[StBernard] Obama & health care

[Westley Annis]

>From the book Audacity of Deceit

http://www.audacityofdeceit.com

CHAPTER NINE

CHANGING AMERICAN HEALTHCARE 

“Rather than educating us on the issues, American political campaigns are
run on themes, images, and messages which are evocative, but content-free
sound bytes.”1 
—Bruce Dixon, BlackAgendaReport.com, in criticizing Barack Obama’s
healthcare plan 

IMAGINE THAT ONE NIGHT you become violently ill, so ill that your spouse
must drive you to the hospital emergency room. Eight hours later, you
finally see a doctor for the first time. When you complain about the
agonizingly long wait, the doctor apologizes, explaining that there were
thirty people ahead of you, most of whom were non-English speaking, illegal
aliens who were all eligible for taxpayer-funded healthcare under Barack
Obama’s Universal Health Insurance Program. 

Or imagine that your elderly father desperately needs an operation and one
day, he calls you in distress. The treatment his doctor recommended was
denied him. Why? Obama’s Universal Health Insurance bureaucrats determined
that his condition was not serious enough to justify the expense of the
operation. 

Appearing at hundreds of campaign events, Barack Obama often stands in front
of banners that espouse “Change We Can Believe In.” And his speeches usually
include declarations like, “We want change in this country!” and, “The
American people are rising up and we’re going to bring about change in this
country!” 

But what does he really mean when he says he wants “change”? What changes
does he have in mind? America has her problems (what nation doesn’t?), but
what things are so awful and wrong that require the sort of radical
“changes” Obama says we need? 

If his life, his associations, and his personal behavior are any indication,
such “changes” will not represent many of the principles upon which our
great nation was founded. In fact, if Obama has his way—and gets a
sympathetic Congress to boot—what remains may not be much of an America, at
least not the country our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers
fought to preserve. 

“CHANGING” HEALTHCARE 

Obama’s approach to healthcare echoes an experiment of the 1990s:
“HillaryCare.” Obama proposes an expensive, government-controlled universal
health plan that will dramatically lower that quality of care while making
it more expensive. 

Obama outlined his plan during the primary campaign, in a healthcare speech
in Iowa: 

We now face an opportunity—and an obligation—to turn the page on the failed
politics of yesterday’s healthcare debates
. My plan begins by covering
every American. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that
will change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on
premiums. That will be less. If you are one of the 45 million Americans who
don’t have health insurance, you will have it after this plan becomes law.
No one will be turned away because of a preexisting condition or illness.2 

Sounds good. His plan will provide coverage to Americans without health
insurance and lower premiums for those who already have coverage. No
rational American would oppose such a plan. But, as usual, the devil is in
the details. For instance, as author, pundit, and political strategist Dick
Morris notes: 

[Obama] wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally
subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up the costs and forcing
federal rationing of healthcare. As in the 

U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the
bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.3 

And to help illegal aliens get access to taxpayer-funded healthcare, Obama
wants to create new generations of Span-ish-speaking Americans.
Specifically, he wants all American children to be fluent in Spanish. As
Obama said at a campaign stop in July 2008: 

I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, we need to
have English only. They want to pass a law, we just, we want English only
. 

But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn
English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak
Spanish. 

You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should
have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when
Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they
speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci
beacoup, right?4 

On his campaign Web site, Obama makes some fairly accurate claims about the
healthcare system in America today. Not enough of us are covered. In many
respects the system is too expensive. Premiums are rising faster than wages.
And so on. 

To fix these problems, he says he will: 

[M]ake available a new national health plan to all Americans, including the
self-employed and small businesses, to buy affordable health coverage that
is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.”5 

According to Obama’s Web site, the Congressional healthcare plan provides:6 

“Guaranteed eligibility. No American will be turned away from any insurance
plan because of illness or pre-existing conditions.” 

“Comprehensive benefits. The benefit package will be similar to that offered
through Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), the plan members
of Congress have. The plan will cover all essential medical services,
including preventive, maternity and mental healthcare. 

“Affordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles.” 

“Subsidies. Individuals and families who do not qualify for Medicaid or
SCHIP but still need financial assistance will receive an income-related
federal subsidy to buy into the new public plan or purchase a private
healthcare plan.” 

“Simplified paperwork and reined in health costs.” 

