Paying for our own Healthcare?

John Stossel (who works for ABC, of all places) put together one of the best segments on the current debate over healthcare and insurance coverage:





Stossel raises a few interesting points:

1) If an insurance carrier covers more things, then people will not really care what those services cost (why would anyone care if one place charged $50 more for a flu shot if he or she is not paying for it anyway?). This then reduces the competitive market and the buying power of the individual.

2) It is impossible to cover more people for more services for less money.

3) Insurance is a safety umbrella to protect against the staggering costs of medical emergencies.

The first two points are the two absolute daggers in idea of a public option that covers everyone will be less expensive to Americans. The phantom number of uninsured people thrown around by the powers that be used to be 46 or 47 million people (now it is 30 or 31 million, depending on the source). How can all of these people be added to insurance coverage that has reduced co-pays, reduced deductibles, and additional services that would be covered?

The average person can likely estimate with pretty good accuracy what college tuition would cost. This is true also for a car or smaller things like a TV or a kitchen appliance. Who outside of an insurance agent or actuary would be able to accurately predict what a physical would cost (both on the low end and on the high end)?

Insurance companies already cover too much which artificially raises insurance premiums. As an aside, I previously had a prescription for taking medication for my persistent heartburn. The medication I was taking, omeprazole, is available over-the-counter, but my insurance was covering all but $5 of the cost. My prescription gave me a course of 30 tablets of 20 mg of the treatment. The final time I was going to pick up my prescription, I found that since my insurance had changed, I would have to cover it out-of-pocket. The pharmacist calculated the cost minus the insurance coverage I previously had and it came to about $75 for the one month course.

My jaw just about dropped. I excused myself from the counter and picked up a box of the same omeprazole (also known as Prilosec), which also has 20 mg of the active drug per tablet. It, at the time, ran for about $35 for 42 days of treatment. I asked the pharmacist if there was any difference between the omeprazole in the bottle that she had on the counter and the omeprazole I had in the box of Prilosec tablets. She told me there was no difference. I asked her why my previous insurer was paying for such a high markup. She shrugged and said that she honestly had no idea. I thanked her for her information and said I would be using the over-the-counter option. I can now get 42 tablets of the same treatment for just over $20.

I remember walking out of the pharmacy that day wondering why the insurance I had covered something that was that unnecessarily expensive. I viewed and still view it as a microcosm for the problems relating to healthcare.

Changes in healthcare and insurance coverage do need to occur, but the current plan is only going to make things worse and more expensive because it is only expanding the existing flaws in healthcare and insurance.

Gee, What Could go Wrong Here?

The United States is facing a potential overhaul of the health care system that would take a step toward a single-payer system that many in Congress have supported in the past (as has President Obama, by the way). To ignore that a single-payer system is not the goal is to ignore virtually every signal given by Democratic leadership concerning health care in the past.

This bill is to be written by a committee that has Charlie Rangel (who suggested to an inquisitive visitor to D.C.: “Why don’t you mind your own G**d***ed business?” when questioned about his tax problems) as its chair, signed into law by a president who smokes, bankrolled by an IRS headed by a tax cheat (Timothy Geithner), and enforced by an administration that has this to its credit in staffing:

1) Timothy Geithner: Secretary of the Treasury - Failed to pay about $40,000 in payroll taxes…oh Timothy!
2) Bill Richardson: Secretary of Commerce Nominee - Evidence of pay-to-play politics…doh!
3) Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State - Husband’s foundation has received donations from a wide variety of international sources…oopsie
4) Tom Daschle: Secretary of Health and Human Services Nominee - Failed to disclose more than $300,000 in income in addition to a car and driver for three years…aw, shucks, Tom!
5) Kathleen Sibelius: Secretary of Health and Human Services - A list of “unintentional errors” led to a tally of nearly $7,000 being owed in back taxes over a space of three years…whoops!
6) Hilda Solis: Secretary of Labor Nominee - Nearly $6,400 tax lien for failure of husband paying for taxes relating to his business…doh!
7) Nancy Killefer: Chief Performance Officer Nominee - Nearly $950 tax lien for failure to pay property taxes from back in 2005…doh!

What could go wrong with this? If Cash for Clunkers is any indication, then the estimates of this plan may have to be tripled and the staffing may have to be tripled in order to accommodate this new program.

