Posted on 08/20/2013 6:26:42 AM PDT by xzins
The Chicago Tribune has finally reverted away from home-town boosterism of the President and is now telling him to, essentially, admit that his signature achievement is toast:
"[President Barack Obama] crusaded for [obamacare] and has embraced its nickname. But he did not write the law. Congress did. Major changes are necessary he has stipulated by his actions that this law as constituted cannot work and Congress should legislate them for his review."
"Bottom line: Lets delay and rewrite this ill-conceived law. Congress need not start from scratch. Lawmakers can build on what all of us have learned from three years of painful trial and error. Three years of attempting, but failing, to make this clumsy monstrosity work for the American people."
By all means, let us have a, ah, temporary delay in implementation which is Beltway-speak (sorry about that) for let us kill this monstrosity, throw it into an unmarked grave in federally-protected wetlands, pour lye into the hole, cover it up, go home, and never speak of this ever again.
(Excerpt) Read more at redstate.com ...
No, Romney ran on RomneyCare being great and not like ObamaCare.
I’ve not given up hope yet.
The problem is that the best system in the world was created by borrowing money from China and then printing more of it.
The people are clearly unwilling to support a level of taxation adequate to fund our system. All false accounting aside, the actual $$ cost at the point if service is far beyond what most can or will pay.
What’s relevant to me is that ObamaCare is far worse, and that I’m not trusting Mitch McConnell & John Boehner to come up with an alternative plan.
Let’s just push the default button and go back to the original program.
Look, don't get me wrong. Obamacare is destroying what I've worked 40 years to build and I'm very unhappy about it.
The problem is that post-1965 expenditures are not subject to either personal/family OR governmental budgeting processes. Covering the expenses of all persons in a class without limit cannot lead to anything other than ruin, and that's what we have, or had before PPACA.
PPACA makes everything worse (which, I believe, is its purpose), but going back to "what we had before" (no limit on spending, low levels of taxation, and unlimited money printing and debt to cover it) is not going to work for very long.
Here's something I wrote last week about our system:
Starting in 1965, we (I started medical school in 1972) have built a gigantic edifice of modern medical care, certainly the best in the world by far - using OPM - other peoples money - (people other than the patients or their families).
Look at the video depiction of the hospital where Vito Corleone was taken after being shot in the Godfather - that level of sophistication is what a true free market is willing to pay for. By true free market, what I mean is what willing patients and their families will pay out of pocket at the point of service.
Everything else - MRIs, CT scans, joint replacements, implantable pacemaker/defibrillators, mobile ICUs, heart surgery involving bypass, modern (safe) anesthesia, GI endoscopy, laparoscopic surgery, cures for lymphoma and certain leukemias - all of that would require tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket at the time of illness, and most people could not or would not do that.
Enter Medicare and Medicaid. They pay, using OPM, for ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING that we, our medical device manufacturers, and translational research can think of (and they pay for the research, too). Yes, there is excess, and yes, given the general competence of government workers, there is fraud, too.
But most of this cost is fixed and most of it is beneficial. Imagine you live in rural NH, and you wake up at 1am on a snowy night in February with chest pain. You dial 911. Within 15 minutes, there is a mobile coronary care unit in your driveway. Within 20 minutes, your EKG is sent via either a cell tower or satellite to a heart center 60 miles away. The PA in the truck has orders within a half hour to administer a cloned protein that costs $10 000 via an IV. It doesnt work, so you roll to your local hospital helipad, where a chopper picks you up. You are at the heart center by 3am. The entire cardiac cath team meets you and goes to work. By 3:45am, they see that angioplasty is not an option, so you go down the hall to the OR, where the surgical team is waiting for you. Using a small incision and microsurgical equipment invented here in the last five years, they bypass your 95% lesion, and your heart is free of damage as you watch the sun rise.
Now, the cost of all this stuff on standby, just waiting for you or your neighbor, replicated as it is all over the country, is in the trillions. The simple overhead dwarfs the cost of the actual treatments. And all of it - every single bit of it - exists because of Congress promise to print or borrow enough money to pay for it, since they know people cant pay for it themselves and are not willing to pay taxes at a level sufficient to nationalize it.
Thats what Obamacare is all about - its a way for Congress to escape from the cost monster that they themselves created before everything comes crashing down. And they have very cleverly offloaded the responsibility for who gets what to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will shortly be offloading it to hospitals and doctors.
Exactly. Let insurance companies sell any product they want, that fits the needs of the individual consumer no matter what state they live in.
I have found that expecting the worst is the best predictor on average.
I assume at this point that
1) Christie will get the nomination’
2) Hillary will beat him
3) She will replace O-care with single payer, and Justice Kennedy with Elizabeth Warren or someone similar, maybe Melissia Harris Perry. Then the government takes over the internet.
But ya never know.
Getting the guns. Or at least restricting to the point of uselessness for the common person.
2. Seizing your 401K
Once Dems get full control of the US government as they got Maryland and CA and like those states have no worries about losing elections in future the list will be endless.
They will be Kings.
Then it will be time to be a talk radio host $$$$
Healthcare is not in the constitution therefore you need to be able to buy it without my money.
Exactly.
WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!!
If they couldnt get this right in the past 3 years, they're not going to get it right in the next 300 years. They've been tinkering with the universal health care system over in Britain for decades now and it still gets worse.
I have long believed that medical costs have skyrocketed because of a huge pot of money called insurance....whether private or government. Since it’s there it gets spent.
That is not to say that the wonderful research and amazing technologies and treatments that have taken place aren’t expensive. I just don’t think it’s as expensive as the increases have indicated. I think a lot of that pile of money goes down a waste/fraud/abuse rathole.
That said, in an ideal world, I’d have the old system with some kind of market-based, competitive controls.
However, if given a choice between ObamaCare, McConnell/Boehner Care, or the old system, I’d take the old system.
The Chicago Tribune has finally reverted away from home-town boosterism of the President and is now telling him to, essentially, admit that [Zerocare] is toast: "...But he did not write the law. Congress did. Major changes are necessary -- he has stipulated by his actions that this law as constituted cannot work == and Congress should legislate them for his review... Lawmakers can build on what all of us have learned from three years of painful trial and error. Three years of attempting, but failing, to make this clumsy monstrosity work for the American people."IOW, not his fault! Partisan Media Shills ping / ridiculous agitprop ping / sure Communism has always resulted in mass murders before but if we'd just tinker a little ping...
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