Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Healthcare. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Finally: Universal Healthcare for Everyone!


I'm Barack Obama and thank you for watching my forty-second prime time broadcast over the course of my young administration. Tonight I'll be discussing two issues important to all Americans: Universal Health Care and immigration.

I'll be frank: when we say that 47 million Americans don't have health care, we're including a sizable chunk of undocumented immigrants -- you may know them by the term "illegal aliens".

Ever since the era of Lyndon Baines Johnson, we Democrats have promoted open borders, amnesty for illegals, chain migration and a path to citizenship for anyone who enters the country.

And the Reds beat the Braves, 9-3 behind a complete game from -- dammit, Rahm, my teleprompter is picking up ESPN again!

Uh, ehm, with Mexico's government crumbling under the twin weights of a global economic meltdown and brutal drug cartels, the President of Mexico -- Vicente Fox -- and I have come up with a simple, but effective, plan.

It combines universal health care, an open border with Mexico and a "superhighway to citizenship" for anyone entering the country.

Because of this policy, there will be no need for politically incorrect designations like "illegal aliens", because anyone entering the country can automatically become a citizen of the United States and Mexico.

So instead of the loaded term "illegal aliens", we'll simply call them "Democrats".

Suck on that, Rove!

Best of all, everyone in the United States and Mexico will get the same free, high quality health care. Partying in Cancun and catch the Swine Flu? No problemo, mi amigo!

Visiting your relatives in San Antonio and sprain your ankle? Simply walk into any convenient Social Security Office or Bureau of Motor Vehicles location, take a number, and enjoy the free Muzak and complimentary General Motors Magazines while you wait.

We call this tremendous new program: La Raza-Care.

La Raza-Care combines all of the benefits of open borders with a multi-country health care system second to none.

Now to pay for this, I am sorry to report that the massive tax cut for 95% of Americans that we recently implemented will have to be dismantled. Along with that, we will be making a few, minor changes to the tax code. So minor, in fact, you will hardly notice them.

* Under the new tax code, your refund check goes directly to ACORN.

* For a vacation to Mexico to count as a business trip, you must return with 100 or more pounds of government-grade marijuana.

* Attorney General Eric Holder gets to write off the entire United States Constitution.

* I can claim my teleprompter as a dependent.

* Finally, all registered Democrats will get a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.

I'm sure you have a lot of questions about this tremendous new program. So we've set up a website to explain your benefits at LaRazaCare.gov and, in espaƱol, LaRazaCare.mx. Happily, both sites accept donations for my 2012 campaign.

We'll soon be enjoying the same wonderful care that our veterans receive at the VA thanks to the leadership of Congress. I'd like to personally thank Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, Charlie Rangel and Diane Feinstein who rammed this through using an arcane procedural loophole without debate, transparency or discussion!

Best of all, La Raza-Care will have the same firm economic foundation enjoyed by Medicare and Medicaid!

So bless you my friends, and may the Lord keep you safe from harm. You'll need it. Adios, Amigos!


Obama's Ominous Implication: Euthanasia of the Elderly May Be Necessary


Gee, socialized medicine sounds great -- don't you think so, grandma and grandpa?

THE PRESIDENT: ...I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —

Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.

THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: ...you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington -- not your family -- will decide whether your grandparents live or die.

While our health care system is certainly imperfect -- because all humans are imperfect, including doctors, nurses, hospitals and insurance companies -- they are more perfect, more competent, more informed, more capable than all of the bureaucrats to whom they'll be forced to report: a bureaucracy that will make all decisions about your health care.

Obama and the Statist Democrats promise health care for everyone, but they will not -- and they can't possibly -- deliver it.

And we know this, because this is what occurs in Canada and Britain and other centralized bureaucracies, where you simply can not have access to advanced health care, period.

And where will Barack Obama be in ten years, when the rest of us are struggling with a massive, out-of-control, federalized medical system that doesn't give a damn about individuals and is busy rationing care, denying care to the elderly?

He will be retired as a very young man; a very wealthy young man, who will have imposed his Marxist ideology upon this society and then walked away from it.

Because the politicians don't last. But their policies live forever.

So much power for a faceless set of bureaucrats who can't possibly have the best interests of your family in mind. And yet they're going to take those decisions away from you and your doctor. And they've been lying every day to justify what they're doing.