No problems here, though. No reason to debate it, just pass it and worry about it later!

"You Lie!"

Last night during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson had two choice words to say to Obama, “You lie!” Those that have read HR 3200 could not agree more.

This was after President Obama had attempted to quell points of harsh contention that he labeled as untrue:

“The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple. There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

“You lie!” yelled Joe Wilson. Given the context of this comment where The One had been calling his political opponents liars and irresponsible, one cannot necessarily fault Rep. Wilson for being disgusted with the President’s finger-pointing. In the text of HR 3200 as it existed, there was no airtight safeguard to prevent illegal immigrants from reaping public option benefits. Two amendments were proposed to ensure that illegal immigrants would not be able to receive these benefits, but both were rejected on a party line vote. If one is in Wilson’s position and is unjustly called a liar by the nation’s highest public official on national television in front of a joint session of Congress, he or she would be justifiably annoyed.

Joe Wilson is currently being raked over the coals for disrupting The One’s speech. Apparently, both the Republicans and Democrats in Congress as well as media figures, commentators, and bloggers alike have short memories:

George W. Bush was speaking to a joint session of Congress for the 2005 State of the Union Address on February 2, 2005. During this address, President Bush noted the increasing concerns regarding the potential demise of Social Security:

“By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt. If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be drastically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs.”





President Bush’s statement was met with boos from many on the left side of the aisle. This must have been out of order as well. No doubt many of the same Congressmen and women are the ones crying foul at Joe Wilson’s outburst last night.

Some other thoughts on the address last night:

Notice the change of language regarding the insurance coverage regarding employers. He now says that employers and individuals will not be “required” to switch to the public plan. What if the employer switches plans to the public option even though the individual likes the current plan? Then that worker will have to, in effect, buy two plans (one through taxes, the other on his/her own).

Obama is obsessed with throwing bricks at the Bush Administration. He had to blame the Bush Administration for the trillion dollar deficit he inherited. He cited the Iraq war (that he is still fighting) as well as Bush’s “tax breaks for the wealthy” (which will expire next year) as some of the factors for his disadvantages in crusading against deficit spending. He then added that the cost of this “plan” (which still does not exist) is estimated at $900 billion, less than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (again, which he is still fighting) and the “tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration.” President Obama, this is your term. You are in charge now. Bush is not in office anymore, you are. You have a Democratic House and Senate. Your party controls everything. Are you still blaming Bush because it is convenient and easy to do so? It worked when you were a senator, but that does not work when you are the president.

Another observation: there is no bill. Obama’s details were very scant. Where is this bill?

Also, Obama stated that he is directing his Secretary of Health and Human Services to look into state demonstration initiatives for tort reform to protect doctors against frivolous malpractice suits. The very mention of tort reform was met with enthusiastic approval from House and Senate Republicans. Few Democrats rose to join them. The Democrats will write the bill because they control the House and the Senate. President Obama has not met with Republicans since April regarding health care and the Democrats do not need to meet with Republicans in the drafting process. The bill will not include tort reform because the Democrats are funded by the deep pockets of the trial lawyers that would be hurt by restrictions on malpractice suits filed against physicians.

Finally, many on the left have criticized Republicans and conservatives for criticizing the plan without presenting a viable alternative. This is not true. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has sent his proposed legislation, The Patients’ Choice Act, to the President and has been virtually ignored by the White House. Tort reform along with allowing insurance companies from other states to compete with each other will decrease insurance costs. Providing a tax incentive (such as not taxing the income used by an individual to purchase his/her own insurance) would also lower the prices of insurance coverage and health care as a whole.

The Republicans are “the party of no?” Joe Wilson may be taking a beating today, but he voiced what many informed observers have been thinking all along. He was right, President Obama. “You lie!"

The 2009 Liberal Scorecard

One of the problems conservatives face in the coming election is that the electorate is largely uninterested in lengthy explanations detailing the nation or state’s current problems. The general populace is much happier with short sound bytes rather than the details. This is one of the areas the American left has mastered. They have for years been able to articulate their talking points in attractive ways that sound good. Conservatives find themselves in the difficult position of going through detail-oriented explanations to counter very vulnerable arguments from their liberal counterparts. A glossy, polished speech that is low on details trumps the less dynamic speech rich with substance. It is a sad fact of contemporary American politics.

