HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE
As technology improves and life is extended, the number of senior health care problems increase. Call it the unintended consequences of medical technology.
When more and more people (like me) live longer and longer, we experience medical problems (like me) which are expensive (like mine). This increased demand for treatment is causing the cost of the entire system to explode. In other words, it costs us so much for medical care as we age that we may actually be outliving our ability to pay for these extended years.
And that just makes sense. You want to retire at 67 but live to 90? You want Medicare to take care of you for those 23 years? Okay how are you going to pay for it? That’s 23 years of social security added to 23 years of medical care and that’s a ton of money. In truth, where is it to come from?
The problem with these and other health care problems is that too few people understand them and too few people want the people to understand them and so many of us are left to blather about things we know little about.
The truth is that this new health care bill is an economic nightmare no matter what pap Nancy Pelosi puts out. You cannot expect a "for profit" company to eliminate “caps” and also cover "pre-existing conditions" and still stay in business (and keep their employees). Not unless you allow them the “means” to cover these increased costs. Those "means" are (1) either letting them raise insurance rates dramatically for everyone or (2) forcing younger, healthier people to buy health care insurance. These changes would help carriers meet their newly expanded costs just as is done with social security. With social security, healthy younger people pay in to help the older retired people take out. In this new health care bill, younger healthy people would pay in to defray the costs of older, more sickly people taking out. That’s the idea and so that’s what they did. But not everyone approves.
(1) 40 states are now suing to strike this provision in the new bill. If they are successful and young people don't have to buy that insurance, the insurance companies will go broke. They will fail since they can no longer deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and they can no longer have payment caps so without compensating revenues they won’t be able to stay in business. If that happens, here comes single payer.
(2) the new bill has a penalty for young people that don't buy the mandated insurance. Unfortunately, (a) the penalty is less than the cost of the insurance so you can forget about that and (b) how the hell will they ever find these kids half of whom, don't even pay taxes. They won't. Tracking down these kids will cost more than it is worth.
Most of the numbers in this bill are a fabrication. For example, they are cutting Medicare and taking that money and treating it as though it was a reduction in costs but an increase in revenue but then they spend that money somewhere else so for budgetary purposes, they sue it twice. But it’s all nonsense since Medicare is deep in debt and the money it spends is all borrowed money anyway so the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards.
In addition to that, the CBO published its number but to get them, they had to add in revenues from taxing union Cadillac health insurance plans even though the chance of Congress approving that tax on union members is basically non-existent. So, that money – repeated for eight years in this decade – is all going to be non-existent. It is just one more huge deficit in the making.
And finally, they said thanks to this bill, 16 million Americans will now have coverage that did not have it before. Okay but the way that happens is they all are transferred to Medicaid (basically free medical care). Well, Medicaid is basically insolvent anyway so they could have been put into that system without this bill. It wouldn’t have mattered. The problem with this is, it’s not free – the states have to pay for it and they have no money. So since it is an unfunded mandate meaning the states MUST provide it but must also find a way to PAY for it, the only answer is higher taxes at the state level. You see, that doesn’t show up in the scoring for this new health care bill.
And who gets taxed? You and me of course but also businesses. And higher taxes on businesses usually mean a loss of jobs. You just can't go around raising the costs of small businesses that are already operating on marginal profits and think it won't have consequences. It will. But in Washington, they don’t care. They just ignored that.
The fact is, this bill is so atrocious you have to think the people who passed it either are blind to reality or just lying to us. And in these 3100 pages no one seems to have read yet is a law change that gives control of college funding to the Federal Government. In my opinion this may be more harmful to America's future than any of the rest of this monstrosity.
Finally, there was a lot of talk about how emergency rooms were filled with uninsured people who needed treatments. That was one of the reasons we needed this bill, to take the pressure off the emergency rooms. Well, mark my words, emergency rooms now will be more crowded than ever because all these 30 million people on Medicaid will not be able to find doctors to treat them since doctors are now so under-compensated for treating Medicaid patients, they have stopped accepting them. Even those who do accept them will put them at the bottom of the list and they will sit for hours waiting for treatment. So where will they go? They will go back to the emergency rooms. Wait and see. (In fact, if they begin reducing payments for Medicare, we may see that same problem affecting that program.)
Of course, abortion providers will flourish because now they can be assured of government money to pay for the destruction of babies which, whether you approve of abortions or not, is exactly what abortion is. That's why the worldwide Caucasian populations have dropped so dramatically that the future of the entire race is now written in stone – there isn’t any. Caucasian women have destroy their race.
Medicare Advantage (which I have) is also apparently over. They took 500 billion out of Medicare and from what I hear, discontinued the Advantage program. How will this affect those of us on this Medicare program? I don't know but I bet it won't be good. Just another benefit of the new bill that by the way, takes taxes right away but delivers benefits in six years. Even the pre-existing condition mandate doesn't kick in until 2014. Doesn't matter though, without compensating revenues, these new mandates will just put the insurance companies out of business leaving us with a single payer system which may have been the goal all along.
My goodness, when Nancy Pelosi stands up so proud I have to wonder if she has any idea what she is talking about? Or maybe she does.
This is going to be a financial disaster for America. It's one thing to want to fix the problems - we all wanted to fix them - but quite another to find a way to actually pay for those fixes. After all, money doesn't grow on trees and we are already deeply in debt with all those unfunded mandates passed on to the states. After all, they still have to be paid and we still have to pay them. Washington says “you must do this” and then “get the money somewhere” and then they wash their hands of the entire matter. Well, unfortunately we have to pay for them. At last count, unfunded mandates from Washington to the States now amounts to – and you better sit down for this, it’s so unbelievable - $400,000.00 for every American family!!! Almost half a million dollars in debt for you and your kids!
So that’s the bill the Democrats are so happy about passing. You see, fixing problems with giveaways is always popular with politicians as well as with the folks “getting”. It isn’t really that popular with the people who have to pay, the people doing the “giving”.
When people extend their hands, I used to think it was for a hand up not a hand out. I was wrong.
Makes me wonder what else is in this 3,100 page Pandora's Box that we don’t know about. I am almost too afraid to find out.
One thing I do know however: Americans are going to pay a lot more for health care in the future and they are going to get a lot less in terms of service. Except perhaps for those who extended their hands out the furthermost. They apparently will harvest the biggest share of the benefits. But the price tag is going to be staggering.
Joey
Welcome to Joey’s Newspage, where people come to exercise their minds
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