“The last time the President made grand promises and demanded passage of a bill before it could be reviewed, we ended up with the colossal stimulus failure and unemployment near 10 percent,” said Senator DeMint.
“Now the President wants Americans to trust him again, but he can’t back up the utopian promises he’s making about a government takeover of health care. He insists his health care plan won’t add to our nation’s deficit despite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office saying exactly the opposite. And today we learn that the President is refusing to release a critical report on the state of our economy, which contains facts essential to this debate. What is he hiding?
“If the actual legislation came close to matching the President’s rhetoric, he would have no problem passing this bill with huge Democrat majorities in both chambers. But Americans aren’t being fooled and are discovering the truth about his plan which includes rationed care, trillions in new costs, high taxes and penalties that will destroy jobs, and even government-funded abortions.
“Let’s be clear, there is no one in this debate advocating that we do nothing despite the President’s constant straw man arguments. Republicans have offered comprehensive health care reform solutions that cover millions of the uninsured without exploding costs, raising taxes, or rationing care. We can give every American access to a health plan they can own, afford and keep without a government takeover.”
So I guess it’s Michele Bachmann and Jim Demint in 2012, then! Right? Bobby Jindal can be Secretary of Health & Human Services, Sarah Palin can be Secretary of Energy, Paul Ryan can be Secretary of Commerce and John Bolton can be Secretary of State. And Edith Hollan Jones and Janice Rogers Brown go on the Supreme Court! Oh, that makes me so happy!
Although there are some positive provisions in the current House Tri-Committee bill – including insurance for all and payment reform demonstration projects – the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.
In general, the proposals under discussion are not patient focused or results oriented. Lawmakers have failed to use a fundamental lever – a change in Medicare payment policy – to help drive necessary improvements in American health care. Unless legislators create payment systems that pay for good patient results at reasonable costs, the promise of transformation in American health care will wither. The real losers will be the citizens of the United States.
Obama is interested in controlling as much of the economy as possible – he is not interested in providing good services and prosperity for you!
Further study
You can learn more about the Republican health care plan with short 5-minute podcasts by brilliant policy analysts like Regina Hertzlinger, Sally Pipes and Rep. Paul Ryan. Not to mention Michael Tanner and Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. There is an alternative way to lower health care costs while preserving individual choice and liberty: consumer-driven health care. Health care videos are here.
The problem with health care today in the United States is that medical care and services cost too much. Now, everyone seems to think that the only solution to this problem is to go with a single-payer system like Canada or Cuba. Only one problem: there is another solution that no one is talking about: consumer-driven health care. And this is the only solution that actually works.
At lunch yesterday, I went to the Chinese buffet and started to read a new book on this issue by Regina Hertzlinger, a professor at Harvard University who specializes in health care policy. So now I understand it a little more. And I managed to round up a few podcasts that can explain her idea of consumer-driven health care to you, too. (I listed them in a sensible order)
This is the key insight that everyone must understand:
Many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them against the exorbitant cost of treating their own leukemia. But how many Americans would willingly pay for insurance to protect them from the expenses of treating their own depression?
Everyone recognizes that the more fully we wish insurance companies to defray our out of pocket expenses for our car repairs, the higher the premium they will charge for the policy. Yet foregoing reimbursement for trivial or unnecessary health-care costs in return for a more suitable health-care policy is an option unavailable under the present system. Everyone with health insurance is compelled to protect himself from risks, such as alcoholism and erectile dysfunction, that he would willingly shoulder in exchange for a lower premium.
Liberty means choosing the right amount to pay for your own health care, based on your own lifestyle choices, and your own risk assessment. Anything less is tyranny.
Along those lines, people who are sexually promiscuous or who abuse drugs will be paying the same medical premiums as everyone else, under Obama’s health care plan. Your lifestyle decisions are irrelevant to the amount you pay and the amount of coverage you get.
Excerpt:
Under the terms of the health-care reform bill approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the legal use of tobacco products is the only vice for which insurance companies will be able to charge their customers higher premiums.
…In other words, a person could have been admitted to hospitals three times for heroin overdoses, or been pregnant five times out of wedlock, or been treated for venereal diseases at least once per year for the past five years, but none of these factors could be used to charge that person a higher insurance premium.
This is a massive transfer of wealth from clean–living, productive citizens to citizens who are not minimizing lifestyle risks and who are not productive. This is nothing but a massive incentive for people to stop working and stop being moral. What would be the point to restraining yourself? Someone else will pay for your mistakes anyway, right? And that’s just what the compassionate, progressive secular-leftists want. To abolish income differentials and the privileges of moral living. So everyone will be the same, and no one will feel bad for being lazy and immoral.
It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
As Ed Morrissey explains in this Hot Air article, the government has a track record running health care programs already, such as the Indian Health Service. This is a single-payer system run by the federal government. Click through to the article and find out how good of a job government does of running anything. People are dying. Government-run health care is an inefficient system that allows bureaucrats to decide how health care is rationed.
Books I am reading about health care
Right now, I’ve picked out 3 books on health care to help me learn about the issue.
Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure
by Dr. Regina Herzlinger
The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
by David Gratzer, M.D.
The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care
by Sally C. Pipes
The latter two books are by Canadians intimately familiar with the Canadian single-payer system.
WINTERY KNIGHT 