Many people who have influence with President Barack Obama have gotten relief from the terrors of the Affordable Care Act we now know as Obamacare, but the great majority of the American people are still expected to follow the dictates of the healthcare “reform” law next month.
The administration’s announcement July 2 delaying the employer mandate was the first in a series of goodies provided to favored constituencies. And, about 20 percent of waivers went to gourmet restaurants, nightclubs, and fancy hotels in Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Cal.) district.
But as maddening as this discrimination is to us common folk, exempting Members of Congress and their staffs is far worse.
Under heavy pressure from Democrat leaders, Mr. Obama agreed to ignore the terms of the law that he pushed so hard for and now requires taxpayers to subsidize coverage for representatives, senators, and their employees to lessen the financial burden of Obamacare.
What a hardship these taxpayer-supported elected officials and employees suffer: The Office of Personnel Management reported that as of September 2012, the average salary for a full-time, permanent, non-seasonal government position was $78,467, and rank and file members of Congress make $174,000. The average American in the private sector makes less than $50,000.
It is possible for others to receive subsidies, too, and the key is income level. But, typical of this law’s rampant failures, there is no mandate to verify eligibility for a subsidy, virtually guaranteeing extensive fraud, and an additional expense burden on taxpayers.
Only about 36 percent of Americans have a positive opinion of the law, and now even Mr. Obama’s strong union supporters are calling for repeal or major repair of this debacle because it is decimating the 40-hour workweek that is the backbone of unionized labor.
Throughout the debate over Obamacare, a major claim was that it would cover the 30 million people that at the time did not have some sort of health insurance, ignoring the fact that a significant number chose not to have insurance. However, the Congressional Budget Office says that over the next decade there will never be a point where the number of Americans who remain uninsured will drop below 30 million. In other words, the main reason for ramming Obamacare down the throats of 270 million people who were happy with their health insurance is a falsehood.
Other of the President’s promises also have been broken:
Promise: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”
Truth: As many as 30 percent of employers will stop providing their existing health care coverage, while many are reducing employee hours below the 30-hour/week full-time level, or are trimming total employees to fewer than 50 to escape the crushing costs imposed by Obamacare.
Promise: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.”
Truth: We now know that health care “reform” will cost a trillion dollars.
Promise: “I will protect Medicare.”
Truth: Obamacare ends Medicare as we know it by imposing, among other things, severe reimbursement cuts that threaten access to care for seniors.
Promise: “I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”
Truth: There are at least 12 ways that Obamacare will increase premiums instead of reducing health care costs.
Promise: “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.”
Truth: Obamacare includes tons of new taxes and tax hikes. One that began this year is the 2.3 percent excise tax on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices that will raise $20 billion by 2019.
It’s not that Barack Obama deliberately misleads; it’s just that so much of what he says isn’t true.
Few people now defend Obamacare besides the Congressional Democrats who participated in the dishonorable process of throwing it together, voting for a 2,700-page bill they had never read, and which had zero bi-partisan support.
Many believe that Barack Obama never really cared what was in the Affordable Care Act or if it ever makes it to implementation, and in fact wants it to fail miserably. And that’s because once it becomes law, replaces the prior system, and causes mass chaos, the stage would be set to move to a single payer, government healthcare system as the only way to fix the resulting mess.
In his worldview, socialistic/communistic systems are the solution to all the country’s problems, and that is how he wants to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
The best thing for the country is to repeal Obamacare and begin again to make the several relatively minor adjustments to the current system that should have been done several years ago. Short of that, delay implementation for everyone until the numerous problems can be addressed and repaired.
Neither is likely to happen, of course, because too many people can’t admit they made a mistake, or they truly want government controlled health care.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Medicine. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Medicine. Tampilkan semua postingan
Obamacare’s serious weaknesses driving even strong supporters away
Commentary by James H. Shott
Although Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) only recently acknowledged that the health care reform bill he helped create – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare – is a “train wreck,” most Americans suspected that at its creation.
Things are so bad that President Barack Obama, trying to prevent some of the disastrous results, did something he is not allowed by the U.S. Constitution to do: postpone implementation of part of the law by suspending the employer mandate until 2015 and leaving the rest of the law intact. The Executive Branch of our government is obligated to enforce the laws – all of them, and all of each of them – and does not have the power to choose which ones, or parts thereof, it will enforce.
The House of Representatives passed two measures delaying the employer and individual mandates for one year, with 35 and 22 Democrats respectively joining in those efforts, which Mr. Obama has curiously threatened to veto.
And more recently, one of Obamacare’s most devoted groups of supporters has jumped ship. In a letter to Democrat Congressional leaders, Teamsters union president James Hoffa, and the presidents of two other unions, said this: “Right now, unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”
The law has already encouraged some employers to trim their staffs to fewer than 50 full-time employees to avoid the expense of the mandate, and in other cases to decide against providing insurance altogether, and pay a much cheaper fine.
Nevertheless, Mr. Obama declared last week that "the law is working the way it was supposed to for middle-class Americans,” and criticized House Republicans for trying to dismantle it.
Polling data from five different polling organizations from mid-May through July 13 shows continuing disfavor among Americans, with the disparity of opposition-to-support running from as little as 5 points to as much as 15 points, and the Real Clear Politics average of the five polls at 10.2 points.
According to the Gallup poll from late last month, 42 percent say that in the long run the law will make their family's healthcare situation worse, and only 22 percent say it will make it better. And 47 percent believe the law will make the healthcare situation in the U.S. worse, while only 34 percent say it will make it better.
