Why I am Against Obama Care ~ by Cato

1. No credibility. Obama demagogues and lies about the profiteering of the evil insurance companies: insurance makes up only 4 % of health care costs, and they only make 2-6 % profits. How are they be making obscene profits? You excoriate the insurance companies for denying services, but your bill itself denies services: “$202.3 billion in cuts to seniors Medicare health plans including massive cuts targeting the extra benefits and reduced cost sharing that seniors receive through Medicare Advantage; $156.6 billion in cuts to inpatient and outpatient hospital services, inpatient rehab facilities, long-term care hospitals.” And this demonization of the insurance industry is only one of the lies of ObamaCare’s proponents – not to mention Obama’s broken promises ranging from his campaign financing to transparency in government to ... well, you name it. Would you in your personal life sign any kind of contract with someone who acts this way?

2. Doesn’t work. Similar plans have failed or are in serious trouble in Hawaii, Massachusets (where the health plan is bankrupting the state), Maine, and Arizona (where “Mayo Clinic loses a substantial amount of money every year due to the reimbursement schedule under Medicare.”). Show me any place on earth where a similar system has worked. Then tell me how your system will be like those instead of like the Canadian or English health care system – or more to the point, like the insolvent Social Security or Medicare programs.

3. The American people by a large margin do not want it. But you are going to do it anyway. You want to force your vision on us. This is tyranny or very close to it. Better freedom than the fleshpots of Egypt.

4. Need is doubtful. How is it that my friend, a single mother on welfare with four kids and no other visible income can get two knees replaced and be in and out of the hospital for a variety of severe ailments – how is the system failing her? Her bills are already being paid, but how?

Here’s a clue. An acquaintance of mine wanted to get a tetanus shot at the hospital. It would have cost $500. She went to the Student Health Center instead and got it for virtually nothing. My seven minute face time with a dermatologist was billed at $552, of which I paid $18. My health insurance paid the rest.

Now the evil insurance companies aren’t going to get the money, since they are the ones paying. The doctor is not pocketing four grand an hour, nor can malpractice insurance, office space, salaries and equipment cost that much. My guess? That money is going to pay for two artificial knees in a woman who has no health insurance and for whom Medicaid does not cover the full cost. Are there people that fall between the cracks? You betcha. But do these outliers require the realignment of one-sixth the economy just to take care of them? I doubt it. I rather suspect the rationale for this monstrosity is “fairness”; might this be the same fairness Obama endorsed by raising the capital gains tax, even though it would mean a decrease in revenue!

5. Numbers do not add up. How can you add 30 million people to the rolls – well, it’s closer to 15 million, but let’s use your number – and not increase expenses? How will you service them when the New England Journal of Medicine reports that up to 30 percent of doctors will quit under your new system? Well, why would they do that? Here’s one reason: “ Wading deep into documents available from CBO and the House and Senate Budget Committees reveals that the claim that Obamacare, in the form of the Senate health bill Democrats are now trying to deem through the House, would reduce the deficit is based on the assumption of an immediate 21% cut in payments to doctors and hospitals under Medicare.”

We will pay for ten years and only have healthcare the last 6 years. What is going to happen in the second ten years? Will we be without healthcare for the first four years of this second decade? No one has explained this.

By the way, do you really believe that the money collected in the first four years will be off-limits and spent only for healthcare? Or will it be raided as was Social Security?

What is your plan when the money runs out? You have done nothing to address, much less reduce, the costs. Your so-called cost savings come either from a shell game – taking money from Medicare to pay for other care; or simply refusing to pay – reducing the payments to providers.

6. Failure to look ahead – Most of these objections are integral to the Democrat’s failure to consider the consequences. Note how many questions remain unanswered. Here are some more. Do you really think that trading the current bureaucracy for another – and the replacement a federal government bureaucracy to boot! – will make for more leniency when making denial-of-services decisions? Is government really more charitable or accountable than private industry? Have you even addressed this question?

