1. YOUR HEALTH CARE COSTS WILL GO DOWN
If you have private insurance you like, you will keep your insurance – and your costs will go down. What’s not to like? When there’s only one gas station in town, they can charge whatever they want and people have no choice but to pay. When there’s only a few insurance companies, they can charge whatever they want, too. We have no other choice. Competition is what drives down prices. And health insurance reform, including a public health insurance option, will hold the insurance tycoons accountable and make them lower prices and out-of-pocket fees to compete.
THE TRUTH:
SEC. 123 of HR3200 covers the creation of the Health Benefits Advisory Committee. This group of bureaucrats will re-define the requirements for all medical insurance coverage plans, including those offered by employers. If the company you are working for does not meet the new requirements or decides it would be cheaper for them to drop their current plan and shove every employee onto Obamacare, you will be on Obamacare and another bunch of federal bureaucrats will then determine the level of coverage that you will receive and what doctor or government run clinic you will be assigned to. The current government subsidized healthcare insurance plan created under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) of 1986 provides terminated or laid-off employees, retirees, spouses, former spouses, and dependent children the right to temporary continuation of health coverage at group rates. On an average, the cost of coverage under this government plan runs as much as 150% over what the employee was paying for medical insurance while employed. The politicians in Washington D.C. can say anything they want to get public support for their legislation, but their ability to deliver what they promise is very doubtful if you look at their historical record. By the time you add the cost of their government medical insurance to the increase in taxes (or fees) that you must also pay to cover the cost of employing millions of new government bureaucrats to run this crazy system and supply benefits to everyone who is not currently covered, what you are paying now for medical insurance will look like nothing. If you are currently insured through your employer or your former employer in the case of retirees, and in a healtcare plan that allows you to go to any privately practicing General Practitioner, then you might want to discreetly ask that Doctor about his or her opinion regarding the proposed “reform” measure. Most privately practicing General Practitioners still in existence are struggling to make ends meet. They spend more time fighting with the government to get minimal reimbursement for their Medicare patients, and hassling with the state worker’s compensation board or HMO administrators to get authorizations for patient treatments and testing than they do actually treating their patients. Despite their extensive education and extremely long hours in the office, few are getting rich, and a surprising number of proficient General Practitioners have given up the practice of medicine and gone to work in completely different fields unrelated to the practice of medicine. The vast majority of those who still ply their trade are deeply disturbed by the proposed “reform measures.” They know that additional government intervention will result in even more paperwork demands, longer waiting for authorizations and less compensation for the services they now provide. If the federal government successfully reduces your cost for medical care, most General Practitioners know that the reduction will come at their expense, not at the expense of the insurance companies. Inevitably, this will result in fewer General Practitioners in private practice simply because it will not be feasible for them to remain in business, pay the staff required to process all of the paperwork, and still make enough money to justify the increased hassle. Considering the fact that most General Practitioners are fairly intelligent human beings who made it through the additional years of college required to become Physicians, it would be safe to assume that they can figure out other ways to make a good living outside the field of medicine. Nobody likes their insurance company, what they like is their doctor and the care they receive. It will not do any good to keep your current insurance if your doctor is forced into bankruptcy and you can’t find a suitable replacement.
2. QUALITY OF HEALTH CARE WILL GO UP
When insurance companies have a monopoly, they can deny your claims and deny you treatment and what can you do? But if there’s competition, you have another option. That holds the insurance companies’ feet to the fire. Plus, health insurance reform will regulate the insurance companies so they can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and other technicalities. The quality of all of our care will go up.
THE TRUTH:
There are more than 1200 different medical insurance companies in the United States today. There is plenty of competition among them already. The cost of medical insurance is based on the cost of providing medical services plus the accumulated financial losses suffered by hospitals and emergency care providers as a result of the federal law that requires them to provide treatment to anyone that walks in the door regardless of their ability to pay. More than 40 million illegal aliens use American hospitals and emergency care providers as their own personal free clinics. Those financial losses were passed along to every patient that enters a hospital or emergency room with health insurance. The insurance companies were forced to raise their prices to cover those increased costs. The insurance companies are not the boogeyman in this situation and if the federal government creates their own insurance company to compete with them it will have to pay the same increased costs or raise it’s premiums to pay for the losses it incurs. The federal government runs numerous insurance and medical coverage plans already, SCHIP, Medicare and the healthcare for members of the military and disabled veterans are a few examples of government run healthcare programs. The care given under all of these programs has never been without numerous problems, in many cases it has been described as horrific. Senior citizens on Medicare are routinely denied their benefits by government bureaucrats simply because those government lackeys are having a bad hair day and decide to take it out on someone who can’t defend themselves. Government healthcare programs are characteristically known for the intense hassle the patients must go through in order to get anything accomplished; many senior citizens with Medicare wait months and months just to get an appointment with a specialist. They often complain that they are treated like dim-witted children. While they are assigned a case-worker within the system, that individual rarely offers any assistance of value and certainly nothing that could be considered helpful. Case workers routinely withhold relevant information about various Medicare programs and shortcuts that would ease the time it takes to cut through the insanity of dealing with the Medicare bureaucracy. Medicare is not “user-friendly” by any means and it should be viewed as the federal government’s finest and largest example of government subsidized healthcare.
