Who’s Lying About Healthcare Reform?...

Just this week the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told Senator Max Baucus (meanly depicted at left) and his health care committee that his plan to cut $127 BILLION from Medicare Advantage (a program that gives almost a quarter of all seniors private health insurance options) would result in LOWER BENEFITS and some 2.7 MILLION Americans LOSING COVERAGE.

When the insurance company Humana sent its customers a mailing telling THEM exactly what the CBO told Senator Baucus’ committee, Senator Baucus ordered that those mailings be immediately halted and directed Medicare regulators to investigate Humana for apparently trying to educate their customers.

Jonathan Blum (the current acting director of the offices of Medicare and Medicaid Services) called the Humana mailings “misleading and confusing to beneficiaries...” and banned all Advantage contractors from telling their customers what the CBO just told the Baucus committee!

Meanwhile, AARP’s website erroneously claims that it’s a “fact” that “none of the health care reform proposals being considered by Congress will cut Medicare benefits or increase your out-of-pocket costs.”

According to the CBO, what AARP is claiming is UNTRUE, or to put it in the parlance of the other side, “A LIE.”

Douglas Elmendorf (director of the CBO) has said that cuts to the Medicare Advantage program “could lead many plans to limit the benefits they offer, raise their premiums, or withdraw from the program.”

Again, why all these lies and obfuscations from the health care reform advocates?

Look, the bottom-line is that neither government nor industry likes the current system of employer-paid healthcare. Government covets all that untaxed compensation and our businesses and industries are looking to shed those costs to become more competitive in the global economy.

The primary (almost the sole) reason for the skyrocketing cost of American healthcare is, simply put that we GIVE AWAY far too much advanced and high-tech medical care to people unwilling and unable to pay for it. Like it or not, THAT'S our current "healthcare problem" in a nutshell.

Honesty demands that we acknowledge that “cost cutting” actually means rationing and restrictions in health care reform parlance.

And to be honest, there’s NOTHING at all wrong with that.

IF DONE RIGHT (with a combination of a strictly rationed and restricted expanded public option along with available private supplemental insurance), such an expanded public option would (1) make the American workforce even more cost-effective, productive and competitive in the global marketplace, (2) make America’s businesses and industries far more globally competitive virtually overnight and (3) eradicate BILLIONS in “untaxed compensation” that most full-time workers (especially government workers) now get.

Such an expanded public option, so long as it is tightly rationed and heavily restricted, would also serve to REDUCE the costs of illegal immigrants and others unwilling/unable to pay for advanced care by rationing ans restricting the amount and level of care they could get, and it would introduce new restrictions and rationing of care to Medicaid in particular, but also to Medicare, as well.

This COULD easily save the U.S. BILLIONS of dollars and transform our industries into global juggernauts very quickly. So long as supplemental private insurance is available to those willing and able to pay to avoid the restrictions and rationing that’ll come with the “free” expanded public option, the people MOST negatively impacted by those restrictions and rationed care would be the least productive and the most reckless and irresponsible among us (“...it’s saying no one’s going to carry YOUR burdens anymore...” – President B.H. Obama). And those very Reaganesque sentiments would not be at all a bad thing for the U.S. economy overall.
So WHY the lies? Why tell people they’re going to get BETTER healthcare and cheaper healthcare, when, in fact, we’ll be doling out LESS care, MORE rationed and restricted care, in exchange for a more vibrant economy and more “fairness,” and by “fairness” I mean, an end to those unwilling/unable to pay mooching off those who can...and do? Why sell something that DOES have its own substantial merits as something that it’s not?

Unless...you’re trying to keep all the dupes who THINK they’ll be getting something MORE for less, or even “free,” continuing to believe that delusion.