Wasting Time With Alex
Tort Reform
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The lowdown on what we get from healthcare reform
As Dirty Harry and the rest of the crime syndicate take the whole “healthcare reform” issue back behind closed doors in an effort to ram it through as soon as possible – those pesky 2010 elections and an angry populace they are hoping has a short memory or can be bought off with other goodies, you know – there are a couple of things you can be certain about.
First off, we should stop pretending this “healthcare reform” was about cutting costs. Unless you are one of the people that chose to be uninsured, despite the many options out there to help you get insurance, and are lucky enough to end up getting it “for free” from Uncle Sam, you are going to end up paying a lot more. If you are one of those lucky enough to own what they call a “Cadillac plan” – that means that you have an employer that pays a huge chunk of the bill, and hence pays you a lot less money to cover that cost, pay for the bulk of the cost plan’s yourself, or have something in between so that you can have a good healthcare plan – you are now going to get a 40% tax hit against that.
All those union people with the real sweet plans – including those working for the various states where the cost is likely to just be passed off to the tax payers again (talk about your double whammy!) – most, if not all, of us in the middle class, and quite a few seniors on some nice retirement plans, are going to see our premiums go up, and do so drastically. In many, if not most, cases you will also see employers, but doubly so when they are going to get whacked hard, simply opt to drop their plans and pay the 8% tax. You can then go join the government option or pay for your own plan at 2 to 10 times your current cost: that is if you can now get private coverage. That government option sure becomes unavoidable, huh? But of course we were told this was not the plan. Oh yeah, it looks like the politicians – but especially congress – which has a “Ferrari Plan” is still exempt from anything in this bill. Seriously, can we dispense with the “fix the out of control cost” lie yet?
As I already pointed out: unless you were already on the dole, your costs are going up. Government needs to, best case scenario, BTW, come up with anywhere from $500 billion to something over $1 trillion dollars in revenue to offset most of the cost and bring the deficit that exists between the real cost and the number they will tell you it will cost, to under $1 trillion. And based on past performance, my guess is that this massive theft won’t even cover a fraction of the real cost, and will need to be much higher. No need to explain how we will end up paying a lot more and getting a lot less, be it quality or quantity, than we have now either. Yay, us tax payers!
And then there are those other “cost savings” too. Talk is that they plan to get some $500 billion in savings from Medicare. If you buy their line it will be practically all from reductions in the system’s inefficiency and waste. As many much wiser people than me have asked when they heard this: why can’t we get those savings right freaking now? The ugly truth is that there will be no such savings. Period. Any inefficiency in the system will only likely grow bigger as the scope of how much government involvement in healthcare increases. The same applies to the waste. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying.
If those efficiencies and that waste could be addressed it should have already been fixed. But it never has been, and that’s not an accident. These inefficiencies and the waste are byproducts of government controlled systems. It’s like the stink you get when eggs rot: unavoidable. So that means that the only way that government will get that $500 billion in savings from Medicare, is to cut legitimate services. Guess who’s going to be banged, and banged hard, when that happens? If they want to keep the same level of coverage, they are now going to have to pay out of pocket for it. That’s if they can get alternative or supplemental coverage. Bet you they certainly will not feel that their healthcare has been fixed or that their costs have gone down.
So we are not getting any kind of cost savings. We are guaranteed to see a lot more government price fixing and control of access to care. The out of control tort system remains untouched. Quality of care and availability of care are going to both go down. You can’t add a couple of dozen new million people thinking they are getting “free healthcare” without any increase in the number of qualified healthcare professionals & facilities to the system and expect availability and quality to not drastically and negatively be impacted. If we are lucky, I have so far only seen that congress will write the law to prevent insurance providers from excluding people for preexisting conditions, and while they are trying hard to force everyone to buy healthcare I simply do not see that working out well. In the end that means we all will see a big bump in our premiums to cover the cost of that as well.
So if you do the down & dirty analysis, healthcare will cost all us shlobs more, result in a reduction of quality and availability for all but the elite, and really not fix either the cost issue either. What is being done really doesn’t do anything but funnel the trillions we spend on healthcare each year through congress, while at the same time moving the decision making capability and mechanism into congress’ hands. Healthcare reform indeed. After you find all that out, does what we have right now seem that bad?
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Sunday, August 23, 2009
Here is what happens when government helps you.. Part Deux
I am worried that everyone here, including myself got way too focused on the first part dealing with the credit card issue, in my post below, and either ignored or missed the real big point in my post: that the collectivists screwed our economy up, even worse than usual, policy wise, and that it is going to get worse if they keep at it.