They've been lying about the number of people without health care. They've been lying about whether the public is satisfied with health care. They've been lying about every aspect of health care.

They unleashed the slip-and-fall lawyers on the medical system, causing untold higher costs for medical practitioners. They've attacked the health care system relentlessly, driving up costs just like they've attacked the energy industry and the automakers.

And even when they have complete monopolistic control of a system, like the educational system in America, they want more control. It's never enough. They want more money, more regulations. More. They need to "invest". They need to raise taxes. They need to repress. They need to compel.

Because the Statist cannot make the imperfect perfect, even though he says he can. The Statist is more imperfect than anyone else.

I ask you to consider something: what kind of people can Obama and the Democrat leadership be, to think they can do these things when history tells them they can not?

The answer is simple. They are power-hungry Statists.


Must read: Democrat Health Care By the Numbers.

Diatribe credit: Mark Levin. Hat tips: The New Bankrupt Times and SavannahWinslow. Linked by: Gateway Pundit and One Big Dog. Thanks!

Sunday, July 19, 2009

"The Speaker Will See You Now"


Government-run "Welfare Care" ain't gonna be pretty.

And every taxpayer should know it will feel something like this.


Thursday, July 16, 2009

Joe Biden: ‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’


If you needed additional proof that Joe Biden is the dumbest man ever to serve as Vice President, Penny Starr of CNS News has it.

...Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money...

..."We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation," Biden said.

"Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. "The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you."

Or we could slash taxes by 25% and hack the size of government by 50%. It's not like anyone would notice the latter.

Biden makes Dan Quayle look like Steven Hawking.


Democrat Government Health Plan Represents Complete "Disdain for the Constitution"


Our resident health care guru, an industry insider who uses the nomme de guerre "Mister R.", is back. In this chapter, he deals with the intersection of the insurance industry, Obamacare and the Constitution.

1. For years, groups like the National Federation of Independent Businesses have been fighting to enable insurance pooling across state lines. Congress has rejected the notion, which would have allowed insurance carriers to do business across state lines and create more competition. Now, Obama, who has been against allowing carriers to do business across state lines, wants to offer a government option, doing so by crossing state lines.

2. Each state has their own mandates that must be included in insurance coverage. Now, if the program is self-insured, there is no need to abide by state mandates, and the federal government will argue, through a combination of premiums and taxes, they will be paying the claims on a self-insured basis (although an argument can be made the taxes levied against the rich serve as "insurance" to protect the program's viability). However, this directly contradicts what Obama said during the campaign: he was against John McCain's health care plan because, by allowing insurance companies to do business across state lines, consumers would lose the "protections" each state provides. "Protections", in other words, are mandates that serve to force insurance companies to provide coverage the state deems necessary. Bottom line, Obama will not honor each states mandates because keeping track of all 50 states will be a bureaucratic nightmare and will drive up the program's cost. It will be a cookie cutter program.

3. As a self-insured product (although, again, there can be an argument made that this is insured), any entity that adjudicates and pays the clams must file as a "Third Party Administrator" in each state, and each TPA is regulated by the respective states. Will the feds subject themselves to state supervision? Don't hold your breath. But what this illustrates is there is clearly a 10th amendment issue. It can be argued that each individual state can prohibit the federal government from doing business in their state and collecting premiums from its residents.

4. If the federal government continues to call this "insurance", which it does continuously by using the term "public insurance option," then the feds have a real problem. In the insurance industry, if you represent your product as "insurance", you subject yourself to state regulation. In this case, Obama has continuously sold this program as "insurance." As such, each state could force Obama to abide by their state regulations, file their program with state divisions of insurance and pay applicable taxes and fees. Any state, under the 10th amendment, would have the authority to do so, in my opinion, although I am not an attorney.

At the very minimum, Obama's plan presents a serious challenge to the 10th amendment and the states rights to protect their consumers. Obama's plan to force people into the federal program is a clear violation of the commerce clause: any individual has the right to shop his/her need for health care to anyone duly licensed to do so, however, Obama wants ignore that right.

Because Obama has clearly shown his disdain for the Constitution in so many areas, his total disregard for our founding document when it comes to health care is not surprising.

