How Did Healthcare Get Into this Mess?

It's time to unload the paperwork burden from doctors

Okay, I know if I say Obamacare is a bad idea, my friends on the left are going to jump me and say I don't understand what it's like to be without healthcare and I hate the poor and want children to die.

First, I'm the poster child for the person without healthcare.  I have to get mine through the few doctors who will even accept someone without health insurance.  I have to pay through the nose so they can afford the two clerks and the confiscatory malpractice insurance and they can't tell their insurance guy they even treated someone like me or they could lose their malpractice insurance. Someone like me who is poor is expected to be lawsuit happy.  I don't sue docs for honest mistakes, but they don't know that, so I pay the price for the greed of others.  I should be singing and dancing over the coming of Obamacare.  I'm not!

How in the world did we get into this mess?  Once upon a time you could go down to the doc, pay for what you needed and move along.  Sometimes doctors took pity on patients who were in financial trouble and gave them free treatment to tide them over.  An OB/GYN once saved my wife's life by donating his services to do a surgery that removed a volleyball sized tumor when we were temporarily without health insurance.  He can no longer do that. It's against the law because it's seen as a discriminatory practice for the doctor to choose to not charge some needy patients and charge others patients who can pay. Apparently only the government is allowed to give things away these days.

That's unfortunate because it prevents physicians from doing what they studied all those years to do - help sick people.  The problem with health care started in two areas. 

•  First, as a wealthy nation we were able to treat ourselves with all sorts of evil delights from fried Twinkies to five nights a week fast food. It's little wonder our lifespans didn't climb as fast as we thought it should, even though it's nearly doubled over just the past century. 
• The second problem was that we expected medical science's technological miracles to keep up the pace they started out at with wonder drugs, penicillin and amazing new surgeries. If they had no answers, we didn't believe them. If they tried something and failed, we assumed they were being malicious.

What happened next was we got mad if the doctors couldn't cure us of everything simply because we expected them too. After all the media made the new medicine men seem like magicians. If they failed us, we sought a way to punish them. A burgeoning crowd of newly minted lawyers looking for work obliged. Juries decided to give lottery level winnings to people who sue hospitals and the race was on. With more lawyers than a society could afford, they started going into politics until the legislatures and congress were so full of lawyers, you couldn't throw a lobbyist without hitting one.

Lawyers passed laws or refused to pass laws in order to protect their quite lucrative business of suing doctors and hospitals. To protect themselves, everyone in the medical business got insured and, as everyone knows, the medical systems circled the wagons and got themselves another bunch of lawyers. Then the government got into it and instead of making things better added a lot of paperwork and whole new federal agencies stuffed with bureaucrats, lawyers and poli-sci majors.

With all these lawyers and bureaucrats to feed, guess who paid at the pump for their fodder?

That's right. You and me. So tell me how adding more government and more trained lawyers and politicians to this mess is going to make it LESS expensive. The meme is that evil insurance companies shouldn't make evil profits off sick people. One guy even told me NOBODY should make profits off of sick people.

And why not? Lawyers do. Doctors do. Hospitals do. Even the government does - how else do you think they'd be able to pay all those new Obamacare bureaucrats. It would be a lot cheaper if healthcare was between you and your doctor, but that ain't happening anymore. It hasn't happened since the days of house calls and paying for a doctor's visit with live chickens. Too many people have stuck a hose into the medical industry and are siphoning off consumer dollars.  Like pirates driving up the cost of shipping, these medical industry parasites drive up the cost of healthcare year after year.

For every doctor and nurse actually practicing medicine, there are 50 clerks, administrators, managers, lawyers, politicians, IRS agents, bureaucrats and hangers-on taking a piece out of the sick person's wallet. They are all making a "profit".  Don't believe it?  Ask any of them if they are working as volunteers?  The bureaucrats know the cash cow is nearly drained, that's why they have gone to the government for funding.  Like one liberal told me once, if a government program runs out of money, they just go get more printed. That's why the IRS is being given the power to reach into your bank account under Obamacare and withdraw money without your permission to pay for your healthcare. Where else did you think all that money was coming from for the hundreds of thousands of new Obamacare bureaucrats?

