President Obama Is A Bald-Faced Liar

Anyone trying to follow the evolution of the so-called health care reform bill would do well to read Health Care Policy and Marketplace  Review.  In a post published today we have the following statement:

Proponents of the Democratic health care bill make the claim that it will make health insurance affordable, improve our deficit outlook, and make our health insurance system sustainable. None of those claims are even close to being true and everyone who knows anything about this debate knows that.

What this means, of course, is that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and every other advocate for this steaming pile of shit is a bald-faced, congenital liar.  If this bill passes we will have no end of Hell.

Congressman Joe Wilson was right.

UPDATE: 3/9/2010

Another good summation of the politics of the health care bill in Commentary Magazine:

Why hasn’t the president been able to win over these and the other needed House Democrats? Well, the nature of the bill simply cannot be disguised – it’s a massive new entitlement, a huge tax increase, a whack at Medicare, and set of Rube Goldberg funding gimmicks designed to conceal the true cost. The lawmakers know it, and the public knows it.

Yes, anyone who has been paying attention, and not deluding themselves, knows this bill is a dog, layering another entitlement program on top of massive unfunded mandates in Medicare and Medicaid that threaten to bankrupt the nation.

UPDATE: 3/18/2010

The Boston Herald seems to agree with me:

As liberal Sen. Dick Durbin just admitted, “Anyone who would stand before you and say well, if you pass health care reform next year’s health care premiums are going down, I don’t think is telling the truth.”

And that “anyone” would be the president.

 So, Senator Durbin also thinks President Obama is a liar.  I'll say it again.  If Obamacare passes I predict that middle class taxes will go way up, and middle class health care will be of poorer quality than we have today.  The Democratic Party is telling the Big Lie here.  I hope the American people can prevent them from ramming this thing into law.

H.R. 3962 - Refuse to Buy Insurance, You Might Go To Jail

The recently passed health care reform bill, H.R. 3962, requires everyone to enroll in a "qualified" plan. The mechanism to enforce this provision is a tax penalty, which is defined in Section 501 of the bill:

(a) Tax Imposed- In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of--

`(1) the taxpayer's modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over

`(2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer.

There are no direct criminal penalties contained in H.R. 3962, but the effect of imposing a new tax brings both criminal and civil penalties into play via the Internal Revenue Code, also known as Title 26 of the United States Code. These criminal and civil penalties, and how they might affect an individual are explained in this posting of the Ways & Means Republicans website, and in this letter from Joint Committee on Taxation provided to the Ways and Means Committee.

The sections cited in these letters are sections of Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, and they may be verified at this website of the Cornell University Law School.

So, the jail time may be applied if a person refuses to buy insurance, making themselves subject to the tax, and then refuses to pay the tax. In every case, passage of H.R. 3962 increases costs for every American by at least 2.5 percent of their taxable income, and perhaps by as much as five years of their life.

Universal Health Care Possible - But There Will Be Losers

Last week my local PBS station aired a fascinating program comparing different countries health care systems. The program, Sick Around The World, can be viewed online, and I highly recommend that anyone reading this post to watch the program before proceeding.

I came away with two conclusions:

First, universal health care that is affordable is indeed possible, but to implement it there will be two economic losers: doctors and and insurance companies.

Second, the health care bill that recently passed in the House of Representatives, H.R. 3962, will NOT reduce costs, and is in fact a monstrosity that will cost Americans a lost of money without providing better or more affordable care.

Here is why my claim is true: the economic losers in many countries are doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies.

It seems simple, even cliche, to say this, but if medical costs are to be reduced, then someone must make less money. In many countries around the world, the two entities making less are doctors and insurance companies.

It seems a little strange to learn that insurance companies in several of the countries visited by the show host are non-profit corporations, but that is indeed the case. Governments dictate how campanies insure individuals, and they dictate the premiums that they can charge. REmoving the profit reduces the cost of care to the individual.

