Free Healthcare and It’s Discontents....

Why is there so much confusion over the current healthcare debate?

The information (FACTS) are all out there, so there shouldn’t be any confusion at all, but there IS.

FACT: Healthcare costs have been skyrocketing in the USA for years. They've far exceeded the rate of inflation and have swamped most worker’s wage increases over the last decade or so. Those costs have gone up due PRIMARILY to Americans, across the board, having access to the latest (and most expensive) health care technologies.

FACT: America’s existing “public options” (Medicare and Medicaid) have failed. They will BOTH implode, but Medicaid especially, by 2016, with its projected $5 TRILLION deficit! Those two programs are suffering under monumentous mismanagement, incompetence, waste, abuse and outright fraud.

FACT: BOTH Democrats and Republicans ARE and HAVE BEEN actively seeking a way to CUT America’s costs and NOT “offer more or better healthcare to more people.”

FACT: There is no “public option” now being considered that would provide long-term care to seniors at government (taxpayer) expense. Moreover, there is no indication of any broad public support for such a program. In fact, most Americans acknowledge the growing national debt as our biggest problem. In response to that the Obama administration has sought to “pay for” its universal care by CUTTING about $500 BILLION from Medicare and Medicaid!

Of course, that number is not close to paying for the projected $1.6 TRILLION cost of this universal care.

Ted Kennedy, less than a month before he died, called for the rationing of healthcare to those on any public options, and that is exactly in line with what the Congressional Democrat’s Bill would deliver.

FACT: The reason most American working people would be WORSE off with an expanded public option is that their employers would have no reason to maintain their current health plans. It would be far cheaper to simply shunt those folks onto the public option. BOTH private sector and public sector (state, local and federal) workers would eventually be placed on the public option.

The government simply CAN’T pay for the current unlimited access to the best and most high-tech healthcare in the world. America’s survival rate for early detected prostate and breast cancers is nearly 100% compared to England’s 77%! There's no question that Americans get the best and most high-tech healthcare, but the unfortunate reality is that it can no longer be given away to all, regardless of whether they're insured or not.

With those fiscal realities in place, the government would have to severely restrict and heavily ration the healthcare offered under its public option. Those workers who now get the bulk of their healthcare paid for by their employers, would have to pay high insurance premiums merely to circumvent the restrictions and rationing the public option will come with, just to maintain the same level of access they currently enjoy. Those who now take home more money each payday by opting not to pay into their share of their company healthcare premiums would have that option or CHOICE denied them. They’d have the option of the free and rationed public option chosen for them...they'd only be able to deny paying for the private insurance needed to circumvent the rationing the public option will come with.

Those who can’t or won’t pay the gap-insurance premiums needed to circumvent the public option restrictions and rationing would face the possibility of being given pain pills instead of access to more expensive treatments for advanced care. That’s not only the existing reality in places like England, it’s also the existing reality in places like Oregon, where older people on Oregon’s statewide plan are often offered $50 pain kills instead of $4,000 anti-cancer drugs, as government must always balance individual benefit, which is minimal for the poor and elderly, versus the cost.

Most workers sense that they’ll be worse off under such a system, but that their companies and our state, local and federal governments will ALL be much better off!

Almost overnight, American businesses will become more profitable and competitive in the global market. That would mean, American workers would become significantly more productive within the global labor pool, which should mean more job creation. Likewise, our state, local and federal governments will be able to shed BILLIONS each year in healthcare premiums it now pays for its workers and insurance companies will reap a huge bonanza in hawking the needed gap-insurance, for those who want to avoid the rationing and restrictions of the public option. It's a veritable WIN-WIN-WIN, for everyone EXCEPT the working taxpayers of this country. They get to pay MORE, for LESS care.

With the great boom this will be to BOTH big business and the government, the only strange thing about universal healthcare is, why it’s taken so long for it to be implemented.

Who Are “the Bad Guys” in the Current Healthcare Debate?

That’s the crux of the question that must be answered, “Just who “the bad guys” in this current healthcare debate?

