Obamacare "not yet a flop"
In Citizen Tom’s blog, he’s been interacting with a person using the monikers “scout” and “novascout”; I pitched in a bit:
Scout wrote:The problem with defunding Obamacare is that the Republicans had nothing to replace it with.
You say the most astounding things. Earlier, you asserted that the Speaker of the House “is not particularly in charge” and implied that this position was merely “a position of respect.” This is a rather badly misfired notion; even leftist Wikipedia (and thus likely to be palatable to you) demonstrates the very substantial control and authority held by the Speaker (not to mention being next in line for the President in the event of loss/disability of Obama and Biden).
Now, you suggest that the Republican plans put forward to address the issue with uninsured citizens is “nothing.” This is, evidently, because Obama and the news media kept up this meme, that there was “nothing” other than Obamacare. The various proposals included pools (essentially, a modest expansion to Medicaid) to address pre-existing conditions as well as free-market expansions. The former isolate that population from the huge majority; the latter provisions provide some of the controls on price that have caused substantial drops in other areas of medical cost.
Instead, we have captive system of Obama-mandated policy design, still state-limited but with a gargantuan juggernaut of Medicaid expansion that has already made the cost curve unrecognizable - and certainly bearing no resemblance to the stunt put forward by the administration and the OMB showing six years of cost but ten years of “revenues-by-shuffling-Medicaid.” By the end of this period, costs were shooting past revenues - but for the overall period, they contrived a “break even” at the expense of Medicaid.
Medicaid was going to be much cheaper, remember? They were going to “contain fraud” (unsuccessful in previous decades of attempts, but what is reality to a waiting agenda?) and anticipated success by simply pulling the money, with the quiet acknowledgment that it would be put back later (the “doc fix”). Instead, we have decades’-worth of Medicaid expansion happening in a single year, blowing all estimates. Obamacare has already failed, and the website is simply a visible channel marker of bureaucratic incompetence that anyone could understand.
But you don’t, do you? You think that Obamacare has not yet been shown to be “a flop.”
I will give you this: If the real purpose of Obamacare was to collapse the system and force the US into a single payer system by dint of having no other choice, then it is succeeding well - as bad as this idea is. We will wind up with a health care system that is like an American leftist’s version of Europe: Even more gigantic waste and bureaucracy than Europeans have learned to deal with. It is bad enough there, of course: In Spain, unlike the US, uninsured persons (they actually can use the phrase “illegal immigrants”) are simply turned away from the emergency rooms to die:
EARLIER this year, an immigrant in Spain was not feeling well and went to hospital with symptoms of tuberculosis (TB). He was refused tests and sent home. Not much later he felt so bad that he rushed to the emergency room where again he was turned away. Then he died.
That does not happen in the United States.
Not yet, at least. But Obamacare hasn’t fully “succeeded” yet.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle