The Obamacare Public Relations Offensive Is In Full Swing
Stanley
Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE
The Obama
Administration promised us a full offensive to promote Obamacare. It is now in
full swing. The Obama administration is using traditional media outlet to
promote the greatness of Obamacare.
The main
outlet so far has been the New York Times. Paul Krugman had two articles filled
with misinformation and misdirection.
On
June 12th a Bloomberg News article was “Obamacare Shows Hospital Savings
as Patients Make Gains.”
In the opening
sentences the statement “Hospitals
are improving care and saving millions of dollars with one of the least touted
but potentially most effective provisions of the law” is made.
“252 hospitals and physician groups
across the U.S. have signed up to join the administration’s accountable care program,
in which they share the financial risk of keeping patients healthy.”
One can conclude this is a
spin article from the first two paragraphs of the Bloomberg News article.
How can one know hospitals
are improving care and savings millions of dollars when measurements are not
going to start being made until after January 1,2014.
Second, there are 252
hospitals and physician groups across U.S. that have signed up to join the
Obama administration Accountable Care Organization's program (ACO).
This statement generated
two questions in my mind. How many hospitals have signed up and how many
physician groups have signed up?
If they were all hospital
groups this is an extremely small number. There are a total of 5724 registered
hospitals in the U.S. of which 4973 are community hospitals. In that group
there are 2903 non-government not for profit community hospitals and 1025
Investor owned for profit community hospitals.
The 252 ACOs, if they are all hospital ACOs,
represent 6.4% of the total community hospitals and 8.6% of the non-profit
community hospitals.
The 252 ACOs are not a
significant number of hospitals to have signed up at this point to draw a
significant conclusion of cost saving even if the cost savings could be
measured at this point.
This article is total spin
article from a probable Obama administration press release.
The second point is why
would physicians or hospitals want to share financial risk with the government
or an insurance company when much of the risk results from patients demographic
and behavior.
Risk assessment is the
healthcare insurance industry’s job not the responsibility of hospitals or
physicians’
Another article that
appeared in the New York Times was “What Sweden Can Tell Us About Obamacare. “
It starts with
the blame game scenario.
LAST month, for the 37th time, the House of
Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare, with many Republicans saying that
its call for greater government involvement in the health care system spells
doom.
Most
progressive thinkers dislike conservative thinkers. They believe most
conservative thinkers are simplistic or dumb. The New York Times is playing to
its audience with blame game statements such as this one.
On close
inspections conservatives are neither simplistic nor dumb and statements such
as the above are not constructive. However, these comments are effective in spinning the story.
"Visiting Swedish health economists were asked to shared their thoughts about healthcare. Like economists in most other countries, they tend to be skeptical of large bureaucracies."
"So if extensive government involvement in health care is indeed a recipe for doom, they should have clear evidence of that by now."
"Yet none of them voiced the kinds of complaints about recalcitrant bureaucrats and runaway health costs."
There
is plenty of evidence that extensive government involvement in healthcare is
indeed a recipe for doom. All you have to do is look at Britain and the lack of
success of its healthcare system.
Look
at most all of the Democratic Socialist countries in Europe. They are all on
the brink of collapse with healthcare costs being a large contributory of the collapse. The only thing holding them up is the funny money they
are printing.
This
is one of the reasons America shouldn’t be printing funny money. Obamacare is going
to force us to print more funny money. It is going to drive us into the same
situation that Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and France are in.
When are we going to learn that socialistic entitlement
societies are not economically or financially viable?
America’s
healthcare system has problems but they are problems resulting from not dealing with the abuse of all of the
stakeholders.
In
the next few months we are going to see more and more public service
announcements, editorials and articles promoting Obamacare with little critical
evidence proving the virtues or viability of the claims.
I
hope the public will not buy the spin. The Obamacare promotion campaign will
consist of a number of crisp sound bites. The sound bites are backed by little
evidence that they are viable.
The
promotion campaign will also contain criticisms and attacks on the big bad
conservative Republicans. The Republicans will be accused of having a difficult
time thinking critically or understanding the big picture.
Maybe
this time the public won’t fall for the spin and misinformation.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone
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