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Townhall…
House Health Care
Repeal More Reality TV than Theater
By Star Parker
Democrats who are calling the House's decisively passed repeal of
Obamacare -- the so-called " Patient Protection and Affordable Health
Care" act -- theater are hallucinating.
Perhaps it was theatrical to include in the name of the repeal act "job
killing", though that is what it is.
But I prefer melodrama to dishonesty. Calling Obamacare -- government
mandates, subsidies, price controls, taxes, and rationed care --
"patient protection" and "affordable" is the height of dishonesty.
The House repeal vote was important because the House is the
legislative body closest to the people, and the people voted
unequivocally last November to repudiate socialized medicine.
It is the beginning of responsible government to start representing
what the American people want and repeal is what Americans voted for.
Although repudiation of Obamacare was the most tangible message of the
2010 elections, there were other important messages.
Most Americans are sick of the socialist direction in which our great
nation has been moving. They are sick of dishonesty and word games
emanating from Washington and politicians. And they are sick of special
interest groups in Washington sucking the oxygen out of all
opportunities for good public policy.
The "Affordable Health Care" Act, besides being bad health care policy,
has all the above characteristics -- duplicitous Washington accounting
games that pretend to save money by spending it subsidizing all the
nation's health care, taking what was already broken in the way we
deliver health care -- most of it already being controlled by
government and third party payers -- and giving us more of it rather
than less, and accomplishing all this by working with the big health
care special interests -- insurance companies and pharmaceutical
companies.
But what makes me most heartsick is to watch our great and free nation
transformed into a second rate welfare state.
Again, even before the "Affordable Health Care" act, our health care
system was already largely taken over by government. Ninety percent of
our health care bills are paid by third parties, and between Medicaid,
SCHIP, and Medicare, well over half of American health care was already
directly controlled by government.
What else do you have to know about what was wrong? Yet, Obamacare's
answer was to give us more of all of it.
I challenge any sitting Democrat who continues to push socialized
medicine on us to move into any of our inner cities and find out first
hand about life on the government plantation.
Twelve percent of the nation's population is black, but 30 percent of
the 60 million on Medicaid are black.
They live under the hallucination perpetuated by Washington that they
have health coverage. Yet 40 percent of our doctors refuse Medicaid
patients because they are not adequately reimbursed. And study after
study shows that the health care they do get is substandard. That
Medicaid patients are, for instance, far more likely to not survive an
operation, compared to someone with private insurance.
Obamacare's answer to this is to expand the income level qualifying for
Medicaid and put another 20 million on it, with the same pretense about
being "covered."
At the same time, as Dennis Smith, former Director of Medicaid at HHS,
points out, the new qualifying structure of Medicaid has the same
characteristics as did welfare that led to wholesale breakdown of black
families.
An individual earning $10,800 qualifies for Medicaid. For two
individuals, that is $21,600. But qualifying income for a family of two
is $20, 107. So efficient incentives are built in to discourage
marriage among low-income earners, a reality in all likelihood already
contributing to their shaky economic status.
The House repeal of Obamacare was not theater. It was reality TV.
The follow up act must be to reform health care with real freedom and
capitalism.
Townhall.com
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