Posted on 12/13/2013 7:12:54 AM PST by Kaslin
"Obamacare was sold on a trinity of lies."
That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next installment of "Game of Thrones," comes from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: "If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period." The second leg in the tripod of deception was "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."
But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn't gotten much attention: Obamacare will save you, me and the country a lot of money. This lie took several forms.
First, Obama promised on numerous occasions that the average family of four will save $2,500 a year in premiums. Where did that number come from? Three Harvard economists wrote a memo in 2007 in which they claimed that then-Sen. Obama's health-care plan would reduce national health-care spending by $200 billion. Then, according to the New York Times, the authors "divided [$200 billion] by the country's population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500."
In September, the Obama administration's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used far more rigorous methods to predict that Obamacare would increase national health-care spending by $621 billion. Using Obama's own math, that would mean -- according to Chris Conover, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and Duke University -- each family of four in America will spend an additional $7,450 thanks to Obamacare.
Of course, that methodology is still bogus. But it's probably closer to the truth.
The president and his allies also insisted that all of Obamacare's "free" preventative care would save the country vast amounts of money. As Obama put it in 2012: "As part of the health care reform law that I signed last year, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive care at no cost. That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services. We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money -- for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody."
That's not true either. First of all, you'd think people would understand that there is no such thing as "at no cost." You are paying for "free" mammograms, blood tests and the rest, even if you don't see a line item for them on your bill. And even if you're poor enough that you don't even see a bill, that doesn't mean no one's paying. That's why millions of Americans who've lost their health insurance thanks to Obamacare are discovering that the new plans it offers are either more expensive, have higher deductibles or both.
Also, prevention doesn't necessarily save money. I know that Benjamin Franklin said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (People always leave out the fact that he owned an insurance company that ran at a profit.) The idea that prevention saves money is one of these things that intuitively sounds like it has to be true. But think about it.
According to the National Cancer Institute, 12.4 percent of American women will get breast cancer at some point in their lives. So for every positive diagnosis there are seven negative diagnoses. Those tests cost a lot of money. Moreover, of the women who do get it, premature screenings won't necessarily catch it. That in no way means that screenings don't make sense. They do, particularly for women in high-risk groups. But testing everybody isn't a great way to save money. As the Congressional Budget Office reported in August, "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall."
When presented with these and other facts, Obamacare's defenders note that the rate of increase in health-care costs has slowed in recent years. "I'm not going to walk away from something that has helped the cost of health care grow at its slowest rate in 50 years," Obama said last month.
This spin doesn't work either. The slowing of health-care costs began a decade ago, and even the administration's own actuaries say the recent drop is mostly attributable to the lousy economy. But even that's too generous to Obama. Costs haven't dropped. The rate of increase in spending has slowed. We're still on course to spend a record $2.9 trillion on health care in 2013.
Obamacare may have been sold on a trinity of lies, but it turns out it's also lies all the way down.
Yes, well…lies are lies…but the word “disinformation” sort of indicates a systemaic string of lies……thus that ain’t a bad word either. I may be gving Jonah too much credit here…...
“Lying can never save us from another lie.” Vaclav Havel
It’s OK. Republicans just funded it for another 2 years.
Tens of millions of “Americans” still think they will get something “free” out of “Obamacare”.
I’d say the number was higher than that.
To most LIVs, Obamacare means “free healthcare on demand”.
I’m trying to imagine the mental condition of someone who lies so easily and must eventually at some point know that he will be caught and held accountable. He’s one sick puppy.
You get free leg-irons and handcuffs for life.
"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia"
"If you like your plan you can keep it"
"Chocolate rations have been increased from one half ounce to one quarter ounce."
The Obama lies struck home yesterday in my household. I just received notification in the mail that my healthcare insurance premium is increasing 26% next year.
By some miracle, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of TX didn't cancel (not yet) my grandfathered, individual HSA policy that covers 100% of costs after the high deductible is met. It doesn't include maternity benefits, mental health care, pediatric dental and vision care or other ObamaCare benefits that are worthless to me.
