Obamacare On The Rocks
By Mike Huckabee
Dec 29 2014
It’s taken six years, but one of Obamacare’s most hyperactive cheerleaders, The New York Times, has finally realized that adding millions of new patients to Medicaid while slashing payments to doctors might have negative consequences:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/us/obamacar....html?_r=0
As the article states, “The Affordable Care Act provided a big increase in Medicaid payments for primary care in 2013 and 2014. But the increase expires on Thursday — just weeks after the Obama administration told the Supreme Court that doctors and other providers had no legal right to challenge the adequacy of payments they received from Medicaid.” You read correctly: "no legal right." In other words, doctors can like it or lump it. It’s estimated that the average cut in reimbursements will be 43 percent, even as many doctors are already losing money on Medicaid patients and either turning them away or quitting their practices. I assume President Obama thinks doctors should work 24/7 purely out of a sense of duty. I have to assume he thinks that because he’s on a three-week vacation in Honolulu and couldn’t comment.
Not to toss out “I told you so’s,” but when the liberal media were excoriating Republican governors as fools for rejecting Obamacare and turning down all that federal sugar, many of us pointed out that it was the classic sales tactic used by opium pushers worldwide: lots of free OPM (Other People’s Money) up front to get the suckers hooked; then the federal stash would be cut off, leaving the states with millions of citizens dependent on government-paid health care and the state scrambling to supply it.
Naturally, the left has a solution to Obamacare’s failures, one that many believe was the real point of the ACA from the beginning, and that’s to argue that it just doesn’t go far enough. What we really need is Canadian and British-style single payer health care. A full government takeover of health care has been the left’s goal for decades. (Thanks to the miracle of videotape, Obama himself is on record supporting that ultimate end.) It involves everything they dream about: massive government control over the most personal aspects of people’s lives, universal dependency on big government, and the equal distribution of misery.
Unfortunately for them, the reality of single payer, government-run health care is suddenly raining down all around us, and it makes Obamacare look as efficient and well-organized as Disney World. I recently pointed out that after several years of attempts to create the first state-run single payer system in the United States, Vermont threw in the towel. By the most optimistic estimates, the cost would suck up over two-thirds of the state’s entire annual revenues.
Smaller-scale efforts are also running aground on the rocks of reality. In Iowa, the start-up health insurance cooperative CoOportunity Health has been taken over by state regulators after the costs of providing care proved higher than expected and federal funding lower than expected.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2.../20856151/
Supporters say this isn’t indicative of any problems for other health cooperatives. It’s just CoOportunity Health’s bad luck that “federal officials ‘had to prioritize’ co-ops' requests for assistance, because their requests totaled more than the available money.” That’s certainly reassuring, considering the rest are also dependent on future funding from a federal government that’s now over $18 trillion in debt and digging deeper in the hole all the time.
I can hear the lamentations of the “progressives” now: “Why can’t we make single payer government-paid health care work here, the way it does in the UK?!” Well, we could, but I don’t think you’d like the results:
http://home.bt.com/news/uk-news/3000-ops-canc...3951944358
That article reveals how Britain’s National Health Service canceled 3,000 scheduled operations in the first two weeks of December alone because demand for care is outstripping the budget. It talks of hospitals being overwhelmed, difficulties in seeing a GP, care being taken away from seniors and waiting lists for health care at a six-year high. Man, “free” health care seems to come at a high cost. When government takes over, it kills competition and the free market, which we need to drive advances and efficiency. More people demand more services, which causes the expense to skyrocket. And since the government can’t magically create doctors who’ll work for minimum wage, the result is always shortages, rationing and waiting lists. This is what happens when "requests total more than the available money."
This is actually what many on the left dream of bringing to America. Just before Obamacare was passed, a Gallup poll found that 87 percent of Americans who had private insurance plans were satisfied with them, and nearly two-thirds were satisfied with the costs. We could have devised a plan to help the relatively small number who couldn’t obtain or afford health care, but the left seized its brief moment of unstoppable power --- the White House and both houses of Congress controlled by liberal Democrats --- to push through a gargantuan, Constitution-shredding government program that messed up what worked without solving what didn’t because…well, it’s just what they do. Their ill-fated attempt to do it in the 1990s was just a trial run. Like a bad carpenter who thinks every problem can be fixed by pounding it with a hammer, “progressives” think every problem requires an expensive, overbearing government program from which no one, not even future generations who never had a say, can opt out. They do this not to solve the problem, just to “manage” it. After all, if it ever got solved, the program would have to go away instead of steadily increasing its power, budget and bureaucratic heft. And as Ronald Reagan loved to point out, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.
Unless you’re British and need your appendix removed. That’s also likely to be around for a long, long time to come.
Please leave me a comment below. I read them!