I used the example of how they rammed through the stimulus patronage bill, but everyone of their big policy pushed through was disastrous for the economy. Let me enumerate them for you. I hope for the day that we do not need to go into the details and the consequences of the left’s response to the economic crisis of their own making either, but the truth, facts, and logic, never seem to be things the left cares for, so I guess I need to quantify that again. Despite their best efforts, the truth has come out. Those that want to know the facts know that we are where we are today because of ideological policy. It was ideology that drove these politicians to legislate the conditions that resulted in the economic collapse we experienced. Lending institutions were forced by law into giving money to seriously unqualified people. Then when this still was not working the same politicians legislated a hokey and completely opaque trading scheme for those securities based on toxic assets, and used Freddie and Fannie to showcase government backing of these dangerous schemes and legitimize them. Finally they decided to bring down the house of cards, right before an election – so they could score on the political perception, one I never quite understood, that democrats are better for the economy – to win the presidency and big gains. Now their solution to an economic slump that I am certain they did not predict or expect to be this big, is for them to meddle even more but keep the underlying fundamental and illogical problem in place. That’s going to work well.
That above brings us to the government takeover of the banking and lending industry, and the consequences of that. While they demonized the TARP program as corporate bailouts with tax payer money, these leftists not only saw the $700 billion that the Bush people put up, but raised it to over $3 trillion, and are even floating the idea government might have to buy out the entire system fro some $29 trillion. Many of those institutions that lined up to drink at the trough of public cash, now regret the deal, but the real and frightening danger is this concept that government should micromanage the private sector and directly work against market influences collectivists don’t like or approve of. The same ideologues in control of government that created the problem in the first place, I should add. As I already said: this is going to work out well.
I won’t waste too much time on the government take over of two out of three American car manufacturing companies. There is no way of defending the tax payer funded takeover of these companies. Even more disgraceful is how that tax payer money was not used to pay off those people that put their own money on the line as investments in GM or Chrysler, but to prop up unions as majority stake holders. Yes, the same unions that are the fundamental underlying problem which made these companies unable to compete and cranked out the low quality wares that turned people off. Talk about your mob style pay-offs. And now the politicians in DC can tell both Chrysler and GM to make cars nobody really wants too. I am sure that once other companies, but especially Ford, all start running circles around these two, that the politicians will use the power of government to rig the system in favor of their new holdings. At the tax payer’s expense, of course. What do you think the “Cash for Clunkers” program was all about anyway? How well has that worked?
We also got graced by the watermelons – the collectivists masquerading as environmentalists – with the “Cap & Tax” bill: the largest and most massive single tax increase passed ever by our politicians. The average American family of four will now get to pay anywhere from $1000 to $4000, depending at whom is talking and how they come up with their umbers, in extra costs and fees tied to their energy use every year. Since they are “costs and fees” I guess we could all tongue in cheek try to defend Obama’s blatant lie that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K. Don’t worry this going back on his promises, especially about taxes and who will pay them, is going to happen so often we will soon be numb to it. It is all going to work out well!
Every one of these moves was intended to bring in some huge section of the private sector, and more importantly the money in it, under control of the federal government. But no plan was as ambitious, or deceptive, as the healthcare insurance
The only place that these leftists have felt spending needs to be cut is in defense. I am sure that it will be these same people telling us the next time that we need to send our troops into harms way that we should not because they lack equipment. Kind of like when we had to go deal with Iraq and they tried to blame Bush for the defense cuts of the Clinton years. Defense jobs I guess are the types of jobs collectivists think are bad, I guess. How long before the democrats undo the sacrifices of the last 7 years and guarantee us a future war in the ME that will cost us 10 times as much as what we already paid? That’s coming. That’s coming, and I can’t wait to see how well it works for us.
There are many more examples of this. It has not been more than what, 9 months, since they have taken over, and foreign and economic policy decisions have all been disastrous. While the rest of the world looks to be moving out of the recession, we are going deeper into it. Don’t believe the constant MSM propaganda saying otherwise. These people are covering for the incompetent ideologues in DC because they have a vested interest. About the only thing that the Obama people have gotten right is the Bush GWoT policies the left used – notice I say used to – get totally crazy about. Funny that huh? I think Obama’s actions are working well to vindicate Bush.
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Friday, September 26, 2008
How our economy lost it’s groove..
The sad fact is that people saw this coming and republicans tried to correct it only to be blocked by democrats whom used PC knock down tactics to intimidate and shut up anyone that would not let their scheme keep makign them big cash! Remember that these are the same people blocking our change in energy policy, reform of Soical Security, Medicare, and all those other colelctivist boondoggles. This crisis is just the first one. Their constant attempts to block any and all proposals to dirll at home for natural gas & oil, build more nukes, and use our coal are going to basically cripple this nation in a decade or so. And I think that is exactly the plan because then government can take everything over. By then we will likely get taken over by the people that have told us to either submit to Allah or die and these democrats will welcome it.
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
A move in the right direction
I am glad to see that an evil criminal has paid for his horrible crime. One thing not covered here is that the Mexican government had gone to the ICC to ask it to stop the state of Texas from enforcing its own laws. The fact Texas stuck to its guns and followed the will of its people is a serious blow to the ICC which was basically trying to override Texas, US, and Constitutional law with its mamby-pamby international law. With one blow Texas punished an evil man and dealt a serious blow to the credibility of what I am certain is a dastardly anti-US and dangerous organization: the ICC. The internationalists lose big. I wish the idiot on the SCOTUS that are always looking out for international rulings to form their opinions get the message too.
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