So much for lowering health care costs. $1.39 trillion for Obamacare, Lowered costs, by the way, is a meaningless political catch phrase. Which costs, total expenditures, or percent of GDP, or the unit costs of a hospital day, or insurance premiums, which does it mean?
Well here is what Obamacare costs. It is no surprise to those who read at least the Obmacare exec summary, and study the analytic reports that are done by many sources.
The die hard new Democrats just don't get it---the real reform is not Government versus insurance, it is bottom up restructure to restore direct patient-doctor control of treatment and spending. You would think liberals would love it, but they like more government, more control, and more spending.
Now the report says: CBO’s initial scoring of Obamacare analyzed its effects from 2010 to 2019, including only six years of full implementation, since main spending provisions do not go into effect until 2014. The new document reports on 2012 to 2021, including an additional two years of full implementation. This still fails to show the true 10-year cost of the law, but gets a little closer. Over eight years, the gross cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions jumps from $938 billion to $1.39 trillion, which includes $677 billion to create a new health entitlement offering generous subsidies to the middle class to purchase health insurance.
As for preference for Government controling medical care, we already have the government do that. Every time medicare cuts out a service, the insurance companies follow. So, for example, Hospice is now down to only the last few days of life, Autism is not acceptable to treat with psychological treatments, to name a few of the government imposed limits. Each copied by the insurance companies. And many procedures are now subject to review by contract agenies---insurance companies.
The reality is that bureacratic insurance and government are interlocked. Medicare and medicaid are run by the insurance companies for the government.
As for as government setting standards, the government body that does the research on quality, AHRQ reported University based studies which showed practice unformly following standards got more deaths and worse benefits than practice where physicians used judgement. So much for government committee deciding.
But, be my guest my die hard policital party and leftist friends. I will discuss with my doctors and get my second opinion from Mayo, and will forgo surgery only if they advise me, and when you ask your federal commission and they deny your surgery, you have my sympathy.
There's two things that're
There's two things that're wrong with this misleading factuality, about the "rise" in health care costs.
Namely, the basis of the accounting for those health care costs and, secondly, whether those are net increases in debt.
As to the second matter, it is quite misleading to suggest that there is any net debt change, at the federal level. The program imposes such taxes as are necessary to pay for its costs, and various regimes as are also necessary to contain future costs. That's a relatively simple matter to examine and verify, factually,
So, "increased" costs are very much of a fiction, in that sense, because they omit increased revenues, obfuscating the offsetting budgetary balance also in the law.
As for the accounting basis, we are talking about the health of the AMERICAN PEOPLE, generally, abstractly, in the first place, as to how we the people, in the aggregate, might be better or worse off, if care providers were assured that a person coming to them for care could pay them for the care they provided. The mechanism for that, in America's woefully organized (disorganized) health care markets, is, sadly, to my thinking, for-profit insurance companies. The Affordable Care Act (aka misleadingly named "Obamacare") addresses the primary problem -- that millions of Americans do not have access to affordable health care, because of the market structure of insurance and of foolish risk taking by individuals.
Despite Ron Paul's highly wrongful suggestion that the Good Samaritan principle is no proper American idea, I believe in it. I will not argue with anyone who says, as Paul suggests, that we pass by the injured man in a ditch, just leaving him there, injured and in need. That's just wrong, possibly evil, but mainly just shameful selfishness. We owe duties to one another, because, frankly, we are born of one another, learn and live by one another, even commanded to be loving one another.
So, as the drinker might say, "Here's to your health!"
The truth implicit, here, in the toast, the very fact implicit in national health care policy, is the impact upon others, when some, a very many others, are not healthy. What it means, when care is not affordably available, is just this -- America is less healthy, America herself is sicker, weaker than She ought to be -- and only because of money, monied interests.
So, in a sense, those who oppose "Obamacare" are unpatriotic, unAmerican.
But, this is mere prefatory, rhetorical digression, from the main claim, about the basis and biases of accounting. Health happens. It will be, as it is. Accounting's only function is basically allocative, to tell us who will be paying some set of costs -- and thus, accounting is morally neutral; it answers no questions of moral interest to the American people.
(And, it also has no definitive role in public debates, even in questions of the "national" debt! It is, in short, always a red herring, because it only tells us what the balances are, in various accounts, without having any moral standard for informing us as to which of those various alternative baolances, as a set, we should prefer.)
Health. Yours, mine, ours. Yes, it costs to care for you and me, for us. We're in that boat together, even if you want to jump ship, swim for yourself, or else, throw me out in the waters deep and shark infested, on the idea of saving yourself. Ayn Rand to the contrary, in fiction more fanciful than fairy tales, we are us, not isolated and unrelated atoms of being. We are, in short, a people, always and ever a part, not apart, from one another.
Anon2: Before we can evaluate
Anon2: Before we can evaluate the accuracy of your remarks, please provide a link to the CBO report you reference
Just because Anon2 didn't
Just because Anon2 didn't provide a link, does not mean that one cannot evaluate his remarks. But here you go anyway..
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/02/23/new-cbo-report-proves-we-cannot-afford-obamacare/ [8]
Click on the first link in the article.
Name a government service you
Name a government service you think is performed well AT REASONABLE COST:
Post office? Amtrak? Defense? The DMV? How are the schools doin' these days. Do people really know what they're wishing for?
As for the misleading
As for the misleading introduction, of what is a reasonable cost, for some public service, the same could be asked of any business product or service.
No price is ever really reasonable.
Is the price of cable (or satellite) tv reasonable? Not really, but it is justifiable, unjustifiable, depending on who's interests you wish to defend, who's money you are talking about.
Let me make this argument as perfectly transparent as I can. Reason has to do with principles, but questions about money are, most often, maybe always, unprincipled, subverting reason,l seducing morals.
The principle -- behind the Constitution's mention of post roads -- the idea that a nation that could reliably communicate between places distant -- is certain. Whether we realize that principle's ideal, in the face of various technologies, and cost allocative schemes, is a question of the wisdom of present policies, but not of the principle itself.
That is, my friends, if you think self government ends in just governing yourself, as if you knew everything and could handle every thing, just fine, all by yourself, well, I think your are delusional, living most arrogantly, in a fantasy, yet untouched by the blights of reality.