Tuesday, October 20, 2009

And Now For The Next Trick

Barack Obama will destroy American health care!!!

Here's the latest.

The actual text of the Baucus version of ObamaKennedyDeathCare has now been completed.  Guess how many pages it is?  If you've paid any attention at all to Barack Obama, you would probably suspect that it's over 1,000 pages, and that they're likely to try to rush it through a vote before it can be read.  Your suspicion would be correct!  Winning the award for best headline on the subject is RedState:

Baucus Bill Will Kill You If Implemented or If Dropped On Your Head

The Baucus bill is finally out.
It came in at 1,502 pages.
The Clinton health care bill was only 1,342 pages.
The Baucus bill has more pages than the last two Harry Potter books. Keep in mind that the last Harry Potter book was so thick they’re making it into two movies instead of one.
The Bill Number is S. 1796.
If Republicans don’t go along with the Democrats, Harry Reid is threatening to drop copies of the bill on their heads.

The text is here.

No matter how it's spun, remember the fact that Baucus is mostly a major accounting trick:
Given that the CBO only puts a price tag on the first 10 years of a piece of legislation, Democrats realized that they could simply delay the enactment of the major spending provisions of the bill by four years, thus creating the illusion of a bill that costs $829 billion over 10 years. But in actuality, the bill is projected to cost just $14 billion in the first four years, and $70 billion through its fifth year.
You can see this in the below table breaking down the CBO spending projections:

I demonstrate this graphically below. The red shaded area to the left of the line represents all of the spending in the first half of the 10 year period the CBO evaluated, and everything to the right of the line represents spending in the second half of that 10 year period. About 98 percent of the spending comes in the last six years, and 92 percent comes in final five year period. Thus, the true 10-year cost of the Baucus bill is well above $1 trillion, and according to estimates cited by Republicans, it's actually $1.8 trillion.


Hey, there's transparency for ya'!

ObamaKennedyDeathCare can be characterized in a number of ways.  One would be a massive welfare:
At a price tag of $829 billion, the SFC ’framework’ will reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 29 million, moving the overall percentage of nonelderly Americans with health insurance from 83% in 2010 to 94% in 2019. But of those 29 million with new insurance coverage, almost half (14 million), will get their coverage through the welfare programs Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).  That is equivalent to adding every resident of Ohio and Nevada to the welfare rolls.
In other words, for half of those Americans who are being promised health reform, they are going to be stunned to find themselves in a welfare office applying for Medicaid. Under the current baselines for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), there will be 76 million individuals served by these programs for at least some part of the year in 2019. If the SFC proposal becomes law, the number on Medicaid/SCHIP will top 90 million. So why do Obamacare supporters want to put 90 million Americans on the welfare rolls? It is cheaper than providing them with real quality health care.
They don't give a damn about actually providing health care for you or anyone.  It's about controlling YOU.

Here's the problem with that scenario:
As we detailed this morning, the Senate Finance Committee bill attained its sub $1 trillion CBO report by shoving 14 million Americans into Medicaid. Medicaid is a convenient method for hiding the true cost of Obamacare because state and local governments pick up part of the tab.

Worse, Medicaid pays doctors and hospitals 20-25 percent less than does the private sector and as a result Medicaid patients often have trouble finding willing providers. In a 2008 sur­vey of the 51 Medicaid directors conducted for the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 17 reported some or significant problems with access to primary care, and 36 reported some or sig­nificant problems with access to specialty care. Americans are in for a rude awakening when they realize Obama’s health care reform means they have to participate in a welfare program.

