Get Government Out of Health Care

The U.S. government has been screwing with the provision of health care in this country since

On July 30, 1965, Lydon B. Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law as an amendment to the Social Security Act, a pyramid scheme in itself that was the cornerstone of his Great Society utopian ideals.

 Basically it relies on others to pay for free health care to people over 65 years old but has been steadily expanded to include other segments of the population including people on the public payroll, SSI disability and illegal aliens in the country for over 5 years.

Everyone who draws a paycheck in the United States has money taken out to pay for this coverage. Over the years the percentage that is taken from the working has increased while the benefits the plans payout have decreased. There is no choice and there is no alternative.  Even though there are private insurance plans available, you must pay for the government plan regardless of participating in a private plan.

There is no Constitutional mandate for the Federal Government to be in the health care business. There is no article or mention and what is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States therefore falls to the individual States themselves to rule upon. This is what is written in the highest law of the land.

So government has bought its way into the healthcare business as a vote buying scheme. The seniors vote for their free healthcare and the people who pay for it, their children and grandchildren, are basically stuck with it even though, as we see by rising costs and less and less return, it doesn’t work.

For all the touting of the good Medicare and Medicaid has done for people one should keep in mind that this is all we get to see. We never will see the good that could have been done by a free market system since this was never allowed to happen.

The previous system we’ve had since World War II was the mandate of getting our healthcare through our employer. This system was a result of acts of Congress during WWII to limit wages of people working here at home and not fighting the war overseas. Employers then added healthcare as a “Fringe Benefit” that was not subject to the new laws. This was further enhanced by being able to write off these benefits as a business expense.

This earlier intrusion into government intervention in the marketplace essentially created a Feudal System whereby employees were bound to their employers for their healthcare because under the law, only businesses could write off the costs of healthcare. The individual or private family could not! This has stifled personal freedom of the individual to start their own business since it is usually the spouse who has to work a “legitimate” job to secure affordable healthcare while the other person pursues the “American Dream” This robs them of the services of their spouse and the ability to function as their own independent business entity.

Now with the assertion of the ironically named Affordable Care Act, we have made these past dictums mandatory. You are now compelled by the full weight of the Federal Government to buy into, for now, a healthcare plan but later it will be THEIR plan since the government’s intention is to eventually drive out private insurers by force of law.

And like Medicaid and Medicare before it, Nationalized Health Care will be a fluid, ever expanding lesson in Social Imperialism, gradually expanding by new government edicts and taking more resources from other segments of our economy. Something a friend of mine refers to as “Kicking another brick under the Pyramid” and staving off the imminent collapse or another couple of years.  In this way, government can keep bad policy alive for decades and then tout about all the good it’s done since it’s been around so long.

But see things for what they are: The system will collapse.

If the individual had been allowed to purchase their own health insurance, like their auto insurance and had been able to choose from any provider from across the country, we wouldn’t be facing this crisis of government control.

Only when the individual is allowed to make their own choices will there be prosperity in the nation. It is when some nameless faceless central planning committee that deems itself the entity to “know better” than the individual themselves what is good for them do we have such a rule of tyrants.

The government has run America’s health care system into the ground by its increased intervention and its continued participation will only lead us to more problems.

The Future of ObamaCare

There is no future for the Affordable Care Act, it’s unworkable.

Call it Ghandi meets Martin Luther King Jr.

Just don’t participate.

You are not powerless against the implementation of this plan. You are not powerless against this government.  Regardless of the law, you have choices.

The government Screwheads have no clue as to how to really pay for their socialized medicine plan. They are relying on the segment of the population in their 20s to pay for much of it. But for most of their 20s these people are exempt from buying into ObamaCare. They can stay on their parents plan until they’re 26 years old. But what if they don’t buy a plan when they turn 27? And what if they can’t?

Right now the people in their mid to late 20s are facing great financial pressure. A larger cross-section are either unemployed or under employed, carry a large amount of student loan debt and now are expected to pay high fees for a health plan they don’t particularly need since, well, they’re young and will stay relatively healthy for the next decade or so. Forcing them to buy into ObamaCare will reduce their purchasing power, already curtailed by debt and lagging opportunity, to practically nothing.

So what if they don’t pay?

But the IRS will enforce ObamaCare, they will be fined and hounded to pay. But where are they going to get the money? It’s the “blood out of a stone” cliché’.  They going to jail these people?. The healthcare plan will be the last priority for them. They won’t even have money for the fines  But these are the people who are expected to carry the burden for the “Affordable Care Act”.  Good thinking.

Having seen my health care deductible double from $500.00 to $1000.00 in two years and expecting it to go to $1500.00 next year, I can no longer easily pay the bills off as they come in so I started sending them $30.00 every other week. I make my own payment plan and send them what I can. If it goes to collections, I ignore them and continue sending the money directly to the receivable department.  My insurance, for all the money my employer pays to them, provides for less and less until it seems I don’t really have insurance at all. They can wait for the money.

