The Fix Is In
Why Britain’s National Health Service spends so much and does so little
22 March 2010
Americans would do well to ponder a recent admission by a former British minister in the Blair government. On March 2, the Guardian reported that the ex-minister, now Lord Warner, said that while spending on Britain’s National Health Service had increased by 60 percent under the Labour government, its output had decreased by 4 percent. No doubt the spending of a Soviet-style organization like the NHS is more easily measurable than its output, but the former minister’s remark certainly accords with the experiences of many citizens, who see no dramatic improvement in the service as a result of such vastly increased outlays. On the contrary, while the service has taken on 400,000 new staff members—that is to say, one-fifth of all new jobs created in Britain during the period—continuity of medical care has been all but extinguished. Nobody now expects to see the same doctor on successive occasions, in the hospital or anywhere else. more
Congress exempted themselves from the healthcare bill which is supposed to be so wonderful. It was so sweet of them to exempt their staffs too! That's how great the bill is - neither Congress nor the staffs who wrote the legislation want any part of it. Read it here:
ReplyDeletehttp://newledger.com/2010/03/exempted-from-obamacare-senior-staff-who-wrote-the-bill/
Peach
Despite assuring Americans for a year that if we liked our current health insurance we could keep it, on January 29th at the Republican retreat, President Obama finally admitted what many of us had known all along. He admitted that "a few stray cats and dogs got in the bills" and we wouldn't be able to keep our current health insurance if the Democrat's health care plans become law.
ReplyDeleteHe also admitted that although he had said for months that the government wouldn't get between patients and our doctors, that was a pledge he might not be able to keep.
Obama spent months telling us that he doesn't plan to cut Medicare but half of the health reform billwill be funded by cutting Medicare by half a trillion dollars. No one who has a basic grasp of math believes Medicare can withstand that kind of budget cutting without also dramatically cutting services to the elderly. Coming at a time when 75 million baby boomers are due to become Medicare eligible, this will force doctors and federal bureaucrats to make disturbing choices about who receives care and who doesn't. How will those decisions be made? Based on how much money in tax revenue the federal government rakes in per individual?
The president also told Americans repeatedly that he would only raise taxes on the wealthy. But the Democrat's health reform bills are loaded with healthcare bill is loaded with taxes on the middle class and Obama recently admitted he was open to middle class tax hikes.
The president has stated repeatedly that the health reform bill won't increase the deficit, but he's pulling a Bernie Madoff scam. We will be taxed for 10 years but only get health care for 6 years which, of course, makes the budget for the program look less expensive. But once the first 10 years are over, the budget sinks into enormous, unsustainable deficit territory. The legislation also raids $52 billion from Social Security revenues. This is a ponzi scheme. People have been jailed for less.
At the health care summit, Republicans correctly pointed out that Medicare and Social Security are virtually broke and before the government starts another unaffordable entitlement program we should make sure that current obligations are met. The Democrat's plan provides handouts to help pay for health insurance for families with incomes up to $88,000 a year. Of course this will require that many of us pay more in insurance premiums but the president has repeatedly denied that will be the result.
At the health care summit Republicans confronted the president and read directly from the CBO Report which states if the Democrat's health care programs are enacted, individual premiums would go up, not down. The president wasn't able to respond.
So many of the important pronouncements by the president and Congressional Democrats about health care reform have proven to be untrue. Americans know the kind of debt this administration and Congress has placed on generations of Americans is unsustainable. In his book Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote ominously in 1867: "unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism."
Today we saw numerous large corporations go public with their plans to layoff employees and drop health insurance coverage for retirees and employees and pay the $750/year fine instead. They said this was a direct result of the healthcare legislation.
ReplyDeleteWho didn't see this coming? Republicans sure did. They've been warning this legislation was a jobs killer. And where are retirees who have pre-existing conditions going to go? The prohibition against not granting insurance based on pre-existing conditions doesn't kick in until 2014. By then the majority of our electorate will be bankrupt.
Peach