"Notes and Quotes"

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

An Open Letter to President Obama on Healthcare -#6

June 11, 2009

Dear President Obama,


The healthcare plan you propose for the United States mirrors the failed socialist plans from Europe and Canada. There is not a single successful healthcare model anywhere in the world except the United States, and you want to change it. In every case, government run healthcare solutions limit or reduce patient care.


In March 2009 Alexander Benard said, " In Great Britain, 100,000 operations are canceled every year because of the need for rationing. In Sweden, patients must sometimes wait 25 weeks to make an appointment for heart surgery. When patients in these countries finally do obtain care, they often find themselves subjected to technologies that have long since been rendered obsolete. These outcomes are not peculiar to Europe; they occur in every country where the government controls access to health care and regulates everything from the price of drugs to the salaries of doctors. These interventions drive down the supply of high-quality health care while driving up demand, thereby creating painful shortages. They also destroy the incentive to innovate, thus limiting the potential for technological advances that cut costs and save lives."


We keep hearing numbers like 45 million uninsured Americans. That sir, is part nonsense and part half truth. To begin with the 10 - 12 million ILLEGAL aliens must be deducted from the number. Next are those who can afford health insurance and choose not to purchase it. This includes the young healthy 18 - 30 year olds, the wealthy who choose to be self insured and those on the margins. Who are those on the margin? They are the people who have decided that having a cell phone, an ipod, a Nintendo wii, more car or house than they can afford, or their daily Starbucks triple soy latte are more important than providing healthcare for themselves and their families. I have heard numbers in the 10 -15 million range this group of uninsured.


That leaves us with some 18 - 25 million uninsured Americans. Not a small number, but in the 6% to 8% range of all Americans. This is the same range as the unemployed, the uneducated or under educated, or those with disabilities or mental impairment. As a cold heartless Conservative let me be the first to tell you that I do, in fact, have compassion for this group and do feel some sense of responsibility to be sure they get proper medical attention. We do in fact, have a safety net for these people through free clinics, emergency room services, etc. We could do more for this group if we concentrated on serving them instead of trying to solve the problem for people who do not really have a problem.


Many free market common sense solutions have been proposed. All should be tried, on a limited basis, BEFORE we resort to a government run system. Medical malpractice reform is an important first step. Today, doctors are forced to order frequently unnecessary procedures and services to avoid potential lawsuits. I have read that throughout the medical system today we have more clerical and administrative employes than we have registered nurses. No wonder we have a crisis when the paperwork is more important than the patients. I understand that this increases our current healthcare costs by 25% - 30%. That is a huge amount of money.


Here is a private sector solution proposed by Ross Mackenzie:


"Let's assume President Obama and Congress were simply to mandate universal coverage. We have a real-world example of how the private-sector can handle mandated coverage. It's called automobile insurance - and it works exceedingly well.

Most states require motorists to have insurance. State regulators license insurance companies to sell policies, and the companies compete for customers - who shop for the coverages they want at the lowest premiums.

So?

So the federal government could require health insurance for every taxpaying household. The states could license private companies to sell health policies within their borders. At tax time, each taxpayer would attach proofs of state-licensed coverage to his federal tax return, and taxpayers would receive tax credits for the premiums. Call it, in the contemporary cliche, a public-private partnership.

What about the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance now?

Every taxpayer would be required to meet the federal mandate and to buy at least catastrophic health coverage. For those who did not because of poverty, there would be a pool to finance minimal coverage - something similar to the uninsured motorist pools in many states. These pools could be financed - subsidized - in a variety of ways.

Those above stipulated income levels still failing to cover themselves and their families would be fined at sums significantly greater than the premiums for minimal coverage. Thereby they would be forced to comply.

It sounds like a lot of hoo-ha. Why not a straightforward system modeled after the European ones and financed by the taxpayers?

The federal role would be limited to policing compliance with the universal mandate - essentially through the friendly enforcers at the IRS. There would be but the merest added tax burden - perhaps to finance the pool for the uninsured poor. There would be no vast new bureaucracy. Private insurance companies would compete to offer the best coverage for the lowest rates. And the quality of medical care would not be driven down, as it is now, by those wielding federal and third-party hammers.

It's a plan not unlike the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan currently enjoyed by the president and members of Congress. Let's see whether the plan these people force upon us, they force upon themselves as well."

Mr. President, you cannot get the right answer by solving the wrong problem.


Healthcare is expensive. Period. It definitely is not FREE. Transferring the burden of healthcare does not make it better or free. Your healthcare solution certainly is not free. By your own projections, the cost is at least $1 trillion (with a T) over the first ten years. You plan to pay for it with money we don't have. What is worse, we have no realistic way to get that money without crushing all of us with a debt we can not pay back.


You are supposed to be a man of change, so let me propose a change that would be good for the country. Let the American people vote on whether or not we wish to assume that debt. Have a national referendum on the healthcare issue. Put it on the ballot in all fifty states. Have two or three proposals for us to choose from. A free market system, a government run system, and a combination. Give us time to study and understand the pros and cons of each. Let the people decide. We have national elections coming up in November 2010. That should be plenty of time. What do you say?



Respectfully,



Steve Mishket

stevemishket@comcast.net

06/11/09


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"Notes and Quotes" Archive

  • **“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” – Justice Tom C. Clark (1899-1977) US Attorney General, 1945-1949
  • **"If the Constitution no longer matters, then the federal government no longer exists. The same document that restricts the federal government is also the document that created them and gives them their authority. Either it is in effect, or it is not." Gary Henderson
  • **"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in the time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." Dante
  • **“When anyone gets something for nothing, someone else gets nothing for something.” -Anonymous
  • ** "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane" Author unknown
  • ** “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter F. Drucker
  • ** “If getting employer benefits without paying union dues is BAD, why is getting government benefits without paying taxes GOOD?”
  • ** “It's not that ‘the rich’ aren't paying their ‘fair share,’ it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.” - Mark Steyn
  • ** "One of the penalties of not participating in politics is that you will be governed by your inferiors." ~ Plato
  • **"Fathom the hypocrisy of a Government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured...but not everyone must prove they are a citizen."
  • **If it matters, measure it: How do you know how much you’ve slipped or improved in an area unless you measure it? How do you take something “to the next level” if you don’t know what level you’re already at? How do you set concrete goals without a sense of where you are and where you want to go? If the success of your venture depends on it, you need to find a way to measure it.
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  • **Political correctness is an approved form of censorship.  Based on emotional appeals at the expense of reason, political correctness mandates that inconvenient truths or facts be swept under the carpet.  Or else. Free speech, guaranteed to all Americans under the First Amendment, is on its way to becoming moot.  The political, media, and intellectual elites who control the terms of national debate and the rules of civil society have succeeded in censoring opposing views, limiting debate, and demonizing dissent.  Perception is on its way to becoming our new reality. Nancy Morgan
  • **Ronald Reagan once defined an economist as somebody who sees something working in real life and wondering if it will work in theory.
  • **"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens." ~ Ben Stein
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  • ** An ideal Federal government in our country wouldn't take much from you, do much for you, or get in your way . --John Hawkins
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