Obama care

Evidently the new health care overhaul is 1500 pages long. No one it seems, especially those in the congress or the senate, has read it cover to cover. Well here is a quick sketch of the proposed changes. The people who do have health care are going to begin to pay for the people who don't have health care. This burden will fall most heavily on small business owners and the wealthy but all of us will pay a part of the new expenses. Your doctor will have to take on about 20% more patients as the people who didn't have insurance begin having regular visits. This will mean it will be much harder to see your doctor and vastly more difficult to see a specialist or get a procedure done. There are just so many doctors around and 20% more patients for the doctor means 20% less service for you.

When the government takeover of health care is in full swing cost control will become a priority. Cutting cost means cutting service. Yes there is waste in the current system but I pay for it through my health insurance premiums and I like knowing that everything possible will be done for me to see that I have the best possible outcome. In the future your doctor will not be the sole decision maker regarding your care. A vast federal government agency will also have a say in how you are treated. Their goal will not be the single best outcome for you, it will be the most cost affective outcome for a vast group of people. We will be transitioning from health care that seeks excellence for you to health care that seeks affordability for all. An automobile analogy would be going from Cadillac to Kia.

If we look around us we can see what cost control looks like. In Canada they have significantly higher death rates for some illnesses than in the US despite having the same treatments as here. Why? Because they don't treat disease promptly. It might take 6 months to see your primary care doctor, six months to see a specialist, six months for a follow up visit and all the while your cancer was progressing. Hence a higher death rate. In other countries the higher death rates are caused by refusal to use the very best medicine because its to expensive. Right now the standard of care is safe and effective. We are switching to a standard of safe and COST effective. Still in many other cases they simply give you pain meds and tell you no to the hip or knee replacement that you need. Your pain it seems is cost effective.

Then there is the Trillion dollar price tag. Yes Trillion. Its a budget buster. Its going to cause increasing deficits for ever. In fact if you look out past the first ten years of this program the numbers become staggering. Its clearly a budgetary black hole swallowing up every dollar that comes into its path. In the end everything will be sacrificed to feed this beast including defense spending and private health insurance. When you consider the financial implications of this plan its clear that Obama care is not just a plan to change health insurance its a plan to change the United States of America. Twenty years from now The US will only be ably to afford a very modest defense budget as Obama care becomes a third rail budget item. Private insurance too will suffer as more money is needed for Obama care. Eventually it will lead to a single payer system as it requires more and more taxpayers to keep it afloat. Democrats know this and many have stated it over the years including the President and Barney Frank.