Food for Thought

Chew on this...

Obama on health care:

“A big part of what led General Motors and Chrysler into trouble,” he said, “were the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers — costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world.”

“If we do not fix our health care system,” Obama said, “America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less, and going broke.”

So many things wrong here...anyone care to start listing?

The Skinny on Obamacare

Here is the current situation and all the facts I can organize in a reasonable fashion for you. I found a great article to draw from so you're not just hearing my words, but I have to add that this is only one of many such sources I've seen - so I'm not just taking one person's point of view. This is a well understood argument by many, and with any luck it can be well understood by more and more every day.

President Obama originally asked Congress to draft the health care legislation that would eventually make it's way to his desk for signing. He quickly abandoned that idea because even Democrats working on it were too moderate for him. Nobody wanted to include the controversial "public option". As of late, Obama has decided to take a more hands on approach, no doubt to insure that his pet "public option" is included. Where are the checks and balances?? I heard someone say on the news the other day that there aren't any checks anymore because Washington wrote them all...sidetrack, I know! It was funny, even though it's true.

It's all so deceptive to me, really. Obama is shunning all accusations of socialized medicine, but this "public option" is at the heart of what everyone is afraid of.

Simply stated by Carol Platt Liebau:

...if Obama succeeds in imposing a “government option” on America, the privately insured will be forced to pay even more to compensate for the government-created cost/payment shortfall as the rolls of those in the government plan expand. As a result, the cost of private insurance will ultimately become untenable. And then – there will be only government-administered health care for all.

TRANSLATION: The public option puts our private option, and our choices, out of business.

and then...

Without privately insured Americans subsidizing Medicare and Medicaid, there will have to be another way to close the deficit between the cost of treatments and the below-market payments government offers for them. The answer, of course, will be health care rationing. Rather than the free market – or health care consumers’ economic and personal choices – driving the distribution of health care, the government will do it.

TRANSLATION: Government runs out of money to fund already sinking programs, so they have no other choice but to take away our choices.

Couldn't leave this part of the article out, cause it's just so true!

A government bureaucracy controlling your medical care is likely to combine the efficiency of the post office with the compassion of the IRS. Imagine a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles – but to secure lifesaving treatment for yourself, a spouse or child, rather than simply to obtain a driver’s license. What a nightmare.

TRANSLATION: Ouch! Keep the DMV image in your head when I give you a "to do" list on this later. :)

My final point for why we should all be wary of the current Obamacare campaign is simple. It's just not what it seems. He is flat out lying when he says that he has no desire to form government-run health care. He has supported a single-payer system in the past, even though he claims not to at this time. His key Democratic counterparts, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, have been pushing for government controlled, single-payer health care for years. This is where they want to take us and it looks like they are doing a good job of blurring the lines just enough for people to get sideswiped by it. There's a good reason our celebrityesque President of the United States is out "campaigning" to get the citizens of the country on board with this - it won't fly on it's own.

Bits and Pieces

Obama is out and about trying to sell his health care plan to the people. Today something refreshing happened...he was booed by doctors at an American Medical Association meeting. Shocking to me, since I know far too many physicians who were crazy enough to vote for him despite the potential threat to so many aspects of their careers.

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reported for the Associated Press:

The boos erupted when Obama told the doctors in Chicago he wouldn't try to help them win their top legislative priority—limits on jury damages in medical malpractice cases.

But what could they expect? If Obama announced support for malpractice limits, that would set trial lawyers and unions—major supporters of Democratic candidates—on the attack. Not to mention consumer groups.

Politics. Gotta love 'em. I realize that he wasn't generally booed by the crowd, but I still think it's cool he got a boo for ONCE in a blue moon. Then I read on. Sometimes I read or hear something that makes me think that maybe my brain is wired incorrectly and I think completely different from everyone else. This is one of those things:

Doctors have special reasons to be wary of the president's plans to overhaul the health care system.

Not long ago, doctors' decisions were rarely questioned. Now they are being blamed for a big part of the wasteful spending in the nation's $2.5 trillion health care system. Studies have shown that as much as 30 cents of the U.S. health care dollar may be going for tests and procedures that are of little or no value to patients.

The Obama administration has cited such findings as evidence that the system is broken. Since doctors are the ones responsible for ordering tests and procedures, health care costs cannot be brought under control unless they change their decision-making habits.

I've had a conversation or two with many a physician and some interesting complaints are often heard. 1) Patients readily request/demand unnecessary tests be run, despite the doctor's recommendations. 2) Doctors are driven to run many unnecessary tests because of liability. They cannot simply make a "gut" call and save the patient/insurance company/taxpayer some money. When the lawsuit comes a calling, they have to be able to show that they did everything they could.

The lawyers have no accountability here? And, of course, the most amazingly overlooked question of our time: Where is the personal accountability?

Coming soon - why Obama's plan is bad for doctors (as I alluded to above without explaining) but most importantly, as the Obama administration will go down denying, bad for patients.

The entire article can be found here.

Jobs Saved

My focus right now is on health care, but it is hard not to pick up tidbits here and there of other topics. I'll tie this into health care for you.

Back when the Obama Administration first started shoving trillions of dollars worth of debt in the form of a "stimulus" down our throats, they sold it under the guise of "saving or creating jobs". The first time I heard this statement my head spun, but it seemed I was the only one. Silly me, I figured others would catch on...like maybe some of the people interviewing him? Alas, months have gone by and the unemployment rate is approaching 10% and Obama is still praising himself for all the jobs he has saved.

Here's my health care tie-in: If I tried to prove to you how healthy I was by giving you an impressive list of all the diseases I have NOT had, would you be sold?

Why are people buying this? "Saved" jobs are not a quantifiable.

Healthcare Reform

It's on the horizon in the next few months. Obama's administration is already prepping the people to embrace the takeover by slinging around one of their favorite words, "urgent". On a personal level, I'm busy and stressed by life right now so paying too much attention to the news can seriously give me a headache some days. That said, I think everyone else is busy and stressed by life and politicians would love it if we kept our heads down in the grind so we'd miss what's happening. There is so much happening!

I'm going to try to focus in on educating myself & others on universal health care. I am adamantly against it from an ideological standpoint, but it's going to take more than that to stop the train wreck - if stopping it is really possible. There are real, serious reasons why this is a terrible idea for America and I hope to shed light on that in the days and weeks to come. My goal: to educate on a confusing but critical topic and to find out what we the people can do, if anything, to stop or curb the takeover. I'd love to break it down for everyone so that we could all just be hanging out in the work lunchroom, playgroup, airport, etc. casually explaining to our counterparts how damaging this is. Goodness knows the media won't do it.

So there, I'm committed and I will produce!