In the opening paragraph of his New York Times opinion article today, Why We Need Health Care Reform, President Obama identifies the main reason for reforming the health care system in America.
OUR nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are the voices of the millions upon millions of Americans who quietly struggle every day with a system that often works better for the health-insurance companies than it does for them. [emphasis added]
There’s your reason for reform — to stop health insurance companies from receiving more benefit than you.
- Your benefit: Health issues addressed and resolved, improving the quality of life for you and your loved ones. In some cases, saving your lie.
- Insurance companies’ benefit: Money.
Surely you can see how they’re getting more out of the deal than you.
This modus operandi, of course, has become the hallmark of the Obama administration: demonize corporate America, convince the American people they’re being raped by the wealthy, and then use the manufactured outrage as a platform to pass sweeping legislation that invariably amounts to a Big-Government takeover of the operation.
Nothing new about this — we’ve seen it for six moths. Obama has already accomplished it to various degrees with the banking system, mortgage companies, car companies, AIG insurance. It should be more disturbing than it is, but sadly, it’s sort of getting to be old hat. It’s just a matter of time before the same tactic is applied to a corporate entity near you: Big-Drug, Big-Oil, Big-Airlines, Big-Fast food, Big-Casino, Big-Hotel, Big-WalMart – name an industry and you can be sure it’s on Obama’s hit-list. In good-old-fashioned, tried-and-true Chicago-style politics, the man is on a mission to make certain that the Federal Government gets a piece of the action, no matter where that action might be. For the moment, the action is in health care. And the takeover is being done in the name of the presumed hundreds of millions of oppressed Americans everywhere. He’s doing it in your name.
Notice in Obama’s NY Times piece that in his four “four main ways the reform we’re proposing will provide more stability and security to every American,” three of them directly concern themselves with cutting the profits of insurance companies:
First, if you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of high-quality, affordable coverage for yourself and your family — coverage that will stay with you whether you move, change your job or lose your job.
Second, reform will finally bring skyrocketing health care costs under control, which will mean real savings for families, businesses and our government. We’ll cut hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies that do nothing to improve care and everything to improve their profits.
Third, by making Medicare more efficient, we’ll be able to ensure that more tax dollars go directly to caring for seniors instead of enriching insurance companies. This will not only help provide today’s seniors with the benefits they’ve been promised; it will also ensure the long-term health of Medicare for tomorrow’s seniors. And our reforms will also reduce the amount our seniors pay for their prescription drugs.
Lastly, reform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. A 2007 national survey actually shows that insurance companies discriminated against more than 12 million Americans in the previous three years because they had a pre-existing illness or condition. The companies either refused to cover the person, refused to cover a specific illness or condition or charged a higher premium.
Bad, bad insurance companies. What good have they ever done for you? — no, I mean besides providing health insurance to you, your family, and millions of Americans for decades. Have you ever had a condition, a surgery or hospital stay that, without insurance, you could not have otherwise dealt with? Of course not, no one has.
Bad, nasty insurance companies.
And so the screws on insurers are to be tightened. Watch the costs rise with every restriction, and your likelihood of holding on to good coverage diminish:
Our reform will prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of your medical history. Nor will they be allowed to drop your coverage if you get sick. They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive…
Most important, we will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. This is what reform is about.
I’m not suggesting health insurance companies — or any insurance providers, for that matter — should be free from regulations and consumer protections. But clearly, Obama’s entire argument for reforming the American health care system is founded on the premise that Big-Insurance exists to screw the people. The corporate rape-of-the-masses must end; otherwise, as Obama puts it so pithily, ”insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against sick people.”
Obama’s demonizing of health insurers wrongly assumes one thing — that insurance companies won’t just say “the hell with it” and get out of the business. The math is simple — Obama expects insurers to cover more procedures and conditions, insure more people, cut premiums, rely on more government reimbursements (ha!), and settle for substantially less bottom-line profit. In short, Obama expects insurers to provide health care to the masses as a service to mankind. That’s known as altruism, and except for non-profit outreaches, no company ever sets itself up to selflessly serve humanity. They do it to earn a living and provide jobs for others, so they can make even more profits.
Damn every last one of them — they do it to make money.
So consider: what happens when an insurance company’s costs of providing insurance (listen, mandatory coverage of “routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies” will not come cheap, people) exceeds its ability to stay profitable — or even solvent? Will it shut down, or continue to operate on an austerity budget, faithfully serving the people because — as we all know by now — health care is the “right” of every human? What happens when the number of health insurers dwindles and substantive health care insurance gets hard to come by? Where will millions of people go when their choices become increasingly limited because insurance companies are closing their doors and budget-conscious employers are switching over to a government-funded public option, and…
Ah, yes. The government-funded public option. The very embodiment of national bankruptcy. One thing you should keep in mind about that — an option is no longer an option when there are no other options left out there. And if you have employer-paid health care coverage, ask yourself this — if you were your employer, and the government provided a less expensive health care option that would save you substantial money, wouldn’t you put all your employees on it? How does Obama’s claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” fit into that scenario? You don’t have a say in the plan your employer provides, do you?
More on the heralded “public option” in a later post.
One last thought – why, exactly, does the President of the United States have to write an article in the NY Times selling his health care reform to the American people, if it’s so great?
– RB Stratford
Related Posts:
Michelle Malkin: Town hall time for Obama and ‘the mob’
Rolling out the welcome mat for Obama in Colorado and Montana
Obamacare/OFA stage props in Houston: “One is a Che Guevara fan and the other lies about being a doctor.”
Hot Air: Facing health-care oblivion, the left finally wonders: “Who really is Barack Obama?”
Dem Senator: Public option is dead
Video: Michelle on conservative grassroots activism at the Right Online conference
Video: Ed Morrissey on ObamaCare at the Right Online conference
This isn’t about politics?
Rasmussen: 54% would prefer no bill to current ObamaCare proposals
MSNBC host: Hey, wouldn’t Jesus want us to have universal health care?
Video: Specter shocked, shocked to find individual mandate in ObamaCare
Dem Senator: Public option is dead; Update: Sebelius video added
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To their eternal dismay, the War in Iraq will be remembered as a success — if not sooner, then later. It will be viewed as the critical step in the founding of a strong democracy in the most volatile area of the world, the Middle East. Some 27 million Iraqis and Kuwaitis were liberated. Sadaam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons to kill masses of people (yes, those would be weapons of mass destruction) was terminated. Mass graves receive no more dead Iraqis. Torture chambers, in existence for the pleasure of Hussein’s maniacal sons, are closed. The potential use of Iraq by terrorists as a training ground has been greatly diminished. And Islamist extremists now have their work cut out for them to make Baghdad the capitol of their future empire, as their prophecies demand.