Doctors are almost always limited by the government to certain rates that they can charge for procedures, and no doctor can charge more. But since the government is the single payer, the amount of paperwork and administration is mush reduced as compared to a United States practice, saving enormous amounts of money. Further, malpractice tort law has been reformed in every case, reducing the malpractice insurance premiums for doctors must pay, further reducing costs.

Finally, every single one of the countries presented in the program use government bargaining power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies bulk pricing on everything from drugs to MRI equipment, reducing costs even further.

All of these measures, and others, reduce the cost of health care, but the losers are doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies.

This program exposes H.R. 3962 as the farce that it is: all of the economic losers, doctors, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies, have made their deals with Congress and the Obama Administration to avoid the necessary concessions that would have to be made to accomplish real health care reform.

Doctors have lobbied long and hard to avoid a reduction in the Medicare payment schedule that has for years been touted as necessary to avoid unsustainable Medicare costs. There is not reason to suppose that payments to doctors will be limited under any new health care plan.

Insurance companies have eagerly come on board to support the plan because there is an individual mandate that every person in the United States must enroll in a "qualified plan". resulting in millions of new premium-paying customers for the insurance companies.

The United States government under the "leadership" of President George W. Bush, abandoned any attempt to negotiate volume purchasing discounts with pharmaceutical companies, and there is no indication that such negotiations will be authorized by H.R. 3962.

And we finally come to another large winner in the health care debate, to which almost every Congress member (Democratic AND Republican) is beholden: trial lawyers. They have successfully prevented any kind of tort reform, meaning that malpractice trial awards will continue to be astronomical, resulting in very high malpractice insurance premiums, which further squeeze doctors.

H.R. 3962 is not a reform of the health care "system". It is a massive new entitlement program, one that is going to make the middle class pay for the coverage of the poor, under penalty of fine and imprisonment. It is an entitlement program that will NOT reduce the cost of medical care, which will continue to increase faster than inflation, causing the entire issue to be revisited in a few years when people realize that they have been duped. It is an entitlement program that will be impossible to repeal if it is once implemented, throwing and economic anvil to taxpayers drowning in a sea of increased costs.

The final two indicators of how much this bill stinks can be found in two facts: first, the Congress has exempted itself from being covered under this plan, and second, the effective date of this law is 2013, the year after President Obama will presumably be safely elected to his second term in office.

I guess that "SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS ".

Control Costs - Then Expand Coverage

Tyler Cowan's article in The New York Times describes the possible harm that insurance mandates might cause. At the end of the article, however, there is a caution that I totally agree with:

We’re often told that America should copy the health care institutions of Western Europe. Yet we’re failing to copy the single most important lesson from those systems — namely, to put cost control first. Instead, we’re putting our foot on the gas pedal and ratcheting up the fiscal pressures on the system, in the hope that someday, somehow, it will all work out.

As it stands, we’re on the verge of enacting a policy that is due to explode, penalizing many of the very people that it was ostensibly designed to help.

In fact the debate in Congress will be completely dishonest. Medicare has 74 trillion dollars of unfunded mandates, and here we are, about to add another layer of medical entitlement on top of it. Tyler Cowan's prediction about exploding entitlements is more real than Congress would have us believe.

Discussion on this article can also be read at The Volokh Conspriacy.

The Health Care Mirage

Most people do not know what health care costs, because most people do not pay of it: their employers pay, they pay out or their paychecks, but at the doctors office or pharmacy counter, they never see a bill.

This helps lead people to believe that health care is free, but it is not. One cannot repeal the laws of economics. Health care is a service delivered for a fee, which somebody pays. That sombody is usually an insurance company which collects premiums in exchange for covering the cost of the services. Individuals usually do not even pay all of the premiums, large fractions of which are often covered by the employer as a benefit to the employee.

So individuals do not often see the true costs of health care, and the belief spreads that health care is, or should be, free.

That is impossible, of course, because there are costs associated with delivering any service. But the belief that health care is free is behind the popularity of the idea of health reform: in this case the government will pay, but it will still be free, especially the so-called "public option".