Such denial-of-service decisions are already playing out. Why are providers (first doctors, now Walgreens) now refusing to take Medicare and Medicaid business? Because it is bad business. If it is bad business for them, it will be bad business for the government, and the American people as owners, once they become the provider. Why are states suing the government and resisting federal healthcare? Because the federal plan is, or promises to be, very bad business for them. If it’s bad business for them, it’s will be bad for us, their citizens. There is no denial-of-service decision like that made because a doctor cannot be found. How does the government plan to address this? We do not know.

7. The Alternative – yes, dear reader, I urge you to read the details of this plan, rather than react to its author or her rhetoric.

My Healthcare Plan
by Ann Coulter (more by this author)
Posted 03/17/2010 ET
Updated 03/17/2010 ET

Liberals keep complaining that Republicans don't have a plan for reforming health care in America. I have a plan!

It's a one-page bill creating a free market in health insurance. Let's all pause here for a moment so liberals can Google the term "free market."

Nearly every problem with health care in this country -- apart from trial lawyers and out-of-date magazines in doctors' waiting rooms -- would be solved by my plan.

In the first sentence, Congress will amend the McCarran-Ferguson Act to allow interstate competition in health insurance.

We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition. If Democrats really wanted to punish insurance companies, which they manifestly do not, they'd make insurers compete.

The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company's home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today.

That's the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations, and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week.

President Obama says we need national health care because Natoma Canfield of Ohio had to drop her insurance when she couldn't afford the $6,700 premiums, and now she's got cancer.

Much as I admire Obama's use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio's state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited OB/GYN visits, among other things.

It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics -- you know, things like cancer.

The third sentence of my bill would prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies.

Freed from onerous state and federal mandates turning insurance companies into public utilities, insurers would be allowed to offer a whole smorgasbord of insurance plans, finally giving consumers a choice.

Instead of Harry Reid deciding whether your insurance plan covers Viagra, this decision would be made by you, the consumer. (I apologize for using the terms "Harry Reid" and "Viagra" in the same sentence. I promise that won't happen again.)

Instead of insurance companies jumping to the tune of politicians bought by health-care lobbyists, they would jump to tune of hundreds of millions of Americans buying health insurance on the free market.

Hypochondriac liberals could still buy the aromatherapy plan and normal people would be able to buy plans that only cover things such as major illness, accidents and disease. (Again -- things like Natoma Canfield's cancer.)

This would, in effect, transform medical insurance into ... a form of insurance!

My bill will solve nearly every problem allegedly addressed by ObamaCare -- and mine entails zero cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, a free market in health insurance would produce major tax savings as layers of government bureaucrats, unnecessary to medical service in America, get fired.

For example, in a free market, the government wouldn't need to prohibit insurance companies from excluding "pre-existing conditions."

Of course, an insurance company has to be able to refuse NEW customers with "pre-existing conditions." Otherwise, everyone would just wait to get sick to buy insurance. It's the same reason you can't buy fire insurance on a house that's already on fire.

That isn't an "insurance company"; it's what's known as a "Christian charity."

What Democrats are insinuating when they denounce exclusions of "pre-existing conditions" is an insurance company using the "pre-existing condition" ruse to deny coverage to a current policy holder -- someone who's been paying into the plan, year after year.

Any insurance company operating in the free market that pulled that trick wouldn't stay in business long.

If hotels were as heavily regulated as health insurance is, right now I'd be explaining to you why the government doesn't need to mandate that hotels offer rooms with beds. If they didn't, they'd go out of business.

I'm sure people who lived in the old Soviet Union thought it was crazy to leave groceries to the free market. ("But what if they don't stock the food we want?")

The market is a more powerful enforcement mechanism than indolent government bureaucrats. If you don't believe me, ask Toyota about six months from now.

Right now, insurance companies are protected by government regulations from having to honor their contracts. Violating contracts isn't so easy when competitors are lurking, ready to steal your customers.

In addition to saving taxpayer money and providing better health insurance, my plan also saves trees by being 2,199 pages shorter than the Democrats' plan.

Feel free to steal it, Republicans!