Previous Mister R.:
• Mister R. Chapter 1: The '47 Million Uninsured' Lie
• Mister R. Chapter 2: Health Care Insurance: Puzzling Questions No One Will Answer
• Mister R. Chapter 3: Obama's Pharmaceutical Delusions
• Mister R. Chapter 4: Obama's speech to the AMA
• Mister R. Chapter 5: Top 10 Questions ABC's Government Healthcare Infomercial 'Forgot' to Ask

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

A Quick Tour of Democrat Socialized Health Care







This chart identifies 31 new federal programs, agencies, commissions, mandates and regulatory bodies that will be in between patients and... their doctors.

Yes, it's just that simple.

They raped the Social Security "Trust Fund".

They raped the Medicare Trust Fund.

They raped Medicaid.

They destroyed health care for our veterans.

Now they're coming for you.


Hat tip: House of Representatives (PDF).

Sunday, July 12, 2009

E-mail from an M&A specialist reveals the true depths of economic despair among business owners


Z writes to describe the current economic environment from a firsthand perspective. He is a veteran mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) specialist who works exclusively in the middle-market.

My clients are all entrepreneurs having built successful businesses with sales of $5 million to $50 million. My prospective buyers are typically companies with sales of $50 million to $200 million. Every one of these companies (buyers and sellers) today shares these common denominators:

1. Their businesses are down 10, 20% or more.

2. They have either laid off staff or have reduced hours to 4-day weeks trying to keep key staff.

3. They have reduced their own salaries and in many cases have implemented “cross the board” salary reductions.

4. They (for the first time in their lives) have no ability to forecast beyond 4 weeks.

5. They see nothing good on the horizon that would benefit them re: sales, cost reduction, efficiency, etc.

6. In other words, they are experiencing a loss of optimism and any positive outlook on the future.

My hope is to at the very least to try to sell these 5 businesses [information redacted].

Prospects are slim. M & A deals are down (depending on the source) anywhere from 60% – 80%. I used to receive 20 – 40 inquiries from buyers every week. I now receive a handful a week.

For me, the worst part is my favorite part. I love to open up new clients! This is the most enriching and fun part. I stopped trying to “build my pipeline” about 3 months ago. I no longer follow up on prospects. Why? Any private business owner would be insane to sell his business now. He will be hit with excess taxes and so many unknown consequences. Do you know that part of the “Cap and Trade” bill includes a provision that if you sell your house, it must conform to new “green standards” which reportedly could cost a seller many thousands of dollars? How many unknown consequences are built into a 1,300 page bill that no one has read?

Any future seller prospects that I encounter, I will urge them to continue operating their business and take from the business everything that they can legally do for as long as they can. They are far better off. It is quite likely that I will have to revisit some of my existing clients and tell them the same thing... something that I dread.

I am so outraged as to what is happening to our country. This is no longer a political issue [because] we will all lose. We are all casualties of the new paradigm. There will be many more as we continue into a morass that will take generations to recover, if we can. Be it “Cap and Trade”; government-run health care; TARP; bailouts; “stimulus”; business takeovers, etc.; our future is being controlled by bureaucrats and politicians who never, ever, ever ran a business and knew the “gut-check” of filling out and paying their “941’s”.

How could they know how to create a job? Throwing billions at states and municipalities with payoffs to unions, lobbyists and partisan sectors? Sadly, the worst is yet to come with job losses, cost increases, inflation, etc. Just look at the job numbers released today.

Forgive my blathering. I went through the 50’s, the 60’s, the price restrictions and gas shortages of the 70’s, the 22% interest rates into the 80’s, the many frustrations of the 90’s, etc. They all pale in comparison to what we face now. Whether it’s “tea parties”, a realization by the silent majority of what is happening, or some miracle that stops this ongoing disaster, I hope and pray for an awakening. I think we can make it and I only hope that my children and grandchildren are as fortunate as we were to continue to have opportunities.

I’m mad as hell and I wish that there was something more that I could do about it.

The economy's flat on its back and what have Democrats done? They've jammed a banana in the economy's tailpipe.

Consider what you, as an entrepeneur or business owner, face:

• If your business uses energy (and heaven forbid you have a fleet of delivery trucks), you await the looming tax impact of Waxman-Markey's disastrous "Carbon Cap-and-Trade" bill, a 1,400-page behemoth that no one read before passing it. What will it mean in terms of new costs, regulations and taxes?