Obama makes other claims, too. He says his plan will also offer “portability
and choice,” and for those wishing to purchase a private health insurance
plan, Obama offers another government solution: the National Health
Insurance Exchange, which “will act as a watchdog group and help reform the
private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating
insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more
affordable and accessible,” according to a description of the plan on his
Web site.7 In other words, Obama would have Washington bureaucrats decide
who is permitted to get certain medical treatments and operations. 

Insurers would be forced to issue a policy to every applicant “and charge
fair and stable premiums that will not depend upon health status,” says
Obama’s Web site. “The Exchange will require that all the plans offered are
at least as generous as the new public plan and have the same standards for
quality and efficiency. The Exchange would evaluate plans and make the
differences among the plans, including cost of services, public.” 

Meanwhile, employers who did not offer “meaningful” contributions to the
cost of “quality health coverage” for their employees will be taxed “a
percentage of payroll toward the costs of the national plan,” says the
description. 

As Dr. John Goodman, founder and president of the Na¬tional Center for
Policy Analysis, explains: 

The Obama plan would subject all employers to a “pay-or-play”
mandate—imposing a tax on those who do not provide health insurance for
their employees. Following Commonwealth, we assume this would be a payroll
tax of 7 percent of earnings up to $1.25 per hour on employers who fail to
pay at least 75 percent of the premium for a minimum package of benefits
 

As the economics literature affirms, a payroll tax is almost completely born
by workers themselves. During the Democratic party primary, Senator Obama
criticized Senator Clinton’s proposal to mandate coverage by asserting she
would try to force people to buy something they cannot afford and then tax
them when they don’t buy it—leaving them worse off than they were. Exactly
the same criticism applies to Obama’s pay-or-play mandate.8 

Goodman notes that the real beneficiaries of Obama’s health care plan are
likely to be the myriad special interest groups that feast on government
mandated benefits: 

[S]tate regulations require insurers to cover all manner of procedures,
ranging from acupuncture to in vitro fertilization, and providers, ranging
from natureopaths to marriage counselors. These mandates reflect the
lobbying power of special interests, and the resulting higher price of
insurance causes as many as one-in-every-four uninsured people to be priced
out of the market. By having the federal government impose a mandated
benefit package, Obama would elevate this special interest feeding frenzy to
the national level.9 

To somehow streamline the healthcare system and lower costs, his plan also
requires:  

.	• More reporting from hospitals, clinics and medical facilities; 

.	• More mandatory collection of data; 

.	• Electronic medical records; 

.	• Forced levels of coverage. Increased government oversight. A huge
new government medical bureaucracy. 



And who pays for all of this? Answer: you. 

There is little debate that America’s healthcare system is ill. It costs $2
trillion a year—the most of any industrialized nation. One-in-six dollars is
spent on healthcare, and when the country’s 65 million-plus baby boomers
begin to retire, that amount is likely to increase to one-in-five.10 

“Our healthcare system is in transition. It is unstable. It is unstable
economically, and it is unstable politically. Economically, it is unstable
because it is based on a system of insurance which is grounded in
employment, and employment-based insurance in the United States is eroding,”
says Robert E. Moffit, PhD, in a 2006 analysis for the Heritage Foundation.
“It is unstable politically because survey after survey shows that the
American people are profoundly dissatisfied with the healthcare system, and
majorities
will say that they are in favor of a massive overhaul in the
system or major change in the system. Usually, the implicit suggestion is
that they would like a system that looks like Great Britain or Canada or
some other European country.”11 

According to Moffit, roughly fifty cents of every dollar we spend on
healthcare “is now spent by the government,” but, when the baby boomers
retire, “the Medicare expansion will go into high gear.”12 

Rather than embracing our capitalistic system to repair the healthcare
industry’s most fundamental problems, Americans are moving in the opposite
direction—led in part by healthcare hucksters such as Barack Obama.  



REFUSING TO LEARN FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES 

Obama and others like him, who support some kind of universal healthcare,
often make their case by pointing to “success stories” in Canada and Europe,
where such systems have been in place for some time now. But these
government-run systems are a far cry from successful; in fact, learned
observers and even medical practitioners within those systems have begun to
speak out against them, because they are fatally flawed. 

