On Sep 13, 10:13*am, "US Army Veteran" > wrote:
> Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage.
>
> During the campaign, Obama insisted that he would not resort to an
> individual mandate to achieve universal coverage. In fact, he repeatedly
> ripped Hillary Clinton's plan for proposing one. "To force people to buy
> coverage," he insisted, "you've got to have a very harsh penalty." What will
> this penalty be, he demanded? "Are you going to garnish their wages?" he
> asked Hillary in one debate.
>
> Yet now, Obama is behaving as if he said never a hostile word about the
> mandate. Earlier this month, in a letter to Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and
> Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., he blithely declared that he was all for "making every
> American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and making
> employers share in the cost."
>
> But just like Hillary, he is refusing to say precisely what he will do to
> those who want to forgo insurance. There is a name for such a health care
> approach: It is called TonySopranoCare.
>
> Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits.
>
> Obama took his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, to the mat for suggesting
> that it might be better to remove the existing health care tax break that
> individuals get on their employer-sponsored coverage, but return the vast
> bulk--if not all--of the resulting revenues in the form of health care tax
> credits. This would theoretically have made coverage both more affordable
> and portable for everyone. Obama, however, would have none of it, portraying
> this idea simply as the removal of a tax break. "For the first time in
> history, he wants to tax your health benefits," he thundered. "Apparently,
> Sen. McCain doesn't think it's enough that your health premiums have
> doubled. He thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too."
>
> Yet now Obama is signaling his willingness to go along with a far worse
> scheme to tax employer-sponsored benefits to fund the $1.6 trillion or so it
> will cost to provide universal coverage. Contrary to Obama's allegations,
> McCain's plan did not ultimately entail a net tax increase because he
> intended to return to individuals whatever money was raised by scrapping the
> tax deduction. Not so with Obama. He apparently told Sen. Baucus that he
> would consider the senator's plan for rolling back the tax exclusion that
> expensive, Cadillac-style employer-sponsored plans enjoy, in order to pay
> for universal coverage. But, unlike McCain, he has said nothing about
> putting offsetting deductions or credits in the hands of individuals.
>
> In other words, Obama might well end up doing what McCain never set out to
> do: Impose a net tax increase on health benefits for the first time in
> history.
>
> Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the
> private sector.
>
> Ignoring the reality that Medicare--the government-funded program for the
> elderly--has put the country on the path to fiscal ruin, Obama wants to
> model a government insurance plan--the so-called "public option"--after
> Medicare in order to control the country's rising health care costs. Why?
> Because, he repeatedly claims, Medicare has far lower administrative costs
> and overhead than private plans--to wit, 3% for Medicare compared to 10% to
> 20% for private plans. Hence, he says, subjecting private plans to
> competition against an entity delivering such superior efficiency will
> release health care dollars for universal coverage.
>
> But lower administrative costs do not necessarily mean greater efficiency..
> Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office analysis last year chastised
> Medicare's lax attitude on this front. "The traditional fee-for-service
> Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to
> reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative
> to a more tightly managed approach," it noted on page 93.
>
> In short, extending the Medicare model will further ruin--not improve--even
> the functioning aspects of private plans.
>
> Lie Four: A public plan won't be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.
>
> Obama has repeatedly claimed that forcing private plans to compete with a
> public plan will simply "keep them honest" and give patients more
> options--not lead to a full-blown, Canadian-style, single-payer monopoly. As
> I argued in my previous column, this is wishful thinking given that
> government programs such as Medicare have a history of controlling costs by
> underpaying providers, who make up the losses by charging private plans
> more. Any public plan modeled after Medicare will greatly increase this
> forced subsidy, eventually driving private plans out of business, even if
> that weren't Obama's intention.
>
> But, as it turns out, it very much is his intention. Before he decided to
> run for office--and even during the initial days of his campaign--Obama
> repeatedly said that he was in favor of a single-payer system. What's more,
> University of California, Berkeley Professor Jacob Hacker, who is a key
> influence on the Obama administration, is on tape explicitly boasting that a
> public plan is a means for creating a single-payer system. "It's not a
> Trojan horse," he quips, "it's just right there."
>
> But even if Obama wanted to, it is simply impossible to design a public plan
> that could compete with private insurers on a level playing field and
> without "feeding off the public trough" as Obama claims.
>
> At the very least, such a plan would always carry an implicit government
> guarantee that, should it go bust, no one in the plan would lose coverage..
> This guarantee would artificially lower the plan's capital reserve
> requirements, giving it an unfair edge over private plans. What's more, it
> is simply not plausible to expect that the plan wouldn't receive any
> start-up subsidies or use the government's muscle to negotiate lower rates
> with providers. If it eschewed all these things, there would be no reason
> for it to exist--because it would be just like any other private plan.
>
> Lie Five: Patients don't have to fear rationing.
>
> Obama has been insisting, including during his ABC Town Hall event last
> week, that the rationing patients would face under a government-run system
> wouldn't be any more draconian than what they currently confront under
> private plans. This is complete nonsense.
>
> The left has been trying to address fears of rationing by trotting out an
> old and tired trope, namely, that rationing is an inescapable fact of life
> because every system rations whether by price or fiat. But there is a big
> difference between the two. If I can't afford caviar and champagne every
> night, any rationing involved is metaphoric, not real. Genuine rationing
> occurs when someone else controls access--how much of a particular good I
> can consume.
>
> By that token, Obama's stimulus bill has set in motion rationing on a scale
> unimaginable in the land of the free. Indeed, the bill commits over $1
> billion to conduct comparative effectiveness research that will evaluate the
> relative merits of various treatments. That in itself wouldn't be so
> objectionable--if it weren't for the fact that a board will then "direct
> financing" toward approved, standardized treatments. In short, doctors will
> find it much harder to prescribe newer or non-standard treatments not yet
> deemed effective by health care bureaucrats. This is exactly along the lines
> of the British system, where breast cancer patients were denied Herceptin, a
> new miracle drug, until enraged women fought back. Even the much-vilified
> managed care plans would appear to be a paragon of generosity in comparison
> with this.
>
> Obama has repeatedly asked for honesty in the health

America needs a total rebuild. Support nothing seeping from the
cesspool Washington,DC.

tt

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