor for, and bring malpractice costs down to a more manageable level. People complain all the time that they think doctors run too many costly exams on them that aren’t necessary, until they understand that the doctor is simply trying to cover himself in case he doesn’t uncover some medical condition that could cause someone to sue him. I’m not saying a doctor shouldn’t be sued if he or she didn’t exercise reasonable judgment or perhaps was even negligent; I’m just saying that the legal sytem has abused the medical profession by turning lawsuits against doctors into a type of “litigation lottery.” If you doubt this, just sit at home and watch TV during the day for a few hours, and watch how many lawyers advertise their services on TV on a contingency basis to sue doctors and pharmaceutical companies.
If Obamacare was so great, why was it passed in 2010 by a Democrat super majority in both the Senate and the House, and then put on the shelf until 2013 or 2014 to be implemented? This is really the question of the day. I mean, if Obamacare was supposed to be this great reform of the health care system, why does the public have to wait three or four years for it to take effect? Could it be that it was calculated to take effect three or four years later, after another election cycle, so that current politicians could mount more effective re-election campaigns? You be the judge. In Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, there are quite a few restaurants who appealed to her and got exemptions from the implementation of Obamacare because of its “costs.” The well-known fast food chain, McDonald’s (ever hear of them?) was granted a waiver that I believe expires either in 2013 or 2014.
It seems to me that the dirty little secret is that a lot of voters, particularly Democrats, think Obamacare is a great deal for people other than themselves, and that as long as they support Democratic candidates for office, they can get waivers or exemptions from Obamacare, at least long enough to either go on Medicare, or sell their business to someone else who has to deal with the 2,700 page Affordable Care Act legislation, while the original seller with the waiver moves to Costa Rica. I’m reasonably certain, although I don’t have proof yet, that all government employees will be exempt from Obamacare. I know for fact that one Henry Clay, U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri, appealed to Hillary Clinton when the Health Security Act was being proposed in 1993 for Congressmen to be exempt from HillaryCare, as it was known then, and was granted his request. The argument would likely run that, “well, Congress (and by extension, all government employees) already have their own health care plan, and thus are already in compliance with Obamacare.” And I’m sure you’re aware, that the taxpayer pays for the Civil Service Health Care plan, and I doubt seriously that President Obama or Hillary Clinton will ever have to wait more than 24 hours to see a doctor if they need one. You and I will be subject to some sort of board review, and if the medical treatment we need is deemed unnecessary by a government bureaucrat, you better either make your peace with God, or see if you can be treated in Costa Rica or New Zealand.
So in summary, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, affectionately (not so much with me) known as Obamacare, is nothing more than a rehash of Clinton’s 1993 Health Security Act, which features fines to both a consulting doctor and yourself, if you try to seek treatment outside the plan, and roughly 10,000 new IRS agents hired by the government at about a $40,000 a year pop, to enforce either compliance with the law by purchasing adequate coverage or enforcement of the fine and/or penalty if you don’t comply. Why else would all these businesses be scrambling to hire outside consulting firms to figure out how to comply with this “law”? Just like the tax code, which is already complex enough, you need all these outside consultants to figure out how to comply with government regulations, and I’m sure they don’t work for free. I would emphasize encouraging your own state through your governor, to not set up these health exchanges, since there’s no mandate for that. If a state doesn’t set up an exchange, then there can’t be any Obamacare for its citizens, at least until they railroad through a law that fixes that. Maybe that can be challenged in the Supreme Court as well, but I wouldn’t count on justice there either. Just enough delay so that perhaps you can get all the medical treatment you need completed, before either your doctor quits out of frustration with all of this, or your care starts to become rationed. .