It's amazing the irony that can be found here, too.  For example, here's how some so-called 'wellness incentives' can actually cause people to lose their insurance:
Get in shape or pay a price.
That’s a message more Americans could hear if health-care reform provisions passed by the Senate finance and health committees become law.
By more than doubling the maximum penalties that companies can apply to employees who flunk medical evaluations, the legislation could put workers under intense financial pressure to lose weight, stop smoking or even lower their cholesterol…
Critics say employers could use the rewards and penalties to drive some workers out of their health plans…
Under current regulation, incentives based on health factors can be no larger than 20 percent of the premium paid by employer and employee combined. The legislation passed by the health and finance committees would increase the limit to 30 percent, and it would give government officials the power to raise it to 50 percent.
A single employee whose annual premiums cost him and his employer the national average of $4,824 could have as much as $2,412 on the line. At least under the health panel’s bill, the stakes could be higher for people with family coverage. Families with premiums of $13,375 — the combined average for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a recent survey — could have $6,688 at risk.
See?  It's a control thing, and once this is in place there will be no facet of your life that cannot be 'regulated' because it's 'good for you' or 'not good for you'.

And how about that number of uninsured that we keep hearing about?  Baucus wouldn't meet the stated goal of giving everyone health care, but even the number of those who would get it is artificially inflated:

The Census is the source for the much-cited figure of 46 million uninsured. Yet the very same table plainly indicates that 9 million of those are not US citizens. That leaves 37 million uninsured who are Americans.
But there's more. In the same document, the Census also plainly states that "health-insurance coverage is underreported" in its survey. When it cross-checked its survey results with the official Medicaid rolls, it found that 16.9 percent of those on Medicaid had claimed on their Census forms that they were uninsured. That 16.9 percent amounts to 9 million people.
So the actual tally, according to the most authoritative source we have, is just 28 million uninsured citizens (46 million minus 9 million non-citizens, minus 9 million on Medicaid who were falsely recorded as uninsured).
To be more exact, it leaves 28,157,000 uninsured out of a total of 280,209,000. That leaves us with 90 percent of American citizens covered by insurance, according to the Census.
And we're going to destroy the American economy for this??

One of the biggest things that will happen if ObamaKennedyDeathCare gets implemented is that private insurance will go away:



It's no wonder that support for this kind of 'reform' is getting less popular every week it's out there being examined:
Now that the Senate Finance Committee has passed its version of health care reform, 42% of voters nationwide favor the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s down two points from a week ago and down four from the week before.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% are opposed to the plan.
It would likely come down to the American people just gaming the system until the entire thing collapsed:
Let’s compare what the insurance execs claim…
Their concern: People will buy insurance only when they desperately need it, such as after they’re diagnosed with cancer or heart disease.
Healthy people might choose to pay the penalty, now proposed at a few hundred dollars per year, because it is far less expensive than buying insurance.
Insurance companies, under that scenario, would end up spending more to treat patients than they would receive in premiums. Rates would rise even faster than they do now.
“People would come in, pay premiums for a few months while they were getting their cancer treatments,” said John Martie, president and general manager of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado. “If enough people did that, the whole system would collapse.
…vs what some moron on the left has to say about it.
Reform advocates say it is farfetched to assume people who can’t afford insurance — and might qualify for government subsidies — would opt to pay a penalty instead.
“They are assuming that people would game the system,” said Denise de Percin, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.
“They are looking at the worst-case scenario. People aren’t stupid — they are not going to pay a penalty and get nothing,” de Percin said.
Is she REALLY that stupid to believe what she’s saying here? Let’s say your choices are these:
- Pay $10 or $15 a month “penalty” which is wasted money. Then if you ever have a serious medical problem, start paying $100 or $150 month for insurance which covers your pre-existing condition.
- Pay $100 or $150 every month for insurance, which is wasted money if you didn’t have any major medical issues.
Under this setup, the only way people are stupid is if they DON’T “game” the system.
It’s amazing how ignorant these fools are.
I don't think all libs are this ignorant.  The people at the top, the ones who are driving the deal, know exactly what they're doing.  The media and the mindless Obots who are spouting their talking points are, in fact, horrendously ignorant.

Unfortunately, that's going to allow this nightmare from becoming reality.

There's my two cents.



Related Reading

No comments: