Can't wait until the people who celebrate the death of their political opponents are in charge of health care.— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) August 23, 2019
Kind of like some animals have warning colors to know they're poisonous, some people have warning signals to never give them political power.— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) August 23, 2019
“Similar problems are bedeviling Sweden and Denmark, two other countries frequently held up as models to follow on health care”
Medicare for all will likewise become a 2020 rallying point. But aside from its multi-trillion-dollar costs, it would destroy the 55-year compact of Medicare and indeed the 85-year-old history of Social Security itself.
Namely, these programs were sold on a number of premises, but two especially. One: Younger and healthier Americans would subsidize the financial, career, and health challenges of an older generation that was no longer fully hale. Two (whether still valid or not): Americans from their preteen years “pay” into a system that keeps track of their chits, calibrated by both years and dollar amounts, to adjudicate their own eventual retirement benefits, the so-called grand bargain that one now pays for others so that still others to come will one day pay for him.While the system is nearing insolvency, the tradition that Americans individually have already “paid” into their retirement benefits would be destroyed, once benefits were shared by millions who had not yet contributed much at all. The generational psychological bond would end, and the very logic of Social Security as a war between old and young would arise.The elderly are not historically illiterate. They grasp that all universal “free” health-care scams eventually hinge on culling out the costly and bad investments, i.e., themselves. They know that “Medicare for all” translates into “Medicare for no one,” especially in an age of open borders. So they will not be paranoid to also assume that in an era of euthanasia and “managed” and “rationed” care, it makes more progressive social sense to “invest” in our youthful future than in “prolonging” already-spent lives — especially when we will be adding more ethnic and racial fuel to the generational inferno.A society that approves of killing an infant shortly after it emerges from the birth canal might similarly have little compunction about pulling the plug on a 90-year-old who was deemed “unproductive” or suffering from “severe deformities” — albeit of course after a “conversation” with family and their “doctor.” To the Margaret Sanger mind, abortion and euthanasia are twins, and both are cost-effective means to free up dollars for more “moral” purposes.
The healthcare crisis has come to a head. Rising costs, woeful insurance coverage, and inflated drug prices are devastating millions throughout our land. All across the nation, people are waking up to the fact that we simply can’t let this issue be swept under the rug any longer.
As government involvement in our healthcare has increased, the problem has only gotten worse, which is obviously the fault of the free market. If we are to fix this problem, we must turn to the obvious solution. We must hand control of our healthcare over to the most trustworthy entity of all: the government of the United States.
When has the government ever lied to us? When has the government ever failed to follow through on a promise? When has the government ever been proven to be inept, inefficient, or ineffective, pray tell? Can’t think of a single time? I didn’t think so. That’s because they are masters of making good, moral decisions, keeping their word, and managing even trillions of dollars with frugality and honesty.
The government has proven time and again it is the solution to any problem, from turmoil in the Middle East to the drug war to the war on terror. And that’s why it’s high time to wrest control of our healthcare away from the greedy for-profit corporations whom we can no longer trust, and hand it over to the trustworthy, caring, nurturing federal politicians who love us so.
Bare reason compel us to accept the only logical solution to the imminent healthcare disaster the government created: hand full control of healthcare to the government.
When an organization has such a bad track record on prediction, why would you believe them , unless your desperately want to.Democrats and much of the media are screaming over the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 24 million Americans will “lose” their health insurance thanks to the GOP-proposed American Health Care Act. In fact, the CBO numbers are guesses based on an alternate reality.
Back when they wrote the ObamaCare law, Democrats gamed the system to get happy predictions out of CBO — numbers that never showed in this reality. Naturally enough, the push to replace ObamaCare now yields some scary estimates.
Proposed bill would let bosses fine you for refusing a genetic testCBO said the Affordable Care Act would trim the deficit; reality’s been the reverse. It said 24 million people would be enrolled in the exchanges by now. Reality: below 11 million.
And the agency is still projecting the exchanges to cover 19 million by 2020 if nothing changes. In fact, enrollment leveled off this last year; at best, it’s on course to stay around 11 million. More likely, the program has begun its “death spiral,” with soaring prices prompting plummeting enrollment.
Then, too, CBO says the repeal of the “individual mandate” — the fine for going without insurance — would drive 18 million people to drop their coverage by next year. But that includes 6 million of the 11 million on the exchanges — suggesting that more than half of those people only buy insurance to avoid the fine.
Much as we hate ObamaCare, we don’t believe that — the fines aren’t high enough. And even if CBO’s right, then those people don’t really want their policies, so they wouldn’t be “losing coverage,” but fleeing it.
CBO also says 5 million would quit Medicaid — even though premiums are tiny. Anyway, everyone who qualifies can re-join Medicaid the instant they need it, so those folks wouldn’t truly lose coverage.
Plenty of other CBO assumptions are just as dubious. For example, the agency guesses that the bill would push up exchange premiums — when Health Secretary Tom Price has already started the process of pushing them down, by junking Obama-era regulations that forced every policy to cover a long liberal wishlist, from “free” contraceptives to chiropractors and other alternative medicines.
The GOP bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a realistic first step toward moving beyond a system that’s on track to implode. The scary headlines only describe a fantasy world where ObamaCare is a smashing success.
So the news out of the federal government Thursday is disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, according to an analysis of the latest data. And that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993, particularly among people younger than 65."This is a big deal," says Philip Morgan, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new analysis."There's not a better indicator of well-being than life expectancy," he says. "The fact that it's leveling off in the U.S. is a striking finding."Now, there's a chance that the latest data, from 2015, could be just a one-time blip. In fact, a preliminary analysis from the first two quarters of 2016 suggests that may be the case, says Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the new report.Anderson says government analysts are awaiting more data before reaching any definitive conclusions."We'll have to see what happens in the second half of 2016," he says.Still, he believes the data from 2015 are worth paying attention to. Over that year, the overall death rate increased from 724.6 per 100,000 people to 733.1 per 100,000.While that's not a lot, it was enough to cause the overall life expectancy to fall slightly. That's only happened a few times in the past 50 years. The dip in 1993, for example, was due to high death rates from AIDS, flu, homicide and accidental deaths that year.On average, the overall life expectancy, for someone born in 2015, fell from 78.9 years to 78.8 years. The life expectancy for the average American man fell two-tenths of a year — from 76.5 to 76.3. For women, it dropped one-tenth — from 81.3 to 81.2 years."It's remarkable," Morgan says. "There are lots of things about this that are unexpected."Most notably, the overall death rate for Americans increased because mortality from heart disease and stroke increased after declining for years. Deaths were also up from Alzheimer's disease, respiratory disease, kidney disease and diabetes. More Americans also died from unintentional injuries and suicide. In all, the decline was driven by increases in deaths from eight of the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S."When you see increases in so many of the leading causes of death, it's difficult to pinpoint one particular cause as the culprit," Anderson says.The obesity epidemic could be playing a role in the increase in deaths from heart disease, strokes, diabetes and possibly Alzheimer's. It could also be that doctors have reached the limit of what they can do to fight heart disease with current treatments.The epidemic of prescription opioid painkillers and heroin abuse is probably fueling the increase in unintentional injuries, Arun Hendi, a demographer at Duke University, wrote in an email. The rise in drug abuse and suicide could be due to economic factors causing despair."Clearly, that could be related to the economic circumstances that many Americans have experienced in the last eight years, or so, since the recession," says Irma Elo, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
United Health Care participated voluntarily. The rest of us participate under duress.The CEO of UnitedHealthCare on Tuesday said he regretted the decision to enter the ObamaCare marketplace last year, which the company says has resulted in millions of dollars in losses.“It was for us a bad decision,” UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said at an investor’s meeting in New York, according to Bloomberg Business.UnitedHealth, the country’s largest insurer, announced last month that it would no longer advertise its ObamaCare plans over the next year and may pull out completely in 2016 — a move that sent shockwaves across the healthcare sector.
Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best.“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn’t grown?” said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. “I don’t have that money.”
Almost 90% of the nation's 30 million uninsured won't pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act in 2016 because of a growing batch of exemptions to the health-coverage requirement.
The exemptions are worrying insurers. The penalties were intended as a cudgel to increase the number of people signing up, thereby maximizing the pool of insured. Insurers are concerned that the exemptions could make it easier for younger, healthier people to forgo coverage, leaving the pools overly filled with old people or those with health problems. That, in turn, could cause premiums to rise...."If your pajamas don't fit well, you don't need health insurance," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. "It basically waives the individual mandate."
CONCLUSIONS
This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.
But Moscow’s annexation of Crimea has set off rapid and drastic changes that threaten to submerge such outposts of dissent. In a speech marking the consummation of Russia’s union with the Black Sea peninsula on March 18, Mr Putin lashed out against a “fifth column” of “national traitors” enlisted by the west to subvert Russia. He vowed to respond forcefully.His warning – especially his choice of phrases widely used by nationalist dictatorships as well as Russia’s own former Communist regime – has resonated strongly with Russians. They have been taken as a rallying cry among those aggrieved by Russia’s diminished power to build a prouder, stronger and more authoritarian state. For Mr Putin’s liberal critics, it is a worrying sign that the rest of the country’s imperfect democratic institutions are under severe threat.In a column that set the tone for both commentaries and blogposts, the conservative journalist Ulyana Skoibeda raved two weeks ago that after the return of Crimea “I no longer live in a conquered country”. In a long lament that reflects the feelings frequently expressed by ordinary Russians, she described the past 23 years as humiliating. Ms Skoibeda said her life had been dominated by western norms, and she had had to suffer through the chaos and deprivation unleashed by the democratic and economic experiments of the 1990s.Standing proudly against the entire world had revived the essence of the Soviet Union, she wrote. “It is not Crimea that has returned. We have returned. Home. To the USSR.”Since the Crimea annexation, there have been frequent moves that symbolise a Soviet revival.