How tragic it is that I should feel fortunate, compared to millions of others in the country, that only my costs are increasing by 26%. Curse Obama and every Democrat for this atrocity.
Trinity of lies? How about...
“There won’t be death panels.”
“There’s no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs.”
“It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans, side-by-side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak..”
“The Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of uninsured by 32 million.”
I could go on and on. It wasn’t a Trinity, it was a whole Canon of false Dogma.
What good does it do signing up successfully for the insurance but getting no doctor that will see you because of that debacle
bump for reference
The lies are even deeper than most people know. One of the worst is that the GOP Members (on the whole) oppose Obamacare and want it repealed. They don’t, and the reason why discloses the biggest lie of all.
The Medicare Act of 1965 issued a guarantee of Federal payment for all “usual, customary, and reasonable” medical services, WITHOUT LIMIT. Using a standard static, socialist analysis they looked at what seniors had paid out of pocket, voluntarily, from 1956-1965 and figured the government would not be on the hook for a whole lot.
But that promise to pay without limit created a huge industry, bigger than the defense industry, that in an explosion of dynamic capitalist creativity discovered, invented, and marketed an immense array of useful, life-improving or even lifesaving products.
There are too many to list, so take one - the $60,000 pacemaker/defibrillator. In 1964, had they existed and had they been sold under a free market, very, very few seniors would have paid the $60,000 to get one. The necessary inventive and developmental work would never, never, have come about without the certainty of “free money” to purchase as many of them as could possibly be needed.
Now, whether or not these devices are good or bad, or are overused or underused, is not my point. On that issue, YMMV.
Without the socialist guarantee of money without limit, the capitalists would never have created them, just like Glastron would never offer aircraft carriers on the open market.
The socialists in Congress in 1965 knew, I believe, that Medicare would (somehow) smash capitalism. But, being socialists, they did not anticipate all the creations of the medical-industrial complex that would start to incur deficits as early as 1984.
Since the Great Compromise of 1986, Congress has paid for all this by borrowing or printing money. All of them, Republicans and Democrats alike, understand that they’ve created a monster and that their foundational promises of 1965 were lies, but none of them have a clue how to end it.
Obamacare is the answer for this generation of Congressthings. Everything that everyone knows is wrong with it is true, including that it cannot possibly work. But they don’t care about that. They needed to “do something”, and they did.
We cannot “go back” to 2008, because in 2008 the “system”, because of the promise to pay for anything capitalism could create, without limit and with OPM, was on a collision course with reality.
If you favor going back, which I do on most days, you have to go back to 1964 and redo Medicare with some kind of budget limit. And to do that, the “government hands off my Medicare” people are going to have to wise up.
Actually, in killing lots of the aged by denying them care, it might just turn out to be true.
“I never said “If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it”.”
My MIL was a pathological liar. She apparently couldn’t control it - literally couldn’t control her own mouth. When she would get caught - and she got caught in her own web all the time - she would blink once or twice and then invariably claim that she never said (what she just said).
Even when she was taken to task she didn’t (couldn’t?) change. The only thing that we could do was put distance between ourselves and her, and make certain that she held zero influence over our lives.
I’d pay anything if I could do the same with Øbongo.
Thanks for the link to your excellent post.
I have one quibble with one sentence: “Treatment of the medically indigent is totally dependent upon the insurance pool of last resort: the taxpayer”
It has not been dependent (entirely) on the taxpayer since the Great Compromise of 1986. Under the Reagan-O’Neill agreement, the GOP could cut taxes and claim the credit, and the democrats could spend printed and borrowed money INSTEAD of tax money, without limit, until 1) Jesus comes, 2) One or the other side crushes all opposition, or 3) The system collapses.
Jesus is on His own schedule, so we have to choose between crushing the Democrat-Republican coalition or letting the system collapse.
It makes me sad that the GOP leaders have chosen collapse, since that makes it more likely.
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