They tell me that Conservative's don't have a plan to fix healthcare.  We actually do.  The plan is to QUIT TRYING TO FIX HEALTHCARE!  Butt out. Get the government out of the healthcare business as much as you can. Make lawsuits less lucrative. Restore the ability of doctors to do pro bono work and to manage their own practices without interference.  How's that not a plan?

Government is not the solution to every problem, especially when it comes to healthcare. I should be able to go down to my doc's, pay 30 or 40 bucks directly to him and get my blood pressure meds re-upped. After all, I can go down to that evil Wal-Mart and buy three month's worth of my prescriptions for ten bucks apiece. But nooooooo. My doc has to charge me $125, do a lot of unnecessary tests to protect himself in case I decide to sue him and pay two extra clerks to do the paperwork on my "case". The tests themselves can cost me another $250. I can't afford that. I have a friend who's a doc who absolutely retired in sheer frustration at having to charge his patients so much money when he knows he could do the same job for a third the cost or less.

And the leftists who love Obamacare, all seem to want to shut down my WalMart to boot. That's stupid! Wally World's $4 generic prescription drug program has done more to help poor people like me with their prescriptions than the federal government ever did‼

If the feds would stop meddling and let docs go independent and make their own decisions about how to care for their patients, you'd see a huge change. It'll be painful for folks to have to start taking responsibility for their own healthcare, but it just may inspire them to get off their duffs and do a little roadwork or eat a vegetable once in a while. There's nothing for bringing a little frugality to healthcare like having to pay for things out of your own pocket.  Best way in the world for stopping waste and fraud - to let consumers make their own decisions about which doc and which healthcare system they want to patronize.

Sheesh!
 

© 2013 by Tom King

Told You He Was Gonna Tax You!

by Tom King (c) 2012

Today's Supreme Court Ruling upholding Obamacare feels like a loss for conservatives.  Actually, Judge Roberts may have done us a favor. He voted with the libs because of one thing that conservatives have been harping on since the so-called "Affordable Healthcare Act" was passed.

Obamacare is a TAX.

It is a tax on the middle class. It is a tax on the lower class. If you can't afford health insurance, you'll just have to pay 1% of your income to the IRS. 

Obamacare, therefore, is a tax on the very poorest among us and the middle class.

Don't expect the Democrats to rush to repeal Obamacare simply because it breaks a campaign promise. They talk a lot about unfare taxation of the poor, but apparently it won't matter.  Of course, since most of the poorest don't pay taxes it probably won't matter.  They'll just get a smaller tax "refund" (which might be considered a tax, mightn't it?).  The middle class will certainly get nailed by this tax by being forced to buy health insurance.  If they choose not to, they'll pay a tax to cover part of the administrative costs of Obamacare and what good with that do for healthcare in America.  If the middle class all buy health insurance, they won't pay the 1% tax and then who will pay the Obamacare admin costs?

Watch for new taxes in other places or increased healthcare costs to cover the massive government bureaucracy that must arise to make Obamacare happen.

Meanwhile the rich, who have already paid protection money to the Democrats in the form of campaign contributions, will continue to pay for their healthcare out of pocket change and their lives will be affected not at all.

It's too bad the government is getting into healthcare.  The costs can be expected to skyrocket just like they did for college tuition when the feds got into the business of paying for that.

Too bad too.  Medicine had actually begun to respond to surging healthcare costs to address some of the gaps in the system through entrepeneurial and philanthropic means - quite without the help of government, thank you very much. There is actually a developing segment of medicine that has begun offering lower priced out-of-pocket healthcare for people like me who can't afford $300 a month for health insurance. These low cost clinics are probably doomed to be closed, because most of them achieve their low cost by NOT taking health insurance or medicare reimbursement.

I paid $200 total for my healthcare last year including meds. I'll pay less this year because I was a new patient last year and had to pay for all the new patient startup costs. The place I went to was a PA clinic. They gave me a checkup and re-prescribed my blood pressure meds.  I got the Wal-Mart generic meds (my doc has their list) and I only paid $10 for a three month supply.   