Health insurance premiums have risen more after Obamacare than the average premium increases over the eight years before it became law, according to the private health exchange eHealthInsurance.The individual market for health insurance has seen premiums rise by 39 percent since February 2013, eHealth reports. Without a subsidy, the average individual premium is now $274 a month. Families have been hit even harder with an average increase of 56 percent over the same period — average premiums are now $663 per family, over $426 last year.Between 2005 and 2013, average premiums for individual plans increased 37 percent and average family premiums were upped 31 percent. So they have risen faster under Obamacare than in the previous eight years....Premiums are being hiked across the board for several reasons, but the biggest contributor is the Obama administration’s highly touted “essential health benefits,” services that insurers on and off exchanges must provide.Some benefits, such as emergency and laboratory services, are uncontroversial. But others, like maternity, newborn and pediatric services, are causing headaches for huge swaths of the population that don’t need them. Anyone past childbearing age, single men, the infertile, even nuns — their premiums are rising as well, because their plans must, by law, provide more services.
Government doesn't have to work this badly. The Obama administration had 42 months from the passage of Obamacare to the scheduled rollout of healthcare.gov. The Pentagon, still the world's largest office building after more than 70 years, was built in 18 months.But that was accomplished by men who knew that the Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt, expected results. Roosevelt could be an inspiring orator. But he also showed a gift for selecting the right men (and, occasionally, women) to reach goals that he thought were really important.Barack Obama seems to lack that knack. He has advanced to the highest position in government without having demonstrated the ability to get results outside a political campaign.
As a practical matter, it is nearly inconceivable that insurance companies would be able to reissue the canceled health-care plans. The process, as Avik Roy expertly explains, is too extensive and complex to complete in the few weeks between now and Obamacare’s coverage deadline — something that an administration that can’t, after three years, get a functioning website running should know. But even if it could be done, the insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the letter of the Obamacare statute. Similarly, the state insurance commissioners would be insane to permit them, and Americans would be insane to buy them. The policies would be legally unenforceable.
There’s a lot of chatter in Washington that Democrats on the Hill feel like they were lied to or misled by the White House. But if you understand how our Constitution works — and they should, given that they only took an oath to defend it — it’s Obama who should feel lied to.The law is really quite clear. It was so clear that the Congressional Budget Office — their own in-house think tank — said that millions would lose their health-care plans. Obama even said so with the Democratic leadership in the room.More to the point, the law was intended to cause millions of people to lose their existing plans so they would enter the exchanges.Now the same people who literally wrote the law feel betrayed when the law does exactly what they intended. That’s like getting mad at a remote-control car when you crash it. Yes, the website’s failures make the panic more acute, but the fact remains that the Affordable Care Act is doing precisely what it’s supposed to do.
A cancer patient whose health insurance was canceled due to Obamacare says he will "pay the $95 fine and let nature take its course" rather than "be a burden on my family" with new monthly premiums that are over $1,300 higher under Obamacare."I've thought about this long and hard," Bill Elliott told Megyn Kelly Thursday night. "When my insurance comes out, just for me, it will be $1,500 a month with a $13,500 deductible. I'm not going to pay that. If I make it that long, I will pay the $95 fine and let nature take its course." [snip]Elliott says he has prayed about his decision and feels it is the right thing to do."Whatever happens, I believe I'm doing the right thing. I've thought about it and I've prayed about it... To me it's saving my family money and then they'll have money to spend instead of throwing it down the drain like President Obama is wanting us to do," said Elliott.Elliott says he voted for Obama due to his promise that Americans could keep their plans if they like them."I like my doctor. I love my insurance," said Elliott. "They were paying just about everything, including medication and medical devices."On Thursday, Obama said he was "sorry"
‘If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” How serious was this lie, repeated by Barack Obama with such beguiling regularity? Well, how would the Justice Department be dealing with it if it had been uttered by, say, the president of an insurance company rather than the president of the United States?
Barack Obama is guilty of fraud — serial fraud — that is orders of magnitude more serious than frauds the Justice Department routinely prosecutes, and that courts punish harshly. The victims will be out billions of dollars, quite apart from other anxiety and disruption that will befall them.The president will not be prosecuted, of course, but that is immaterial. As discussed here before, the remedy for profound presidential corruption is political, not legal. It is impeachment and removal. “High crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment — need not be indictable offenses under the criminal code. “They relate chiefly,” Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 65, “to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” They involve scandalous breaches of the public trust by officials in whom solemn fiduciary duties are reposed — like a president who looks Americans in the eye and declares, repeatedly, that they can keep their health insurance plans . . . even as he studiously orchestrates the regulatory termination of those plans; even as he shifts blame to the insurance companies for his malfeasance — just as he shifted blame to a hapless video producer for his shocking dereliction of duty during the Benghazi massacre.It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will ever be impeached. It is certain that he will never again be trusted. Republicans and sensible Democrats take heed: The nation may not have the stomach to remove a charlatan, but the nation knows he is a charlatan. The American people will not think twice about taking out their frustration and mounting anger on those who collaborate in his schemes.