• If your business has employees, you face an uncertain cost structure for health benefits as Democrats bandy about a complete takeover of the nation's medical system. Will there be an employer mandate? Will employer-provided insurance lose its favored tax status?

• And your workforce faces an uncertain future given the Democrats' incessant attempts to ram forced unionization into non-unionized workplaces. The Pravda-esque Employee Free Choice Act (or "Card Check") eradicates the secret ballot requirement for unionizing and mandates government arbitration of wages and benefits if an agreement cannot be reached in a short period of time. The government, then, would be setting wages for business owners! Will small businesses be forced to replicate the extraordinary success stories of Chrysler and GM through Card Check?

• The Obama administration also appears to be pushing an initiative that could take equity stakes in small businesses using the $700 billion rescue program for the banking system. What would that mean to business owners who needed capital to keep their operations going? What would the impact be of government ownership stakes in thousands of small businesses?

Who could possibly hire in this environment? The economy is flat on its back because Obama and the Democrats put it there; and their policies continue to suck the life out of the most productive members of society.

Writing at Townhall, Dan Kennedy calls the economic environment a "climate of fear". He relates a conversation with a board member of one of "the largest and most successful... regional banks". The director stated, "Our bank’s leadership team and others I know at the local or regional level feel paralyzed and intimidated by the climate of fear created by the Obama administration... The new and proposed regulations will remove every competitive advantage of the community bank, and make every bank identical, forced to operate exactly as does Bank of America..."

New regulations, new taxes, new health benefit dictates, forced unionization... who could possibly be hopeful in this sort of environment?

Mark Levin calls the economic environment a "repression". And I'll say it for the record: Obama is a failed president and his is a failed presidency. His Statist ideology has failed in every place and every time it's been tried. And it's failing now, as anyone with half a brain knew it would.


Linked by: Dan Riehl. Thanks!

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Democrat Health Care, By The Numbers


0: The number of unrehearsed, unscripted questions asked of President Obama during his "Town Hall" on health care reform.

13: The number of teeth that British veteran Ian Boynton pulled out himself with pliers "because he couldn't find an NHS (National Health Service) dentist... [he] could not afford to go private for treatment so instead took the drastic action to remove 13 of his teeth that were giving him severe pain."

14: The percentage of all patients in Britain who wait more than one (1) year to receive treatment after a referral by a general practitioner. Half of all National Health Care patients in Britain wait between 18 and 52 weeks for treatment.

37: The "health care ranking" assigned to the U.S. by the World Health Organization among the world's countries. This oft-quoted number is used to justify an overhaul of the U.S. health care system and lists countries like Italy (2), Andorra (4), Malta (5), Singapore (6), Oman (8), Portugal (12), Greece (14), the United Kingdom (18), Ireland (19), Columbia (22), Cyprus (24), Saudi Arabia (26), the UAE (27), Morocco (29), Canada (30), Chile (33), the Dominican Republic (35) and Costa Rica (36) ahead of the U.S. Considering that no U.S. citizens travel to these countries when experiencing a life-threatening situation, it's worth questioning the methods by which the WHO arrived at these rankings. Their criteria included subjective and political assessments such as "Fairness in financial contribution". Suffice it to say that the WHO's rankings are clearly fraudulent and are designed to influence U.S. policy.

60: Average cancer survival rate (all types) for patients in the United States. Canada's survival rate is significantly lower at 55%, while Europe's is a dismal 48%.

81: Average percentage of those who survive a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the United States versus 43% in Britain under their National Health Service.

90: Number of days, on average, each Canadian patient must wait for an MRI under the Canadian government-run health care system.

750: The estimated number of people waiting in line (in the pouring rain) at Britain's Bury Office attempting to register for dental care.

2050: By this year, "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (health care for the poor) will consume nearly the entire federal budget." And by 2082, Medicare spending alone will consume the entire federal budget. This trajectory is, quite obviously, unsustainable for our children and our grandchildren. Congress is bequeathing our descendents a bankrupt health care system -- for just the third of the medical system that the government already runs!