Legalizing 12 million or so Mexicans won’t work either. What makes you think THEY’RE going to all of a sudden pay taxes and buy health insurance?  The U.S. government does but that’s just plain naïve.

The illegals have been getting along quite nicely on the underground economy and they should be in no hurry to get off that gravy train. We’ll have to see about how that plays out but I’m thinking buying into U.S. citizenship won’t be the payoff the government thinks it will be.

Private employers are also not powerless in the face of ObamaCare costs and mandates. They will be jettisoning workers from the full time roles and spinning off companies to stay under the employee limit. Part-time employment ie: underemployment, is already growing faster than full-time employment ObamaCare is driving up the cost of full-time employees so it stands to reason that we will have less full-time employment. Duh!

ObamaCare, like the RomneyCare plan we have in Massachusetts, is already cash starved. RomneyCare has never been in the black and neither will ObamaCare.  The attempts at cost controls have all fallen short. The plans will require more and more money that will not be coming from the taxpayer base. There are so many groups and people already NOT paying for these services, the people who do pay will be hard pressed to keep up. I don't see how we'll be able to do it.

By people and companies not participating, not paying and ignoring the health exchanges in favor of continuing to go to their regular clinics and by even paying cash, the Affordable Healthcare Act will not stand. It’s dead on arrival.  

It’s unfortunate that this plan relies on force to implement rather than the people’s desire and free will to participate and this is actually the basis of the plans undoing. It, like most of President Obamas policies, is against nature and the natural order of things.

So if you don't like what's going on, you need do nothing.

Doctors: Pushers in Lab Coats

This is the state of medicine in the United States today. I was at a pharmacy/mini mart last week and a kid jumped the counter, grabbed a bunch of prescriptions waiting to be picked up and attempted to escape on foot with them. He didn’t get out of the parking lot.

This poor sap was just doing what many of our fellow citizens are doing these days: Trying to get their fix. He must have run out of doctors to prescribe for him.

I changed doctors a few years back when my former GP offered me a certain male enhancement drug. I never expressed an interest in aquiring it nor did I ask. I was there for a checkup and we hadn’t even started yet. That was it for him.

I have always found it strange that people have so many prescription drugs lying around. There are a lot of drugs in cirulation these days and they're all prescription drugs.

I met a woman not too long ago who told me the story of how she came to be divorced. Her former husband had a thriving construction business. She told me that he injured his ankle on the job and the doctor prescribed Oxycondone for the pain. Doesn’t this man, a man with no history of addictive behavior, become hooked on this stuff? Doesn’t he lose the business, his marriage and ends up living on the street? Yep, scared the crap out of me to hear this. How can this be?

Legendary musician and self-proclaimed child porn researcher, Pete Townsend of the British rock band,The Who, once said about his heroin addiction that he was “Addicted the very first time” he used the drug and “chased the feeling of that first high” for the rest of the time he was involved with it.

Much like the American weapons industry and our national addiction to war, we have a huge economic interest in the manufacture and distribution of pharmascutical drugs. It’s big business! But these drugs are so powerful, they can take over a person’s life and negatively affect the lives of all they are involved with, their colleagues and their families. But what can you do, a customer is a customer.

I'm not going out on a limb when I say that most of the murder and robbery going on in this country is drug related.  Nobody wants to rob a bank if they don’t have to. These are acts of desperate people but with the wasted efforts of our penal coloney state, there are no resources to help people get clean. A jail cell, yes, a drug facility, no.

Drug companies have a huge sales force with the power of the “junket” and “seminars” that they get doctors to "teach" and to promote their “product” for big rewards. Who cares if it’s killing people? Certainly not the drug industry.

It has been reported that more Americans are now hooked on manufactured drugs than on the old tired stuff like Marijuana, Hashish, Cocaine and Heroin COMBINED. All that is oh, so yesterday. Your parents did those drugs way back in the 70s and 80s for crying out loud, why horse around with that stuff when you can get the good, clean high of a high quality pharmaceutical?

And it’s all LEGAL! Well most of it anyway. The manufacture and distribution methods are all above board at any rate. These are the "legitimate" drugs, the drugs allowed by the State. Those others are illigitimate. There's a big difference, see?

All good for the economy.  People gotta have good jobs so they can have good homes and nice communities with good schools to raise their kids in.

But these very same communities are in jeopardy and although the damage in dollars and cents may be harder to track, the toll outweighs the gains. Nobody grows up wanting to be a drug addict but we have plenty of drug addicts. Some are born but most are MADE.

There are few professions where the practitioners take an oath. Some swear to uphold the law, another swears to uphold the Constitution but one in particular vows to “do no harm”. All these oaths have been violated and this will continue no doubt. While people don’t trust the police much and certainly don’t trust the President, many people trust their doctors and believe what their doctor tells them. These drugs are “medicine” and most believe that it wouldn’t be recommended if they didn’t need it.

Yes, doctors take an oath but they don’t take a vow of poverty and in our society, as in any society, money does most of the talking. People, and doctors are people first, like to have things and what’s the harm in prescribing this stuff?