Another good example of government subsidized healthcare is the Veteran’s Administration. The Los Angeles Times has reported on three different cases where the patients of the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center were subjected to medical experimentation without their knowledge or knowledgeable consent. In one case an elderly patient was kept on an operating table with an electrophysiology probe inserted in his heart for an extra 45 minutes to collect research data despite twice telling his doctors that he did not want to be used as a human guinea pig. Another patient had his heart catheterization treatment prolonged for research purposes, despite the fact that he did not give his legally required consent. Robert Hanson, a stocky World War II veteran who was 71 years old and in relatively good condition despite his age, was tricked into signing consent forms permitting his doctors to forego his standard therapy and dose him with a purely experimental heart drug, some of Mr. Hanson’s caregivers as well as his daughter insist that he was incapable of understanding the forms he was tricked into signing or the risk they implied. Robert Hanson dropped dead of a heart attack in the hospital parking lot after taking the experimental heart drug. As far as quality care is concerned, we should consider the well documented cases where American veterans have been infected with HIV as a result of the improper sterilization of colonoscopy equipment at government provided health care facilities, or the 92 out of 116 U.S. veterans with cancer whose cancer treatments were egregiously and incompetently administered at government provided health care facilities.
The problem with government subsidized healthcare is that the money used to fund it flows through the furry fingers of greedy politicians. When they need the tax-money for other projects it is siphoned off and cuts to the healthcare system are made as a matter of course. Shortcuts are taken and rationing occurs. As a direct result, people suffer the consequences and often die. Government healthcare is simply not synonymous with quality healthcare. The government is a political machine. Government determinations are based on the peculiar logic of politics. Politicians can shuffle stacks of funding money around far faster and with more dexterity that a Vegas card dealer blitzing through a deck of cards, where it goes – nobody knows, but the fact remains, it is suddenly gone and the costs need to be reduced. In a government run healthcare system, reduced costs will be directly proportional to a reduction in the quality of the healthcare provided. Furthermore, any government run healthcare system created by the Democratic Party will be a fully unionized healthcare system. SEIU didn’t drop $60 million dollars of their member’s dues money into the Democratic coffers during the 1998 campaign season for nothing, and SEIU is currently financing a good portion of the television ads promoting Obamacare. SEIU is the same labor organization that represented the nurses at Drew King Medical Center in Los Angeles. The quality of the medical care given at Drew King Medical Center in Los Angeles can only be compared to the quality of medical care given to the Jewish inmates of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.
3. SENIORS WILL GET BETTER CARE, TOO
When the insurance companies want to scare you, they talk about your mama. The truth is, health insurance reform will create more choices for patients of all ages – including senior citizens – and give them more power over their health care, not less. Plus health care reform will make Medicare better, not by reducing benefits as you might have heard, but by cutting billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abusive overpayments to insurance giants.
THE TRUTH:
There is nothing in the Obamacare bill to warrant the compelling belief that seniors will get better care, however, there is plenty to indicate that their care will be rationed according to their age and health condition. The federal government of the United States has been babbling for more than a hundred years about cutting the billions of dollars in government waste, fraud and abusive spending by the U.S. Congress and the various agencies of the federal government. To date they have been entirely unsuccessful and the waste, fraud and abusive spending by the US. Congress and the various agencies of the federal government have increased at an alarming rate. No legislation is passed through the United States Congress without the addition of billions of dollars in needless pork projects carefully inserted by our elected representatives. The federal government cannot clean their own house so how can they be expected to clean up the waste, fraud and abusive spending in healthcare? If anything, the implementation of Obamacare will give the federal government free rein to enlarge the scope of their already outrageous waste, fraud and abusive spending. It will give them more places to hide pet projects, contractual rewards to large contributors, personal graft and outright theft of tax payer money than ever before. “More choices for patients of all ages – including senior citizens – and give them more power over their health care, not less,” is the promise, but the reality is just more opportunity for government waste, fraud and corruption at the expense of American tax payers and senior citizens.