10,000: Number of Canadian breast cancer patients to file a class action lawsuit against Quebec's hospitals because, on average, they were forced to wait 60 days to begin post-operative radiation treatments.

280,392: The number of jobs that employers would shed if government levied an employer mandate, requiring them to insure all employees. A 2007 study by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University and Helen Levy of the University of Michigan ("Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment") found that "0.2 percent of all full-time workers and 1.4 percent of uninsured full-time workers would lose their jobs if a health insurance mandate were written into law. Workers who would lose their jobs are disproportionately likely to be high school dropouts, minority, and female."

443,849: The number of British patients of the National Healthcare Service (NHS) who waited four or more weeks for inpatient admittance into a hospital (Excel file) in May of 2009 (more than 75% of all patients).

1,500,000: The number of Canadians who do not have -- and cannot find -- a general practitioner/primary care physician due to shortages in medical staff: "In Norwood, Ontario, 20/20 videotaped a town clerk pulling the names of the lucky winners out of a lottery box. The losers must wait to see a doctor... Shirley Healy, like many sick Canadians, came to America for surgery. Her doctor in British Columbia told her she had only a few weeks to live because a blocked artery kept her from digesting food. Yet Canadian officials called her surgery 'elective.' ...'The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,' she said."

12,000,000: number of illegal immigrants who would qualify for free health care and -- in all likelihood -- additional health care rights for relatives under the Democrats' universal health care plan, according to a reported statement by the office of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and spokespeople for the racial separatist group La Raza.

$311,000,000 ($311 million): The amount of additional funding requested last month by the Obama administration simply to combat Medicare fraud. Medicare fraud is estimated at $60 billion annually.

$3,600,000,000 ($3.6 billion): The amount of added malpractice insurance costs to the current health care system instigated by an out-of-control trial lawyer lobby that donates heavily to Democrat causes.

$10,000,000,000 ($10 billion): The estimated amount of Medicaid fraud, based upon FBI estimates. Criminal practices include billing for nonexistent, overstated, or unnecessary services, kickbacks to patients, inflated costs, etc.

$60,000,000,000 ($60 billion): The estimated annual amount of Medicare fraud, due to widespread criminal operations that victimize taxpayers and specialize in dead doctors, fake patients, non-existent treatments and the like.

$107,000,000,000,000 ($107 trillion): The estimated shortfall of the Medicare and Social Security programs, which are utterly and completely bankrupt; they can be legitimately called an "enormous version of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme".

Canada and England don't pay as high a price for their health care because they freeload on American innovation. If we utilized their systems, Americans might worry less about paying for health care, but we'd get 2009-level care and long lines. Those are the immutable laws of supply and demand. Government monopolies don't innovate. Only the free market innovates.

Furthermore, government bureaucrats already raped the Social Security Trust Fund -- there is no trust fund. They raped the Medicare Trust Fund -- there's nothing left. They raped the Highway Trust Fund -- it's empty. I could go down a long list of things the government said it would do, but hasn't done. Because the big government statists are liars. They even moved these massive expenditures "off the books" to conceal the damage they've done.

And now the Democrat Party, the union bosses and the trial lawyers are launching the most massive attack on the American people in the history of government.

They promise health care for everyone, but they will not -- and they can't possibly -- deliver it. The numbers don't lie.


References: Sick in America: 'Free' Is Good? (ABC News), There's no such thing as free health care (Reason Magazine), Social Security and Medicare Projections: 2009 (National Center for Policy Analysis), Who is Debby Smith?, E.R. P.R., Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2009.
Linked by: Dan Riehl ("Obacare"). Thanks!

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Wondering who's behind all of these Obamacare ads?


Have you noticed all of the pro-Obamacare ads running in primetime?

Ever wondered who's behind them?

I'll give you one guess.

That's right: the SEIU -- a.k.a. ACORN -- a.k.a. Socialists -- a.k.a...

Your George Soros-controlled, far left Democrat Party.


Related:
RED ALERT -- La Raza: "If the American people found out..."
Top 10 Questions ABC's Infomercial 'Forgot' to Ask
Cold Chills and Assisted Suicide: Why Every Senior Must Oppose Democrats' Health Care Plans
The curious case of 200 nearly identical MSM headlines

Linked by: Double Plus Undead. Thanks!