I can afford that.  Under the Obamacare Tax, I'd have had to pay an additional $1,300 for the same care, would still have paid pretty much the same but it would have been called a "copay" and for fun, I would have had to file a bunch of paperwork to boot.

Oh, how liberals love their paperwork.

Okay, gang, here's your mantra:   "Obamacare is a tax on the middle class."

Keep repeating that till November!*

Tom

*My friend Atom Ant also pointed out this little poison pill for the Democrats lurking in this Supreme Court Decision.  "By calling it a tax it now only takes 51 Senate votes to remove the law... Roberts is a genius! If it was not a tax it would require reconciliation... 60 votes."

In other words it only takes the Republicans winning a one vote majority in November to have enough to repeal this turkey.  Don't forget to vote!

The Progressive and the Lassez-faire Capitalist Dentist

If you just listen long enough, they always let slip the difference between ideology and reality. In this case, it was the noted progressive socialist George Bernard Shaw serving as chairman of the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English.  There was a discussion about how to pronounce canine.  Shaw maintained it should be "cay-nine" as ordinary people pronounced it who used the term every day.

One of the committee members challenged him and Bernard pointed out that his dentist pronounced it "cay-nine" when talking about the canine teeth.

"Then you must have an American dentist," the member argued.

"Of course," Shaw shot back.  "Why do you think that at 76, I still have all my teeth!"




Even a confirmed socialist like Shaw recognized the superiority of laissez-faire capitalist dentistry.

History in the Making: Welcome to Amerika!

America has jumped the shark.  If you don't know what that phrase means, let me explain.  The rest of you, "talk amongst yourselves".  Jumping the shark is when a television series finally does something so desperately dumb for ratings that you know it's fixing to be canceled. It refers to the episode of "Happy Days" where Fonzie jumped a pool of water with a shark in it on water skis. 

The Pres should have been wearing a leather jacket and a bathing suit when he made the announcement that the House had passed the Health Care Reform Act tonight without a single Republican vote God bless 'em. 

Welcome to the United Socialist States of Amerika!  It has begun. This is the first in what I believe will be a wave of socialist laws that will end up collapsing the economy and bringing on a crisis of epic purportions.  I believe the Dems plan to use this as cover to either cancel the November elections or at least postpone them to protect the public safety.  We haven't seen this country so polarized since 1859.  These impossibly arrogant people really do believe that Americans will happily accept the loss of their liberties and the establishment of a gargantuan government with its tentacles in every corner of our lives in exchange for some bread and circuses and a 12 hour queue for free band-aids. 

I am one of those people that this bill was supposedly passed for.  I am between steady jobs. My wife is unemployed and unable to return to work for health reasons.  I have bad knees, high blood pressure and no health insurance.  AND I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS TO MY KIDS AND GRANDKIDS!  I do not want to saddle them with massive unpayable debt and a government that will tell them what to do, when to do it, where to do it and how to do it just so I can have some government bureaucrat tell me I'm too old and useless to get any free band-aids. 

I'd rather be rolled over by a tank on the Washington Mall.  That will be next.  They've already banned rallies on the mall after August of this year.  The president plans to create a special security force, armed like the military to keep order in the homeland. They're indoctrinating our children.


We've seen the signs and we didn't want to believe it.  They've told us from their own lips what they want.

We missed our chance to head it off. The Apocalypse is upon us I fear. An established totalitarian government is an essential precondition for bringing on the events described in Revelation. America must be eliminated as a refuge for the free practice of faith, for free speech, assembly and the press.  Voices must be silenced. We have seen it time and again: in France during the Revolution, in Russia during the Revolution and in China during the Revolution. 

Welcome to the Revolution!  Not the one we had before, but the one that will destroy everything the American Revolution stood for. The new Bolsheviks are celebrating tonight. Let them!

We need not despair, for help is coming, riding out of the east on a cloud of light with all the power in the universe at His fingertips.

Till then?  As someone once advised, "Keep your head low and your powder dry!

I'm just sayin'

Tom