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/2014/12/obamacare-on-the-rocks
By Mike Huckabee
Dec 29 2014
It’s taken six years, but one of Obamacare’s most hyperactive cheerleaders, The New York Times, has finally realized that adding millions of new patients to Medicaid while slashing payments to doctors might have negative consequences:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/us/obamacar....html?_r=0
As the article states, “The Affordable Care Act provided a big increase in Medicaid payments for primary care in 2013 and 2014. But the increase expires on Thursday — just weeks after the Obama administration told the Supreme Court that doctors and other providers had no legal right to challenge the adequacy of payments they received from Medicaid.” You read correctly: "no legal right." In other words, doctors can like it or lump it. It’s estimated that the average cut in reimbursements will be 43 percent, even as many doctors are already losing money on Medicaid patients and either turning them away or quitting their practices. I assume President Obama thinks doctors should work 24/7 purely out of a sense of duty. I have to assume he thinks that because he’s on a three-week vacation in Honolulu and couldn’t comment.
Not to toss out “I told you so’s,” but when the liberal media were excoriating Republican governors as fools for rejecting Obamacare and turning down all that federal sugar, many of us pointed out that it was the classic sales tactic used by opium pushers worldwide: lots of free OPM (Other People’s Money) up front to get the suckers hooked; then the federal stash would be cut off, leaving the states with millions of citizens dependent on government-paid health care and the state scrambling to supply it.
Naturally, the left has a solution to Obamacare’s failures, one that many believe was the real point of the ACA from the beginning, and that’s to argue that it just doesn’t go far enough. What we really need is Canadian and British-style single payer health care. A full government takeover of health care has been the left’s goal for decades. (Thanks to the miracle of videotape, Obama himself is on record supporting that ultimate end.) It involves everything they dream about: massive government control over the most personal aspects of people’s lives, universal dependency on big government, and the equal distribution of misery.
Unfortunately for them, the reality of single payer, government-run health care is suddenly raining down all around us, and it makes Obamacare look as efficient and well-organized as Disney World. I recently pointed out that after several years of attempts to create the first state-run single payer system in the United States, Vermont threw in the towel. By the most optimistic estimates, the cost would suck up over two-thirds of the state’s entire annual revenues.
Smaller-scale efforts are also running aground on the rocks of reality. In Iowa, the start-up health insurance cooperative CoOportunity Health has been taken over by state regulators after the costs of providing care proved higher than expected and federal funding lower than expected.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2.../20856151/
Supporters say this isn’t indicative of any problems for other health cooperatives. It’s just CoOportunity Health’s bad luck that “federal officials ‘had to prioritize’ co-ops' requests for assistance, because their requests totaled more than the available money.” That’s certainly reassuring, considering the rest are also dependent on future funding from a federal government that’s now over $18 trillion in debt and digging deeper in the hole all the time.
I can hear the lamentations of the “progressives” now: “Why can’t we make single payer government-paid health care work here, the way it does in the UK?!” Well, we could, but I don’t think you’d like the results:
http://home.bt.com/news/uk-news/3000-ops-canc...3951944358
That article reveals how Britain’s National Health Service canceled 3,000 scheduled operations in the first two weeks of December alone because demand for care is outstripping the budget. It talks of hospitals being overwhelmed, difficulties in seeing a GP, care being taken away from seniors and waiting lists for health care at a six-year high. Man, “free” health care seems to come at a high cost. When government takes over, it kills competition and the free market, which we need to drive advances and efficiency. More people demand more services, which causes the expense to skyrocket. And since the government can’t magically create doctors who’ll work for minimum wage, the result is always shortages, rationing and waiting lists. This is what happens when "requests total more than the available money."
This is actually what many on the left dream of bringing to America. Just before Obamacare was passed, a Gallup poll found that 87 percent of Americans who had private insurance plans were satisfied with them, and nearly two-thirds were satisfied with the costs. We could have devised a plan to help the relatively small number who couldn’t obtain or afford health care, but the left seized its brief moment of unstoppable power --- the White House and both houses of Congress controlled by liberal Democrats --- to push through a gargantuan, Constitution-shredding government program that messed up what worked without solving what didn’t because…well, it’s just what they do. Their ill-fated attempt to do it in the 1990s was just a trial run. Like a bad carpenter who thinks every problem can be fixed by pounding it with a hammer, “progressives” think every problem requires an expensive, overbearing government program from which no one, not even future generations who never had a say, can opt out. They do this not to solve the problem, just to “manage” it. After all, if it ever got solved, the program would have to go away instead of steadily increasing its power, budget and bureaucratic heft. And as Ronald Reagan loved to point out, there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.
Unless you’re British and need your appendix removed. That’s also likely to be around for a long, long time to come.
Please leave me a comment below. I read them!
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/2014/12/obamacare-on-the-rocks