Republicans also are criticized for offering no alternatives while trying to dismantle the measure. “Three years after campaigning on a vow to ‘repeal and replace’ President Barack Obama’s health care law, House Republicans have yet to advance an alternative for the system they have voted more than three dozen times to abolish in whole or in part,” Sunday’s editorial in The Washington Post complained. That ignores, however, H.R. 3400 - Empowering Patients First Act, introduced in 2009 before Republicans campaigned for and won control of the House.
And now there is another, H.R. 2300 – the Empowering Patients First Act of 2013. Its principal sponsor is Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who sponsored H.R. 3400, and he has credentials for health care issues matched by few in the Congress. Rep. Price is also Dr. Price, a physician who actually delivered and understands patient care.
This measure allows patients, families and doctors to make medical decisions, not Washington, DC. That is an excellent place to begin improving health care. What a shame that wasn’t the driving factor behind the ACA.
“You can get folks covered, you can solve the insurance challenges, and you can save hundreds of billions of dollars in this health care system,” said the physician/Congressman, “all without putting Washington or health insurance companies in charge of those decisions that ought to be between patients, and families and doctors.”
How can H.R. 2300 – a bill of only 249 pages, less than a tenth the length of the monstrous Obamacare bill – accomplish this?
Rep. Price describes it as comprehensive legislation under which “every single American has the financial feasibility to purchase the coverage they want, either through tax deductions, or credits, or advanceable credits or refundable advanceable credits so that they can purchase the coverage they want for themselves or their families, not what the government forces them to buy.”
He says further that everyone owns their own coverage, like a 401k plan, so if they change their job or lose their job, they take their coverage with them, and it allows all of those with pre-existing conditions to pool together, giving them the purchasing power of millions so that no one person’s adverse health status will change the cost for anyone else, including that one person.
While H.R. 2300 has the great advantage of being properly focused on patients and physicians, trying to straighten out the voluminous failures of the ACA in one bill is a Herculean feat. Obamacare needs to be repealed in total, and as soon as possible, and then Congress must undertake a sensible approach to correcting the problems of the health care system without turning it over to the government.
Cross-posted from Observations
Cross-posted from Observations
Continuing our head-long slide down the slippery slope of abortion
When people challenge and attempt to liberalize valued traditions, there is usually great concern that doing so is the first step down the "slippery slope," which ultimately leads to bad results. The “slippery slope” is considered a logical fallacy, but in the case of abortion, evidence supports that it is an apt argument.
We started down this slope when abortion was legalized 40 years ago. If it was not the original intention, abortion certainly has become a thinly disguised mechanism for after-the-fact birth control. Pregnancy is not a mystery; we know what causes it. There are numerous ways to prevent pregnancy whenever people decide to forego the one certain way to prevent pregnancy: abstinence.
Birth control devices, while not perfect, are very dependable when used properly. However, somewhere along the way it was recognized that there were a lot of people facing the eventual birth of an unwanted child, and some thought that society was obligated to find a way to relieve these folks of having to bear responsibility for their actions. Abortion became the solution for unwanted pregnancy, under the curious label, "a woman's right to choose."
Each now-pregnant woman and her male partner had the right to choose to abstain from sexual intercourse and chose not to. They had the right to choose to use birth control, and either chose not to, or chose not to use it consistently or correctly, or it just didn't work one time. In the great majority of cases, birth control measures do work when used properly, and that means that in the majority of cases the right to use birth control actually was not chosen.
The "right to choose" is little more than a mechanism for prospective parents to avoid creating a child at an inconvenient time: In 2004 fully 74 percent of women getting an abortion said a child would "dramatically change their life."
Since Roe v Wade imposed legalized abortion on the nation in 1973, 55 million abortions have been performed, and approximately 1.2 million future Americans were aborted in each of the last several years. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and nearly half of those are aborted.
Planned Parenthood is the nation's most prolific provider of abortions, performing about 1-in-4 total U.S. abortions each year, chalking up 334,000 in 2011. It received $542 million from taxpayers that year, about 40 percent of its total revenues.
And since 1973 we have witnessed the slide down that slippery slope. It has been considered acceptable by a significant number of Americans to end a pregnancy anywhere from the morning after to the day when the baby should be born healthy and ready for life.
We have been treated to horrors such as partial birth abortion where the baby is allowed to be born, but not completely, with part of the child still in the birth canal so that a butcher with MD or DO after their name can kill the child before it is "born." This nefarious procedure takes hair-splitting to a new level.
A year ago a giant slide down the slippery slope occurred when two Australian ethicists – Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne, and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne – provided an answer to the question, "When does a fetus become a person?" Their answer: it doesn’t matter. They argued in the online edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics that if abortion of a fetus is allowable, so, too, should be the “termination” of a newborn.
This cold-blooded idea has now infected the United States. That same concept appeared in testimony at a Florida legislative committee that was considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion and is moving on the table and struggling for life. A Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates lobbyist endorsed the right to "post-birth abortion." The lobbyist, Alisa LaPolt Snow, stunned legislators when she said that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion "should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician."
This is nothing more than pre-meditated murder, and is not so different from first responders executing a seriously injured accident victim. And just how far does this "right" to post-birth abortion extend? The first birthday? The difficult years of adolescence? Or perhaps it will extend many years after the botched abortion when under as-yet-unknown elements of the Affordable Care Act bureaucrats may be in the position to determine that it will cost too much to keep an elderly patient alive.
Fortunately, the tide appears to be turning against the grizzly practice of abortion. Last June a Gallop poll showed that 50 percent identified themselves as "pro-life" compared to 41 percent who said they were "pro-choice." And, 51 percent said abortion is morally wrong, compared to 38 percent who said it is morally acceptable. And some state legislatures have passed tighter restrictions on the procedure.
This attitude favoring preserving life and restoring personal responsibility is one small ray of light in America's otherwise darkening culture.
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