That idea is totally wrong, and I think many American will be shocked to learn who will end up paying for it: the middle class will pay. They will pay either through increased premiums of their employer provided plans, through increased taxes, or they will pay the premiums directly.

Huh, what?

That's right. The "public option" is government defined health care, and government mandated health care, but it is not government paid health care, or at least not yet, and not for people with means. Only the very poorest will pay not premium to be covered under the public option. And it does not attempt to reduce health care costs. The primary goal of all proposals currently in Congress is to cover the uninsured, and the services used by the currently uninsured must be paid for by somebody, and that will be the majority of Americans that already have health care, or have the means to pay for it.

I think that Americans will be disappointed by the fact that post-reform they will be paying more out of pocket for health care and taxes. But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, that once the first round of reform is in place, a second one addressing growing costs can be passed, and this article in the New York Times describes how this might be done:

But there’s another path, equally radical, that’s more in keeping with the traditional American approach to government, taxation and free enterprise. This approach would give up on the costly goal of insuring everyone for everything, forever. Instead, it would seek to insure Americans only against costs that exceed a certain percentage of their income, while expecting them to pay for everyday medical expenditures out of their own pockets.

Such a system would provide universal catastrophic health insurance, in other words, while creating a free market for non-catastrophic care. In the process, it would marry a central conservative insight — that we’ll never control spending so long as Americans are insulated from the true price of their medical care — to the admirable liberal premise that nobody should go bankrupt paying for life-saving treatment.

The key point to this view of health care is that we begin to treat it just like any other service. We shop around for the best quality versus price for all kind of services, and service providers have an incentive to innovate and run their businesses more efficiently in order to remain profitable and competitive. Once the cost of health care is advertised in an office just like an oil change for your care, Americans can then manage their health care costs themselves, and true reform will have been accomplished.

Health Care Bill Debate

Megan McArdle has another insightful article about the coming debate over the health care bill recently passed out of committee in the Senate. She comments on Michael Cannon's article at Cato explaining wht Cannon thinks that the health care bill may die because of internal conflicts among Democratic interest groups.

McArdle does not think Cannon is correct, and that health care reform will pass, will fail, and cause a huge hole in the deficit. Democrats will be stuck trying to explain why a national heath bill ballooned in cost just like the one in Massachusetts, causing the Restoration of the Republicans to power in Congress.

So what if McArdle is right, and Republicans return to power after the Democrats are crucified on the health care cross? Will the health care "reform" enacted by the Congress be rolled back? Or will the Republicans morph into something akin to European "Conservatives" who are winning campaigns based not on ending the social services offered by the government, but on promising to manage them better and deliver them cost effectively.

I think that this is a real possibility. After all, when has a social program ever been eliminated in the United States?

The Future Of Health Care - Coming to You Soon!

The experiences of Massachusetts residents and their state's reformed health care system is a cautionary one for the rest of America. Read here about how "reform" might work for all of us in the future: fines for non-compliant plans, after the Guv'ment changes the rules.

It's apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

This is exactly why so many people are suspicious of the Democratic proposals for health care "reform" currently making the rounds in Congress. And you better believe that it will be the middle class that takes it in the pocketbook to pay for the "reform". Politicians, like Willie Sutton, can be depended on to "go where the money is".

Oh yes, this is change we can believe in!

Health Care Reform - Experience of States Not Encouraging

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." There is a whiff of insanity surrounding the debate over health care reform. Many of the things proposed in various legislation have been tried before, notably in Washington, Tennessee, and Massachusetts.

But I have not seen it laid out more logically than in this article on the The Atlantic website. After reading this article one could ask their Congressman some really hard questions. One telling point:

Proponents of reform often say it has to be done at a national level because states can't borrow money in downturns, but this doesn't explain why the spending side is headed through the roof.

Keep in mind that the United States can only borrow money in a downturn to the extent that the Chinese continue to buy our Treasury bonds. How long will that keep up if the spending for a black hole of an entitlement keeps sucking in more and more of the budget.

And why is nobody in Washington D.C. discussing the still unfunded mandate for Medicare, which is still expected to be insolvent sometime around 2017!