“Canadians are beginning to rethink their system. You find the same thing
across Europe,” says David Gratzer, M.D., a U.S.- and Canadian-based
physician, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of Code
Blue: Reviving Canada’s Health Care System.13 As a physician in Canada, he
says he began to rethink the country’s healthcare system when he began
noticing patients having to wait months and even years for otherwise routine
medical tests, procedures, and surgeries. Oddly enough, however, he says he
sees America heading down that same destructive path. 

“[H]ere’s the irony: If Canadians are willing to rethink things and embrace,
at least to some extent, some capitalism when it comes to healthcare, I find
increasingly that Americans are not,” Gratzer says. “If Canadians are
willing to rethink these issues, Americans are also rethinking and heading
down the same lines that Canada once did. That’s a terrible mistake.”14 

Unlike Obama and Co., Gratzer says the main reason why healthcare in the
U.S. is so expensive is because Americans are over-insured, not
under-insured. “As a result of this,” he says, “American healthcare is so
terribly expensive because it’s so terribly cheap. 

The British are no better off, as Emmett Tyrrell, founder and editor of the
American Spectator, a forty-year-old political and cultural magazine, points
out: 

Health care officials in Britain discovered that patients were lingering in
emergency rooms for days before being treated. Incensed by this, the
bureaucrats magisterially ordered that emergency room patients be treated
within four hours. The consequences were reported in the Daily Mail.
Hundreds of “seriously ill patients” simply were kept longer in ambulances
before being admitted to the emergency rooms. Hence, there were fewer
ambulances available for subsequent emergencies. As Herzlinger notes, the
consequence of socialized medicine is “rationing.”15 

According to Gratzer, employer coverage is one of the main influences in the
rising cost of health insurance. On October 23, 1943, the IRS ruled for the
first time that employers could provide their employees health insurance and
pay the premiums in pre-tax dollars. The ruling came at a time of
unprecedented price and wage controls during World War II; employers
couldn’t attract workers with better wages, so they opted to provide
benefits (such as paid health insurance) instead. Over the years, Gratzer
says, the benefit of employer-provided health insurance grew from basic
coverage to covering “health” problems like sunglasses, marital counseling,
and hair transplants, to name a few. As benefits grew, so did costs. 

The implementation of government-paid insurance programs was another
contributing factor. Medicare and Medicaid programs continue to grow at
astronomical rates, and, when baby boomers begin to retire, Medicare will
explode. 

“The end result,” Gratzer says, “is that Americans are just hopelessly
over-insured when it comes to health insurance. For every dollar spent on
healthcare in the United States, only fourteen cents comes out of pocket.
That applies for people on Medicaid, Medicare, privately insured, and that’s
why we have such an upside-down universe when it comes to healthcare.”16 

And the worst is yet to come. According to Gratzer and other analysts, at
some point between 2013 and 2017, depending on which analysis you believe,
Medicare will begin spending more than it brings in. By about 2041—at the
current and anticipated rates of expenditure—the program is expected to go
broke. 

“When today’s college students reach retirement age in 2050, their children
and grandchildren will face a payroll tax rate of about 16.8 percent to pay
their Social Security benefits—a 37 percent increase over today’s rate,”
says Matt Moore, a senior analyst at the National Center for Policy
Analysis. “When Medicare Part A is included, the payroll tax burden will
rise to 24.5 percent—almost one of every four dollars workers will earn that
year.”17 

Obama’s “prescription” for this problem is to add another huge
government-run healthcare boondoggle financed by employers and the taxpayer.
This program, too, will wind up going broke, after delivering sub-standard
care to those whom it was ostensibly designed to help the most. 

In a Washington Post article, Gratzer offered five solutions:18 

.	• Make health insurance like other types of insurance by
restructuring current health savings accounts (part of the 2003 Medicare
reforms) and leveling the tax field for people not covered by an employer
plan; 

.	• Foster more competition through deregulation (healthcare is the
most regulated sector in the American economy), in part by allowing
consumers to shop around—even from state to state—for coverage; 



.	• Reform Medicaid using the welfare reform template of allowing
states to experiment and innovate with block grants provided by the federal
government; 

.	• Revisit Medicare reform, in part by scrapping price controls and
using the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan as a model—which would give
elderly Americans a choice among competitive private sector plans; 

.	• Address prescription drug prices by scaling back the scope of the
Food and Drug Administration; it costs nearly a billion dollars for a new
prescription drug to reach the market, and nearly 40 percent of that is
safety regulations—essentially a massive tax on all pharmaceuticals. 



