Thread: Welcome to Day 1, The Obamacare Nightmare

Welcome to Day 1, The Obamacare Nightmare

By Kay Daly
September 23, 2010 12:50 PM

There is a lot of improvement that can be made in America's health care system to be sure.

How about starting with a serious approach to tort reform for medical malpractice to include the "English Rule," otherwise known as "Loser Pays", and the runaway lawsuits that have chased most ob-gyns out of the baby delivering business would slow down considerably. Even Senator Tom Coburn, an ob-gyn, has decided that he has delivered his last baby, mostly because the upkeep on medical malpractice insurance has priced him out of the system. It has gotten so bad that in some states, expectant mothers must drive extraordinarily long distances just to find an ob-gyn still practicing. Not terribly reassuring when the water breaks.

Beyond the problem of litigation and the cost of health insurance, everyone can agree that there is a lot of room for improvement in our nation's health care system. But if Obamacare is not reversed/repealed, the solutions that Obamacare seeks to impose, not to meantion the costs involved, will have historians in the future scratching their heads wondering what in the world possessed our generation to trash the most advanced health care system in the world.

Some of those so-called reforms are going into effect starting today.

According to the Washington Examiner, this is what we have to look forward to:

» Obamacare won't decrease health care costs for the government. According to Medicare's actuary, it will increase costs. The same is likely to happen for privately funded health care.

» As written, Obamacare covers elective abortions, contrary to Obama's promise that it wouldn't. This means that tax dollars will be used to pay for a procedure millions of Americans across the political spectrum view as immoral. Supposedly, the Department of Health and Human Services will bar abortion coverage with new regulations but these will likely be tied up for years in litigation, and in the end may not survive the court challenge.

» Obamacare won't allow employees or most small businesses to keep the coverage they have and like. By Obama's estimates, as many as 69 percent of employees, 80 percent of small businesses, and 64 percent of large businesses will be forced to change coverage, probably to more expensive plans.

» Obamacare will increase insurance premiums -- in some places, it already has. Insurers, suddenly forced to cover clients' children until age 26, have little choice but to raise premiums, and they attribute to Obamacare's mandates a 1 to 9 percent increase. Obama's only method of preventing massive rate increases so far has been to threaten insurers.

» Obamacare will force seasonal employers -- especially the ski and amusement park industries -- to pay huge fines, cut hours, or lay off employees.

» Obamacare forces states to guarantee not only payment but also treatment for indigent Medicaid patients. With many doctors now refusing to take Medicaid (because they lose money doing so), cash-strapped states could be sued and ordered to increase reimbursement rates beyond their means.

» Obamacare imposes a huge nonmedical tax compliance burden on small business. It will require them to mail IRS 1099 tax forms to every vendor from whom they make purchases of more than $600 in a year, with duplicate forms going to the Internal Revenue Service. Like so much else in the 2,500-page bill, our senators and representatives were apparently unaware of this when they passed the measure.

» Obamacare allows the IRS to confiscate part or all of your tax refund if you do not purchase a qualified insurance plan. The bill funds 16,000 new IRS agents to make sure Americans stay in line.

And this is what we are going to be paying for?

There was another interesting piece by Victor Davis Hanson in today's Townhall.com where he writes that we have become a "nation of peasants":

"Even after the failure of statism at the end of the Cold War, the disasters of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, and the recent financial meltdowns in the European Union, for some reason America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama's "spread the wealth" slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama's "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."

The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and creates more regulations, the more those who create wealth are sitting out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks and either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit largely confiscated through higher taxes.

No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few don't get richer. "

This is, in a nutshell, the entire philosophy of the Obama Administration, and the jewel in the crown for President Obama is imposing his socialist philosophy on the health care system.

The messages we are getting from the Obama Administration are in direct opposition to the full throttle embrace of the free market by the Reagan Administration. In Obama's world, the goverment knows best what to do with our money and fully living up to our potential, utilizing every opportunity this great nation has to offer is derided as selfish and wrong. Success is to be penalized in Obama's world. And every speech that Obama delivers now reflects the doldrums of the economy, echoing the "malaise" of the Carter years.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan told us to dream big dreams and go out and achieve them "and why not -- we are Americans." He told us that the best was yet to come. He encouraged Americans to recognize that it was indeed "morning in America." When the Congress actually went along with Reagan and cut taxes and limited spending and worked to balance the budget, the economy roared back to life in the biggest peacetime expansion in history.

It always seems to be the liberals that tell us that we "can't" or we "shouldn't" -- they dread the future and reinvent the past. We conservatives are the ones who know that a truly free market isn't "trickle down economics" as they derisively call it but "a high tide that lifts all boats." Success breeds success -- it cannot be coerced, regulated or taxed into existence but instead created through hard work. Socialism suffocates opportunity, competition and ultimately, success. It only serves to create a serfdom beholden to government masters who always seem to end up benefitting quite nicely and not truly in the confines of the very rules they seek to enforce.

Obamacare is not just an innocuous health care reform program. If it isn't repealed, it is the first step of a pretty short march away from freedom and toward socialism.

http://www.gopusa.com/fresh-ink/2010/09 ... htmare.php

many, many links on this post; go to the link above if you wish to view them

» Obamacare won't allow employees or most small businesses to keep the coverage they have and like. By Obama's estimates, as many as 69 percent of employees, 80 percent of small businesses, and 64 percent of large businesses will be forced to change coverage, probably to more expensive plans.