If one were to transcribe the liberal demagoguery to golf, liberals would not keep score in a tournament, but would decide on a winner by who hit the coolest shots, who was best dressed, or who was the most charismatic during the round.

The conservative keeps score. On a federal and state level, this has been a disastrous six months. Here are the scores that the conservative can use to prove his or her point.

Federal:
1) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Remember when the new administration promised transparency? There were earmarks upon earmarks in the bill ranging from additional funding for STD prevention (as if people don’t know where babies come from or how gonorrhea is spread) to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (because that will put people right to work). This bill along with the Obama budget also increased federal deficit spending from 3% to 12-13% according to the Congressional Budget Office.
2) Gitmo is still open. Didn’t General O. promise to close it? Even many Democrats saw the peril in doing this and blocked this from happening.
3) Nancy Pelosi vs. the CIA. Yeah, she lied…and then disappeared to China. Nothing to see here…carry on! After all, people will forget that she knew about the waterboarding and then lied about knowing it despite ripping Big Bad Bush for waterboarding terror suspects.





4) Cap and Trade. Gee, here’s an idea…how about we try to lower the global temperature by ourselves by imposing higher taxes on manufacturers and energy producers? No, no…they won’t choose to manufacture in China instead. China and India are not bound by Kyoto, so there is no way that American companies would look to lower costs by outsourcing to China. Nah. Silly conservatives…the United States can easily cool the earth down from its fever on its own…stick it those Big Bad Oil Companies! Just because heating and cooling homes is going to be exponentially more expensive under this plan doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something to combat a problem that has not been proven to even exits. But don’t take the evil conservatives’ word for it, take The One’s word for it…





5) The AIG tax. Who would have known that the person who introduced language into the stimulus allowing AIG to award bonuses was a Democrat at the blessing of the tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner? Remember how angry those guys were at AIG and how they proposed a 95% tax on them? It was as if they did not know about it beforehand…they act well.
6) Nationalization of GM. But wait, Chairman, I mean, President Obama does not want to run GM, but will tell them to keep their headquarters in Detroit. How is the government taking over the nation’s largest auto company not socialism?
7) Proposal of nationalized healthcare. Wow! Free healthcare! Sounds good, right? It does…until the taxpayers get stuck with the bill, patients are excluded from planning their own medical care, and all profit-driven incentive is removed from pharmaceutical companies and health care professionals to practice any kind of innovative experimentation…
8) Iraq. Wasn’t General Barry going to cut and run? U.S. troops are still in Iraq. Maybe Bush wasn’t so crazy…
9) Oh, there’s more (disarmament when North Korea is testing nuclear missiles, sitting and watching instead of taking any stand on Iran, surging the military in Afghanistan when the Taliban is running amok in Pakistan, apologizing to the Arabs and Europeans about American arrogance…), but for the sake of sparing the details, this will have to do.

State:
1) The Wisconsin State Budget. Jim Doyle signed a budget that increased the garbage tax, eliminated the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO) for public educators, released “non-violent” felons early, provided in-state tuition to illegal immigrants (don’t worry, they can’t get drivers licenses), extended domestic partners of state workers to be eligible for the state insurance plan (not just the gay ones, either), increased fees on cell phones, established a new income tax bracket, lowered the enrollment cap on school choice, increased the hospital tax four months after it was implemented, increased the cigarette tax, increased the capital gains tax, etc. The Joint Finance Committee (composed by a 12-2 Democratic majority) inserted many provisions behind closed doors in the middle of the night and the budget passed the Senate and Assembly before the “little people” (a.k.a. the public) even became aware of it. Remember when Jim Doyle promised not to raise taxes?
2) State smoking ban. Remember when if someone did not like a restaurant or bar, he or she would go to a different one? That was not good enough for the state legislature or the governor. Apparently, private restaurants and bars cannot decide for themselves whether or not to allow smoking.

This is only a partial scorecard. The Obama Administration has been in power for not even six months and look what is happening.

The problem the conservative faces is presenting the disastrous public policy decisions above to a populace that gives Obama a 60% approval rating while the Congress (run by the Democrats) has an approval rating in the 30s. This is a populace that has 40% of people that believe that the government has its own money (that is not paid for by the public).

But then, Obama and his teleprompter sure give good speeches. It is really a shame about those pesky little conservatives busting apart his platitudes and fluff with facts and figures.