Posted on 10/03/2025 10:33:17 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The current federal government shutdown is framed by Democrats as an attempt to “protect Medicaid” enrollees from “devastating” cuts in coverage by the Trump administration. Republicans argue that Medicaid should be focused on truly medically vulnerable citizens and should not be paying for illegal residents or healthy adults who have returned to work. Both sides miss (or ignore) the real point: the U.S. healthcare system is failing Americans because it rewards bureaucracy, not care, effectively wasting trillions of dollars a year.
Medicaid was never meant to be the sprawling entitlement it is today. In 1965, it was designed to cover less than 2% of the population, specifically those who were truly medically vulnerable. Following expansions under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and the COVID lockdowns and emergency declarations of both the Trump and Biden administrations, nearly one in four Americans is now enrolled. Many are healthy, working-age individuals eligible for employer coverage.
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Republican proposals to trim Medicaid would improve the rolls, reduce its $900 billion annual price tag, and focus resources on those who genuinely need help. Medicaid is not only fiscally unsustainable but also medically inefficient, with too many dollars lost to “BURRDEN”—bureaucracy, unnecessary rules, regulations, directives, enforcement, and noncompliance.
When administrators are paid first, too little remains for providers, and the result is deadly. Medicaid enrollees often suffer long wait times and literally die waiting for care—“death by queue.” Georgia’s new Medicaid Pathways program spent $54 million on bureaucracy last year while delivering just $26 million in actual healthcare.
Georgia is not an outlier; it’s the norm. Medicaid spends more and more on BURRDEN, leaving less and less for patients. Meanwhile, the American Medical Association reported national health spending in 2023 rose to $4.9 trillion—$14,570 per person—outpacing...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
We focus on profits, not patients.
I’ll say it again. The lie that gov’t healthcare is helpful keeps getting repeated, so I’ll repeat the truth. Hopefully it helps...
There are so many reasons unconstitutional gov’t healthcare should be abolished.
Here is a sampling of reasons:
1) Gov’t takeover of healthcare is unconstitutional and, thus, illegal. Nowhere does the Constitution delegate power to the feds to meddle in healthcare.
2) See 1)
3) Gov’t healthcare puts your individual healthcare in the hands of distant, indifferent, and non-medial D.C. bureaucrats and politicians who of course as middlemen must be paid and, thus, increasing the cost of healthcare. The HHS bureaucracy has a budget of $1 trillion.
4) The highest quality, most affordable, and most available healthcare in the world is what we had in the voluntary cooperation DIRECTLY between doctor and patient before the gov’t muscled in in the 50’s and 60’s with its “helping hand” hand out and a hammer behind his back! As Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help’”.
5) Gov’t hammer? What hammer? Forced vaccines, forced abortions, forced treatment all by distant politicians and bureaucrats who are not medical experts and do not know you personally.
6) Gov’t agenda vs. your own personal agenda. Who cares more about your health? You? Or some distant politician and bureaucrat who doesn’t know you from Adam and frankly couldn’t care less about you personally?
7) No one cares more about your health than you. Why in the world would you take your personal healthcare and your personal choices in the self interest of your health and wellbeing out of the hands of the DIRECT relationship between you and the doctor of your choosing who knows and cares about you, and instead put your healthcare in the hands gov’t politicians and bureaucrats who don’t know you, have the power to force you to do what they want, and who have their own agenda which includes “culling” the “overpopulation” - so gov’t has a bias toward your death.
8) That is a short list. There’s more but why would anyone need more reasons? NUKE UNCONSTITUTIONAL GOV’T HEALTHCARE!!!
The ‘profits’ are the worst part of the problem - those go to insurance bureaucrats and government aristocrats... and the incentives suck.
Doctors aren’t paid well, their choices are controlled by non medical people - the whole system is so bad it looks like it was designed by a stupid drunk democrat with a heart as big as ‘her’ ego. It’s a mess.
Switch the incentives back to what a heathy careful family would make and the system could work again...
And the profits are in treatment of symptoms, not in prevention of the underlying causes.
When I went back to college briefly after my transplant, I had a long discussion with a kid who wanted Medicare for all. I don’t think I swayed him, but I’d been on Medicare for about a decade at that point, so I unloaded all of my peraonal experience fighting with DHS for care and meds. Multiplying that by 300 million people or more would completely break the system.
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