By the looks of what’s going on in our nation, plenty of harm.

The ObamaCare Pyramid Scheme

The “Individual Mandate” is the cornerstone of Obama’s national healthcare program. It is the key element to have the full weight of the Federal government behind the enforcement of mandating participation of every man, woman and child in America in this “Healthcare” program. 

The purpose of this is, of course, to keep this new pyramid from tipping over too quickly, much like the older Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare scams before it, by insuring a steady flow of cash from everybody into the program even though some will pay more and others will pay not at all. 

Taxpayers must be compelled to pay into the system so that the government can continue to give away healthcare for “free” to their core constituency groups, mainly illegal aliens and their support groups, sympathetic businesses like MacDonald’s Corp, GE, General Motors, the Catholic Church and the Public Unions in every state in the nation. Given that only about 50% of the American population even manages to pay taxes anymore, participation by people who do pay taxes is a necessity. Not for it to work in the long run, because really there is no long run, but for the plan to work right now because once it gets going, people will grow to expect it and it can always be "fixed" down the road, right?

So to make Socialized Medicine work, people must be forced into the program, and private insurers out of it. There must be plenty of bricks to kick under the pyramid in the event it starts to hemorrhage red ink. And it will take a lot of money. In truth it will take more money than the world currently has to keep this boondoggle afloat for even a couple of years of full operation never mind into perpetuity. There will be shortages of everything from cancer medicines to doctors. Finding a doctor will become a big issue and the prices of  pharmaceuticals will climb.

And this administration makes no bones about how the Affordable Care Act is based solely upon a Pyramid Scheme of epic proportions. Every Commie associated with this deal, from Kathleen Sebelius to Charles Schumer has said that the plan will work "if" many able bodied young people sign onto the plan. That's a pretty big IF considering that under ObamaCare, todays 20-somethings don't even have to participate since they can stay on their parents healthcare plans until they're 26 years old. How's that for farsightedness?

But also this young demographic is most likely the largest group of underemployed and unemployed people that reside in this nation. Many are carrying crippling college loan debt that they won't pay off for over a decade and so how are they going to pay the premiums when they turn 26? Perhaps the Federal Government will then enact yet another loan program so that they can borrow money at low interest from the government to pay for their health plan that, since they are young and healthy, they won't likely be using so that they can pay for other people to use the plan. This is a bad deal for America's young people no matter how you look at it. For them it's a robbery.

Usually bad policy takes decades to start to smell bad. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are prime examples. They started small and unobtrusive but they slowly grew over decades to be the national budget busters they are today. But its the newer bad policies coming out of Washington that just stink right away like GW Bush's “No Child Left Behind” and the “Drug Benefit Plan” tacked onto Medicare which were labeled failures the day they were passed into law. 

And on the local level the predecessor to Obama’s health plan, an entity that is referred to as “RomneyCare”, started in the red and has been running deficits ever since. Contemplate this for a moment: The MassHealth plan started losing money right from DAY 1 and has gone downhill ever since. It has only been held up by Obama's friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick with funds from somewhere else in the state's general tax fund. They're not about to release that information.

But the National Healthcare Plan, slap-dashed together by a Leftist Congressional majority and even then only barely rammed through over every reasoned objection has reached the pinnacle of bad policy and bad precedent. It will stand as the biggest increase in taxes that the American public will have ever seen and the final straw.

The ACA is yet another Federal plan that the American people are forced by the stern blade of an overlord government to pay for even if they never receive a dime from it. I was going to say that never before in the history of the United States of America has there ever been a product or plan that made it mandatory that a citizen to participate in but I’d be lying. Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are all plans that a majority of citizens are pushed into participation and have to pay for. With the exception of public employees that is. Public employees are exempt from being forced to pay for Social Security and Medicaid taxes. 

So ObamaCare is not so much a health plan as it is a DRAFT. We are all now Conscripts in Obama’s war against private markets. We are now destined to be Cannon Fodder, thrown to the front and compelled to go over the top in Obama's Communist power grab and the struggle to keep what we as individuals have worked for our whole lives. We have been impressed into this monumental economic error and will be sacrificed on its altar of failure. 

And it will fail. The takers will always outnumber the payers.

So is it Constitutional?  Never mind that there is no Constitutional mandate that the Federal Government should even get involved in providing healthcare to individuals. All federal duties not specifically outlined in The Constitution are left to the States, so to mandate state participation in a Federal plan not therein outlined, and that includes Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, would be unconstitutional out of hand.

But it makes no difference if the Supreme Judicial Court lets the Individual Mandate stand or not since ObamaCare is already inflicting its economic damage on our lives. 

It would be great if the SJC would strike down not only the IM but ObamaCare in its entirety but it’s a Dead Plan walking regardless. The only difference would be the level of pain it would cause if allowed to go forward.

And it doesn't stop here. The next step is the so called "Single Payer" plan where the GOVERNMENT is the sole provider of health care in the country. Look at how well the Veteran's Administration has handled the Single Payer system with America's veterans.

Don't get sick.