Barack Obama rejected all of these suggestions. As part of his grand
healthcare plan, he has said that doctors, hospitals, clinics, and medical
laboratories will all have to provide more documentation (i.e., become more
regulated) to “ensure quality care.” The truth, however, is that more
regulation won’t guarantee quality of care. In fact, more regulation has led
to less efficient, more expensive healthcare. 

In their 2007 book, Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and
How to Free It, two experts from the libertarian Cato Institute argue that
entitlements, tax laws, and costly regulations are hampering the U.S.
healthcare system. According to a summary of the book, authors Michael F.
Cannon, Cato’s director of health policy studies, and Michael Tanner,
director of health and welfare studies and the Project On on Social Security
Choice, contend that “Consumer consumer choice and competition deliver
higher quality and lower prices in other areas of the economy. The authors
conclude that removing restrictions can do the same for healthcare.”19
Cannon and Tanner argue that any reform method should expand patient choices
and decision-making while dramatically decreasing choices and decisions made
about patient healthcare by a bloated, faceless government bureaucracy. 

“The answer then to America’s healthcare problems lies not in heading down
the road to national healthcare but in learning from the experiences of
other countries, which demonstrate the failure of centralized command and
control and the benefits of increasing consumer incentives and choice,”
writes Tanner, in a March 2008 Policy Analysis paper for Cato.20 He says a
closer examination of those systems shows that, to a program, all are
“wrestling with problems of rising costs and lack of access to care,” and
that “the broad and growing trend” among nations with universal healthcare
“is to move away from centralized government control and to introduce more
market-oriented features.”21 

In other words, the global trend among nations with national healthcare
programs is just the opposite of what Barack Obama is advocating—less
centralized government control, not more. Why? Because these countries are
learning that government produces the least efficient, least cost-effective
product, and that free-market forces are much more suited to producing
products that work at a reduced cost. “Countries with more effective
national healthcare systems are successful to the degree that they
incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost sharing, market
prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control,”
says Tanner.22 

Obama nonetheless has eschewed the free-market approach. He is convinced
that the prescription to heal the ailing American healthcare system is more
government, not less; more regulations, not fewer; more red tape, not less;
more bureaucracy, not less. Meanwhile, experts agree that the free
market—not Obama’s big government solution—is the only thing that will save
the U.S. healthcare system. 

Less individual control and less personal freedom. Despite his rhetoric,
that is Obama’s vision of healthcare reform. 

As a state senator in Illinois, Obama voted to require that dental
anesthesia be covered by every health plan for difficult cases; today, that
requirement is “one of forty-three mandates imposed by Illinois on health
insurance, according to the Illinois Division of Insurance,” writes Scott
Gotlieb, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a May
2008 article for the Wall Street Journal. 

“Other mandates require coverage of infertility treatments, drug rehab,
‘personal injuries’ incurred while intoxicated, and other forms of care.” He
continues: 

By my count, during Mr. Obama’s tenure in the state senate, eighteen
different laws came up for a vote and passed that imposed new mandates on
private health insurance. Mr. Obama voted for all of them. As a presidential
candidate, Mr. Obama says people lack health insurance because “they can’t
afford it.” He’s right. But he is also partly responsible for why health
insurance is too expensive. A long list of studies show that mandates like
the ones Mr. Obama has championed drive up the cost of insurance for the
very people priced out of coverage.23 

According to a 2008 study by the health insurance-supported industry, the
Council for Affordable Health Insurance, mandates and government regulations
are increasing the cost of insurance by 20 to -50 percent, depending on the
state.24 

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” writes Gottlieb. “If insurers were allowed
to offer ‘bare-bones’ plans—which would be cheaper because they would cover
just essential care—many consumers who are priced out of health insurance
now would likely buy these plans instead of living without insurance.”
Again, the free market at work—but not in Obama’s America. 

“Socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and
replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the
state,” writes Llewellyn Rockwell, president of the free-market Ludwig von
Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. “If you are serious about ending private
ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending
freedom and creativity too.”25 

Welcome to Obama’s America, where the answer to the nation’s healthcare
problems is more bloated, government bureaucracy. 

For new, breaking information on Barack Obama since this book was published,
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