Wasting Time With Alex

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?