Is it the Conservatives, many of whom already benefit from government-run healthcare in the form of Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans Hospital care, OR is it the liberal-Democrats who want to impose rationing and restrictions on care for all, so that a few more Americans can be covered under an umbrella of what by current standards is sub-par care, with those who CAN afford to, being able to buy expensive gap insurance to avoid those restrictions?

To be able to answer that question, we first have to look at the problem.

The same liberal Democrats who chant “America’s healthcare system is broken,” conveniently overlook the undeniable FACT that the part that is broken is, in fact, Medicare and Medicaid not only account for a large and growing share of federal spending — 23% last year, they now account for appx 50% of all U.S. healthcare spending, that is about 6% of GDP, for a nation that currently spends 12% of GDP on healthcare.

Both Medicaid and Medicare are rife with fraud, waste and cost-overruns.

Moreover, the fact is that the primary reason that the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than other countries is because we have access to and consume far more healthcare services at baseline. Countries that utilize various forms of socialized or universal healthcare spend less than the United States because they ration care, to some degree or another, by restricting what services patients can have access to through a variety of mechanisms.

Those rationings and restrictions come with a very high human price.

Recently, a review of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed that the United States ranked at the top in terms of access to advanced medical technology such as CT scanners, MRI machines, and Cardiac Catheterizations. As a result of this access to newer services and technologies, Americans enjoyed among the highest rates of cancer survivorship and survival from major medical illness around the world.

An recent study from the Eurocare-4 working group, which appeared in Lancet Oncology, found that the United States outperformed European countries in 5-year relative survival rates for all malignancies in men (66.3 versus 47.3) and women (62.9 versus 55.8) and was among the highest performers in terms of 5-year relative survival rates for colo-rectum, lung, soft tissue, skin melanoma, breast, uterine, prostate, thyroid, and non-hodgkins lymphoma.

In addition to these live sustaining measures, increased utilization and access to healthcare services improves the quality of life for many patients suffering from painful and debilitating diseases such as joint, eye and cardiovascular disease. Regarding "disease specific outcomes", which were not taken into account in the WHO rankings, the US performs at the top.

But all of this comes at a cost.

The liberal Democrats are pushing healthcare rationing and restrictions to cut costs, specifically to the most poor and vulnerable – those unable to purchase the needed supplemental insurances to circumvent the rationed care that comes with any government-managed healthcare.

Some Conservatives are being equally hypocritical, in that they too support reining in healthcare costs by eliminating access to top level care to those unable to afford it, but they too, don’t want to annunciate this. Why do so? There’s no downside in them politicizing this issue to the hilt the way the liberal Democrats politicized national security over the past decade!

So, bottom-line, there’s no way to cut America’s healthcare costs nor keep them from continuing to mushroom other than restrictions and rationing of care.

That can be done by BOTH government AND the private sector.

One thing that MUST be done is to get the out-of-control costs of Medicare and Medicaid under control BEFORE any misguided politician even considers using them as “a workable healthcare system,” as in their current form, they’re far from that.

Another thing that MUST be done is to eliminate that inane “unfunded mandate” that maintains that ANYONE who comes to an American hospital’s emergency room in need of care MUST be cared for AT TAXPAYER’S EXPENSE! It’s a mandate that DOES NOT EXIST anywhere else in the modern industrial world and it’s now a luxury we cannot afford.

Then, we must look at rationing care, restricting access AND really cracking down on Medicare and Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse.

Government funded healthcare is NOT “free” because no commodity (and healthcare is a commodity) is ever delivered for free. The cost of all our current, government-funded “free healthcare” (in the form of Medicare and Medicaid) is 6% of GDP or appx. $900 BILLION every year.

What America can no long afford is giving people who don’t pay into the system unlimited access to expensive, advanced care. Those of us who recognize that fact and accept that some form of rationing and retrictions for existing government healthcare programs are wrong to argue against universal, government-run healthcare plans for their restrictions and rationing, just as surely as those who support the "public option" are wrong for claimiing that the most dysfunctional portion of our current healthcare system (Medicare & Medicaid) can be blueprintss for any kind of "solution" to our current healthcare cost problems.