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Psycho
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ObamaCare, the future of America.
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Archive » July 23, 2009
THE HEALTH CARE DILEMMA: PART III
By Harris Sherline, Contributing Writer
How about universal health care plans in general? How well do they work? Do they deliver as promised, or can they? The two most often mentioned systems are those in England and Canada, although there are others as well: Germany, Japan, Sweden, Finland and Russia, for example. There are also a couple of well-known programs in the U.S., notably in Massachusetts and Oregon that can be studied to see how effective or efficient government run health care actually is.
So, before jumping off the edge ourselves, doesn’t it make sense that we should evaluate how well some of these other plans are working? Looking at just three, Canada, Oregon and Massachusetts, provides some insight into the track record of government health-care programs:
Assessing Canada’s health care program, Dick Morris noted the following statistics:
“A 16% higher cancer death rate in Canada”
“An eight week wait for radiation therapy for cancer patients.”
“42% of Canadians die of colon cancer vs. 31% in the U.S.”
“Cutbacks in diagnostic testing.”
“The best methods for chemo therapy are not available.”
“No way out of the system; you can’t even pay for services yourself.”
David Gratzer, a Canadian physician, writes in the Wall Street Journal (June 9, 2009):
“ … Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system … Canada’s provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine.
Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery … Only half of ER patients are treated in a timely manner by national and international standards, according to a government study.
The physician shortage is so severe that some towns hold lotteries, with the winners gaining access to the local doc.”
How about Oregon, which established a government-run plan in 1993? IBD Editorials.com noted the following (June 9, 2009), among other observations:
“ … the state’s Health Services Commission (like the title?) has compiled a list of 680 treatments, only 503 of which will be paid for by the Oregon Health Plan … Got condition No. 504 … Treatment for lichen planus, a skin rash, is an out-of-pocket expense … So is therapy for a cracked rib (No. 512), nasal polyps (No. 524), a broken big toe (No. 527) and liver cancer (No. 575).”
Oregon residents must pay for treatment of all these conditions themselves, along with many other health problems.
“A great many lifesaving procedures that ranked high in 2002 have been relegated to much lower positions in 2009, while procedures only tangentially related to life and death have climbed to the top … Treatment for type I diabetes … was ranked second in 2002 but demoted to 10th in 2009, even though not providing treatment is a death sentence.”
So, if Oregon didn’t get it quite right, how about Massachusetts, which adopted its own state mandated health care plan in 2006?
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, wrote a briefing paper in June 2009, “Massachusetts Miracle or Massachusetts Miserable: What the Failure of the Massachusetts Models Tells Us about Health Care Reform,” in which he observed:
“Although the state has reduced the number of residents without health insurance, 20,000 people remain uninsured … Health care costs continue to rise much faster than the national average … New regulations and bureaucracy are limiting consumer choice and adding to health care costs … Program costs have skyrocketed.
Despite tax increases, the program faces huge deficits — with its attendant rationing ... A shortage of providers, combined with increasing demand, is increasing waiting times to see a physician.”
In the final analysis, national or universal health care systems, whatever they are called, are invariably forced to resort to rationing of services by limiting care on the basis of cost, age, the severity of disease or injury or various other criteria
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It’s unavoidable and will happen in the U.S. if the Obama administration manages to get Congress to pass a health care bill.
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How will we pay for this new bill, the VAT will be coming, it’s basic economics.
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Obamacare's next trick: the VAT
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 26, 2010
As the night follows the day, VAT follows health-care reform.
With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable.
We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks -- the unfunded $200 billion-plus "doctor fix," the double counting of Medicare cuts, the 10-6 sleight-of-hand (counting 10 years of revenue and only six years of outflows) -- is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare preempts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.
Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, "health-care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost." But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.
Obama knows that the debt bomb is looming, that Moody's is warning that the Treasury's AAA rating is in jeopardy, that we are headed for a run on the dollar and/or hyperinflation if nothing is done.
Hence his deficit-reduction commission. It will report (surprise!) after the November elections.
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won't be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs -- which are locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it.
By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT.
Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.
Obama set out to be a consequential president, on the order of Ronald Reagan. With the VAT, Obama's triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.
Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.
And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.
As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work.
But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.
Ultimately, even that won't be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.
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This is a logical outcome, you all know the possibility of this happening is relevant, and yet you all seem to be holding hand and singing kum by ya, reality isn’t a one sided perspective, in all matters, the “facts” come from both sides. This scenario is just as much a reality for America as it is not and as much as I am a believer of American Exceptionalism, I just don’t see how we are going to get around the facts and the reality of this bill.
It really is that basic and that simple the economics of this bill and the payments we will make just don’t equal up to freedom, let alone a relevant cohesive health care system. We can do Better than this, we have to do better than this, for all our children and our parents, we must do better than where this bill will lead our society.
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you can tell them all you want but it won't matter until they think it does
p.s. I contradict my contradictions, with or without intention, sometimes. 
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