4. REFORM WILL MAKE HEALTH CARE MORE AMERICAN
Insurance company plants are saying that health care reform will make America more like Russia. But isn’t Russia the place where a few businesses and elites monopolize entire industries? America is about choice and competition. And health care reform will actually do away with some of the worst kinds of rationing, like canceling coverage for pre-existing conditions and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.
THE TRUTH:
Socialized medicine in the former Soviet Union was underfunded, low quality and loaded with problems right from the start. Like the government, it has all but collapsed and with the introduction of more free market policies, Russian healthcare is getting better but still has a long way to go. However, Russia was not the first to experiment with socialized medicine. The German government instituted public healthcare programs as far back as 1880 under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of more virulent Communism. By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s doctors were quite accustomed to cooperating with the government in providing healthcare to the public. Following World War I the German government implemented policies to provide health care services to all citizens and the focus of medicine moved from private practice to public health and preventable health care. (Sound Familiar?) Between 1924 and 1928, the period of economic consolidation in Germany, public health care improved to the point where tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism were all subject to government regulation and treatment and counseling centers were established for drug addicts and couples suffering with marital and sexual problems. As a result of these programs, Germany experienced a significant improvement in the public health of their citizens. As a result of these reforms and the changes in perception associated with them, the role of physicians in Germany transformed from being an advocate and advisor for the patient, to becoming a partner of the government. The compassion, individual ethics and charitable nature of Germany’s doctors was gradually replaced by an even stronger collective ethic pushing their attention to the common cause of benefitting German society as a whole.
When the U.S. stock market crashed on October 29, 1929 it touched off a worldwide economic crisis and Germany was not spared in the slightest. Germany’s socialized medical system, a large part of the welfare state they had established, was hard hit. Funding for housing programs, nutritional programs, financial support payments and maternal, mental health and child health programs were all subject to massive cuts. The only thing that remained of Germany’s humanistic reform measures were the government mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Efficiency became the sole yardstick used for measuring expenses and German healtcare became more a matter of cost-benefit analysis that medical care. The scientific foundation for the cost-benefit analyses Germany’s government funded (and therefore politically minded) medical care system was provided by the new advancements in the field of genetics. Physically strong, healthy and productive members of German society became the focal point of German healthcare providers. The weak, sick, old, and less productive members of German society were deemed less worthy of continued medical support.
During the period of these economic and political developments, a British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer coined the term “Social Darwinism,” to define the concept of “survival of the fittest” with respect to human civilization. The application of Darwin’s theories to the newly discovered field of genetics occurred long before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s, and the effort was largely undertaken by scientists who misguidedly believed that the outward expression of genetic types could be based upon the external measurements of a human’s body. Their work became categorized under the heading of “eugenics” which became the study of their misguided concepts of genetics and how that study could be applied through the application of government policy to improve the overall population. The study and application of Eugenics was not isolated to Germany alone. In the United States, the study of Eugenics resulted in state and federal healthcare policies of an atrocious nature. Three years after the term “Eugenics” was coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, who defined it as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations,” the state of Connecticut enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria. Under these Connecticut state laws, anyone who was diagnosed as having epilepsy or was deemed to be feeble-minded or imbecilic, was prohibited from marriage. During the early 20th century approximately thirty American states enacted similar state laws prohibiting marriage to individuals diagnosed with a variety of medical problems on the basis of eugenic criteria. In 1907, President Woodrow Wilson helped the state of Indiana become the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals. Ardent American supporters of eugenics and eugenic government policies included Theodore Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and the National Research Council. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League, which later became the organization we know today as Planned Parenthood was a major supporter of the American eugenics movement and the primary motivation of her push for the legalization and widespread use of contraceptives as a means to reduce the proliferation of those she viewed as being the “lower classes” of American society. Sanger believed that the final aim of eugenics was racial regeneration. Her views were well-received and in full alignment with those of the Ku Klux Klan and she gave lectures on eugenics and birth control as a strategy to promote racial regeneration to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1926.
The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States and the state of Oregon did not repeal its forced sterilization law until 1983. Adolph Hitler’s primary inspiration for the genocidal slaughter of millions of people in the attempt to create a “master race” was the eugenics movement in the United States where the pseudoscience received extensive financing through corporate philanthropies such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. The study of eugenics in America was undertaken by some of America’s most respected scientists and experimentation went on in the labs of prestigious American universities like Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The credibility of the eugenics movement was severely damaged by the end of World War II and the uncovering of Hitler’s genocidal death camps, but eugenics is far from dead, and modern advancements in the field of genetics has prompted a revival of some of it’s more insidious theories.
Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care, addressed the Supreme Court in 1996 during the case of Vacco v. Quill. Dr. Pearlman’s testimony advocated physician-assisted suicide. He is a long time proponent of health-care rationing and his 52-page end-of-life planning document, entitled, “Your Life, Your Choices,” first published in 1997 was suspended from use by the Presidential administration of George W. Bush. At that time Dr. Pearlman’s, 52 page pamphlet was viewed as a workbook designed to lead the reader to the intended conclusion that physician-assisted suicide was a far better alternative to living the remainder of your life as an invalid. At the direction of the Barack Obama’s administration the bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care have resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices,” and despite the denials of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama and the American news media, the principles expressed in Dr. Pearlman’s pamphlet play a significant role in the structure of the current healtcare reform bill.
Any nationalized healthcare program or government subsidized healthcare program is subject to government and political abuse, and that potential is greatly exacerbated in direct proportion to the degree of politics involved in the programs creation and regulation. Economic instability, the natural ups and downs of tax revenues and widespread lack of accountability for government spending inevitably impacts the overall operation, management and quality of the medical care provided. Any attempt to deny this obvious fact is an attempt to deny reality.
5. WE CAN’T AFFORD NOT TO REFORM HEALTH CARE
We’re spending more than $2 trillion dollars per year on health care in America. The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade. Every year, nearly a million families face bankruptcy because of medical debt. Health care reform will drive down costs and save you money and be fully paid for over 10 years — not adding a single penny to the deficit. Meanwhile, the cost of doing nothing is enormous and only growing.
THE TRUTH:
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE Report to Charles B. Rangel, Chairman, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives – July 17, 2009
“Effects of the Key Provisions of H.R. 3200
Collectively, those provisions would yield a significant increase in the number of Americans with health insurance. By 2019, CBO and the staff of JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 37 million, leaving about 17 million nonelderly residents uninsured (nearly half of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). In total, CBO estimates that enacting those provisions would raise deficits by $1,042 billion over the 2010-2019 period.”
Obamacare will create huge federal bureaucracies and provide tremendous growth for some already in existence. The cost will be tremendous and all of it will be the burden of American tax payers. The government can not create funding from nothing. Its only source of revenue is the tax payers. You and I will pay for everything the government does. On top of your crushing credit card debt and your inflated home mortgage you will have to deal with an increase in taxes and fees associated with Obama’s healthcare reform. Regardless of what the media is telling us or the Democratic politicians are claiming, the 40 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. will inevitably be covered under Obama’s plan and we will pay for it. We will also pay for the next 140 million who will come behind them.
The financial resources of the federal government are not infinite regardless of their ability to print more money. The national debt has never been larger and more out of control. Government spending has never been greater than it is today. Financial irresponsibility has never been this blatant. Government healthcare will destroy our current medical system and result in widespread healthcare rationing and low quality medical care. It will entirely destroy the technological advancement of medical research in the United States and the good doctors and specialists we now have will be replaced by a legion of ill-trained, union represented, healthcare technicians certified by the U.S. government as “Doctors.” Obamacare will be a complete and unmitigated disaster.
In 1979 the United States Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act and it was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter on October 17, 1979. The purpose of the Department of Education was to create programs to generate funds for education, standardize school curricula across the nation and enforce the civil rights laws as those laws pertained to students. The quality of American education went straight into the toilet. The Department of Education was a creation of Democratic legislators who felt the need for educational reform was pressing. The educational system that cultivated the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, Robert Fulton, Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, Willia Carrier, Samuel Colt, Cyrus McCormick, John Browning, Emmett W. Chappelle, Edmond Berger, Robert Bryant and millions of other great American minds was obviously broken and needed to be fixed. The quality of American education has been on a downward spiral continuously since the federal government first became involved. American public schools are more interested in turning out politically correct, culturally sensitive future Democrats than they are in teaching math, reading, English, grammar, geography, history, writing or science. Public school students have to be tested for their ability to read at a sixth grade level prior to their graduation from high school at the completion of the 12th grade. Every year millions of high school students graduate from high school with absolutely no employable skills of any nature. The United States of America is currently forced to look to Asia and India for adequately trained and educated engineers, computer technicians and scientists because our educational system is incapable of producing them. The Department of Education has become a political money pit and the more tax money poured into it the worse it does.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party now want to fix American healthcare the same way they fixed our educational system. History is a harsh educator, unfortunately the American people have short memories and seldom remember the mistakes of the past, but in this case, they should certainly make the effort because this is one mistake that the American people can not afford to repeat.
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