What Is It All About?
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE
It is all about concentrating control over the healthcare system in the federal government. It is about increasing profits of the healthcare insurance industry. It is about decreasing consumers’ freedom to choose a physician. It is about inhibiting physicians’ freedom to use clinical judgment.
It is designed to happen slowly and insidiously. The trick is to increase control and decrease freedom so that it is not noticed until after it has happened.
Obamacare will not collapse in the next day or two. It will take months to a few years before the major stakeholders (consumers/patients) realize what has happened to our healthcare system.
Only when every consumer is affected will there be a unified public community outcry to repeal Obamacare.
It might be too late at that time. All the stakeholders will have adjusted to the new but unsuccessful healthcare system at the taxpayers’ expense.
Socialized medicine has not been cost effective anywhere in the free world.
Eighty percent of the people are not sick at any one time. The healthy think the socialized healthcare system in their society is fine until they get sick.
Most people do not realize that the bureaucratic costs and inefficiency in a socialized medicine system consume a high percentage of the GNP.
Americans would not tolerate 50% of the GNP going to the healthcare system. Especially when the quality of care and access to care has diminished along with the rationing of care.
Medical care is personal. Commoditization of medical care is not personal. When consumers realize they do not have the freedom to choose there will be a reaction.
President Obama’s public relations machine is pumping out deceptions and half-truths right and left about the success of the web site in December without producing any facts except the number of people who visited the site. The implication is these consumers have signed up and received healthcare insurance.
The defects in the implementation are too numerous to count. The New York Times is not deterred. It is regurgitating the Obama administrations press releases. The administration admits the rollout has had a lot of glitches. However, the administration as well as the New York Times has said that over time all Americans will all be happy with the results of Obamacare.
The mainstream media is spinning President Obama’s story.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post started off the New Year with the following statement.
It is no longer a matter of logic. It is no longer a question of what will work or what will not work. Obamacare is the law of the land. Therefore it is best to shut up and live with it.
No one is talking about Obamacare defects or its inevitable failure.
“The fight is history, you realize. Done. Finito. Yesterday's news.
Any existential threat to the Affordable Care Act ended with the popping of champagne corks as the New Year arrived.
“That was when an estimated 6 million uninsured Americans received coverage through expanded Medicaid eligibility or the federal and state health insurance exchanges.”
“ObamaCare is now a fait accompli; nobody is going to take this coverage away from the millions of uninsured”
Let us keep half-truths in perspective. Where did Eugene Robinson get the fact that 6 million people got insurance coverage on the health insurance exchanges?
Over 6.5 million people lost their healthcare insurance already under Obamacare and 48 million people were said to be uninsured before Obamacare. President Obama promised that 30 million new people would receive insurance under Obamacare.
These calculations should give most thinking people a headache.
Carl Sandburg, in the Prairie Years ,said that a liar has to have a good memory. However, if you tell enough lies and cover them with enough distractions the audience experiences information overload and doesn’t remember the lies.
It seems to me that Obamacare does not solve any of the problems in the healthcare system.
It is going to make the healthcare insurance industry richer, the pharmaceutical industry richer and the middle class poorer as coverage is reduced, deductibles are increased, access to care is reduced and rationing of care is increased.
Access to medical care should be universal.
Obamacare changes the entire healthcare system. It permits 20% of the population to have access to healthcare insurance while destroying the present healthcare coverage system for 80% of the population. Most of that 80% claim they liked their insurance and their doctor.
President Obama lied to them when he told them they could keep their insurance and their doctor. He is now telling them Obamacare is for their own good.
Why should the government decide on our healthcare coverage?
Healthcare insurance never made people healthy. People help themselves stay healthy.
The main issue is the present healthcare system is unsustainable.
Medicare and Medicaid are unsustainable.
The private employer sponsored healthcare system is unsustainable.
The Veterans Administration healthcare system is unsustainable.
The present and impending failures of Obamacare are unsustainable.
What can America do?
The consumer’s responsibility is missing from the entire discussion. How do you create a system that lets consumers be responsible for their health and healthcare?
How do consumers stop healthcare insurance executives from making obscene salaries and drug companies obscene profits?
It is by consumers not buying their products.
There must be total transparency of healthcare products available to consumers. Consumers must be educated to evaluate these products. Only then can consumers choose the best healthcare and medical care value for them.
There must also be a financial incentive for consumers to be responsible for their own healthcare and medical care decisions.
It is not by imposing an ideology that promotes central government control of the healthcare system.
It is not by creating more entitlements
Government bureaucracy is inefficient. It does not help the masses. It helps insiders. It leads to cost overruns.
It stifles innovations.
It is not by imposing a system of redistribution of wealth that is going to fix the healthcare system.
Politicians are forced to disguise the redistribution of wealth because it threatens their re-election prospects.
Our elected officials passed the 10 hidden taxes that have been in force for four years going on five to finance Obamacare before it is fully implemented.
The costs of these taxes have been passed on to consumers. The majority of consumers are in the middle class. They are paying for these taxes indirectly.
In reality President Obama is taxing the working middle class and lower class as well as people making over $250,000 a year. Despite these increased in taxes Obamacare still in for more cost overruns.
The taxpayers’ problem is the administration is unwilling to reveal these cost overruns.
President Obama recently promised to bail out the healthcare insurance industry if they lose money on Obamacare.
This promise is almost as upsetting as providing a waiver to Congress from Obamacare.
Government’s role is to educate consumers.
It is not to create increasing entitlements to have more and more central control over the population.
Entitlements do not work!
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone.
Please have a friend subscribe.
Richard A Dickey,MD • January 11, 2014
Stan
I agree with your assertion that the greed of the insurance and drug industry leaders are wrong and that Obama and Congress accepted feeding that greed to get the ACA passed. It is time to correct that but, on the whole, I support the ACA. Here is my recently submitted letter to the Editor of the NC Med Journal about this:
To the Editor — The November/December NCMJ’s letter to the Editor, ‘Health Care Costs Must Come Down’ by Ron Howrigen, president of Fulcrum Strategies, Raleigh, NC, demands a response. This is mine.
I heartily agree with the author that Health care costs must come down. This is inarguable and, in spite of the author’s pessimism, I note that the rate of rise of health care costs has already moderated since the Affordable Care Act ( ACA) was passed, even though it will cause a rise (estimated at 6%) as the millions of uninsured (at least double the 6%) are extended coverage by the ACA as it is fully implemented. However, the author totally avoided discussion of the ethical and moral issues the ACA sought to address, particularly the American public’s right to access and coverage of good health care. It has been our obligation, as fellow members of a wealthy nation, to provide that coverage after having failed to address it for over fifty years. Notably, the author, a consultant to physicians, is certainly not a disinterested party in the health care system and therefore his denial of any conflict of interest is hardly forthright. He actually admits his conflict in his statement of his ‘biggest concern,’ i.e. that the ACA will try to control costs by drastically reducing reimbursement to physicians. He and we must realize that our health care system is rapidly evolving to become not nearly as dependent on the physician as it has been in the past.
When the ACA was being considered by the Congress, those whose corporate bottom lines might be significantly impacted by it and the lobbyists who represent those interests read and studied the ACA carefully. I too read it, all of it. Yet few physicians or patients to whom I spoke had actually read even a small portion of the ACA. As I discussed it with others, I shared my excitement about the significant amount of the ACA which was directed to research ways to assess and improve medical care and coverage. I believe these aspects of the ACA had been included with the expectation that, someday, the findings of the research funded by the ACA could and would be used to improve health care and save money through the implementation of evidence-based practices and payment policies identified by that research. I am not unaware of the considerable compromises and gifts our elected officials in Washington, including our President, had to accept to get the ACA through Congress. I hoped that, over time, the positive effects and benefits of the ACA, such as the coverage of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance and the removal of the pre-existing condition clauses, would be appreciated by most Americans. While I was disappointed especially in the failure of our President to be successful in his quest to avoid many of those concessions in the final ACA, I hoped those gifts to some corporate interests, including hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical businesses, could be ameliorated or even reversed with time.
While I am dismayed by the unrelenting efforts in Congress to undo or limit funds for the ACA, the deficiencies of which are remediable, I remain excited about the good things which have already come and will be coming from this act, one of the most courageous, morally right steps our nation has ever taken.
Richard A Dickey, MD, FACP, FACE
Retired endocrinologist
51 Players Ridge Road
Hickory, North Carolina 28601-8839
radmd51@gmail.com
(828) 495-1230