It's Time For Another ObamaKennedyDeathCare Update

So here we go...!

All you really need to know about socialized medicine in 90 seconds:

Good stuff.

One of the big questions in this debate is that of just how often insurance companies pull the rug out from underneath people. In other words, is there a real need for a government-run safety net because of those eeeeeevil insurance companies? Er...no:

Scott Harrington digs into the rescission issue, a prominent feature of the Obama healthcare stump speech. We’ve discussed his use of an inaccurate anecdote to lend credence to his claim that insurers routinely drop coverage on the sick. But accuracy aside, let us stipulate that sick people do sometimes lose their health coverage.

President Obama implies that rescissions normally arise from chicanery on the part of the profit-crazed insurer and are increasing in frequency:

“More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.”

One might think that insurers are yanking the rug out from under the sick left and right. They aren’t, and they can’t, because it’s illegal. This is not to say that there are never abuses.

Harrington notes:

Clearly, this should never happen to anyone who is in good standing with his insurance company and has abided by the terms of the policy.

Therein lies the key: your coverage is a contract between you and your insurer. (For you young’uns, a contract is a quaint concept dating from the pre-Obama era.)

The real numbers on how often rescission happens?

These two cases [cited by Obama] are presumably among the most egregious identified by Congressional staffers’ analysis of 116,000 pages of documents from three large health insurers, which identified a total of about 20,000 rescissions from millions of policies issued by the insurers over a five-year period. Company representatives testified that less than one half of one percent of policies were rescinded (less than 0.1% for one of the companies).

The bottom line is that there are already processes and procedures in place for dealing with abuse without handing control of the entire industry over to the government.

Here's another great question: Where's the plan?

Wallace Forman at Americans for Tax Reform notes how President Obama keeps referring to his healthcare "plan":

- 28 times at the joint session of Congress on Sept. 9
- 6 times at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Sept. 10
- 15 times at his Minnesota health care rally on Sept. 12
- 8 times speaking with members of the AFL-CIO on Sept. 15

But exactly where is Obama's actual "plan"? Forman asks:

The House and Senate have introduced at least four Democrat health care proposals - at least two versions of H.R.3200, the Senate HELP Committee's bill, and the recently released Baucus proposal. All of these are real plans - hundreds of pages long - that may be enacted into law. Obama's "plan", so far as we can tell, is three pages of bullet points on the whitehouse.gov website.

When are these bullet points going to be translated into an actual piece of legislation? Obama swears that his proposal will not raise taxes on the middle class or drive Americans out of their current insurance arrangement. Yet every one of the Democrats' actual plans contain precisely those things Obama says he would never allow. He has not said he would veto those bills.

Until he comes up with a bill of his own, we can only assume he is referring to one of the Congressional bills currently being debated as 'his' plan. As such, it's all fair game to dissect.

Here's something you won't hear from Obama or the state-run media: if ObamaKennedyDeathCare goes into law, lower income workers will bear the brunt of it:

Reuters reports today:

If U.S. health reform efforts lead to higher costs for employers, employees may end up bearing the brunt, according to a new survey.

Employers will not absorb higher costs, choosing instead either to reduce benefits, lower salaries or cut jobs, the survey from professional services firm Towers Perrin said on Thursday.

Eighty-seven percent of employers said they were very likely or likely to cut benefits if reform leads to higher costs. Only 11 percent said they would accept lower profits.

This study confirms what conservatives have been saying about Obamacare from the beginning: If you mandate coverage on employers or add taxes to the coverage the offer, it simply comes out of the hide of employees.

All five bills in Congress (three in the House and two in the Senate) contain employer mandates or “pay or play” provisions which require employers to offer health insurance to their employees or pay a tax/fiine to the federal government. Even the left is beginning to recognize that these provisions are job/economy killers and are calling the Baucus “free rider” and other tax provisions the MaxTax.

Not exactly hope-n-change, huh?

And another thing: Obama is lying through is teeth when he says that most of the cost of ObamaKennedyDeathCare will be paid for by health savings. As with just about every other major issue, watch for yourself as President Obama conveniently tells a completely different story than candidate Obama:

It truly seems as though he doesn't know this thing called YouTube exists! Good thing for us it does.

One of the groups which will get hit hardest by socialized medicine is those who are young and healthy. That same group must also be primarily ignorant, because they're the biggest remaining supporters of ObamaKennedyDeathCare. It's time to burst that bubble and bring them into the real world:

Oddly, the key population to be hit with the effect of mandatory health insurance coverage are young adults, which are also the biggest supporters of Obama and health reform generally. The recent Census Bureau survey notes that 28.6% of young adults from 18 to 24 years old are uninsured, as are 26.5% of those from 25 to 34. That is double the rate of those of age 45 to 64.

Many of these people are in very good health, so don’t feel a strong need for coverage, but in the proposals before Congress, they will not be allowed to benefit from their good health and will pay the same premium as people who are very sick.

The Washington Post reports, “According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week, young adults are more optimistic about the outcome of health-care reform than those age 30 and older, but they are evenly divided on the cost implications, with 32 percent expecting their costs to decline and 27 percent expecting an increase. About 52 percent of young adults support the idea of the individual mandate, about the same proportion as in other age groups. But in terms of the overall package, the under-30 group broadly supports the Democratic effort, with 60 percent favoring the proposed reforms vs. 42 percent among older adults.”

I once heard a definition of a conservative as being a liberal who's been mugged by reality. Here's hoping the ignorant youth mentioned above get mugged sooner rather than later. It's better to be mugged than considered by one of Obama's death panels.

Jonah Goldberg highlights the common denominator of the health care debate:

Once the government decides it is in charge of health care, it has a say in everything you do (this, natch, was an argument of my book). Guns, diet, and cars are more relevant to our slightly lower life expectancy than insurance premiums and reimbursement rates, so of course Henry Waxman and Barbara Boxer and the rest of the gang are going to use their control over the health-care system as an excuse to go after those aspects of our lives. Why wouldn't they? They already want to influence those aspects of our lives now. Health care is really the only other policy area — after "the children" and global warming — that gives the State access to the most private spheres of our lives. Whenever someone says "it's a health-care issue" it's somehow supposed to trump traditional rights and liberties. That's what the push in the 1990s to make gun control a health-care issue was all about. That's why cameras once used to catch terrorists are now used to catch people eating in their cars in the U.K.

I've never heard anyone say something is a "health-care issue" as a preface to an argument for getting the government out of something.

I'm pretty sure no one ever has! And that's really the nutshell of the whole debate - Obama and the Democrats want control over you and all aspects of your life.

Wanna let 'em? 'Cause, like, they've been so good at everything else they've tried so far...

There's my two cents.


Related Reading:
A few more myths from the White House
Killing Granny
Dangers to Democrats of end-running cloture
Obama threatens health insurance company for deviating from approved thoughts