Right to Opine

Why, if ObamaCare is so great, are the very unions that backed it so strongly and cheered its passage applying for and receiving waivers to get out of it?

On Wednesday, the agency [Department of Health and Human Services] quietly updated its online list, which now reveals a whopping total of 729 Obamacare escapees – in addition to four states Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, and Tennessee – who collectively cover 2.1 million enrollees.

Five major unions—the most glaring of which is the SEIU—who contributed heavily to the campaign to pass the monstrosity have obtained waivers for local affiliates. Why?

Without the HHS-approved exemptions, these health providers would have been forced to drop low-cost coverage for seasonal, part-time, and low-wage workers due to skyrocketing premiums. The only way they are keeping their health care is by successfully begging the feds to spare them from Obamacare.

Lovely. You know a law must be great when the same people who pushed it are doing their best not to have to live under it.

There were a number of grandiose promises made during the push to pass ObamaCare, among them that millions of uninsured Americans would gain access to health insurance and that those who were underinsured would receive comprehensive insurance. Not so fast.

The health law passed in March says insurers must have a medical-loss ratio of between 80% and 85%, meaning they must spend at least that proportion of their revenue on actual care.

A couple months ago, McDonald’s and a few other large employers were granted waivers to the medical-loss ratio rules under threat of tens of thousands of employees losing their medical coverage entirely. Now the Department of Health and Human Services has announced

the agency plans to release “a special methodology that takes into account the special circumstances of mini-med plans in determining how administrative costs are calculated” for medical-loss ratio purposes.

So HHS is now changing the rules so that mini-meds can continue to operate as is. Did we really need to pass a trillion dollar healthcare bill just to leave the underinsured underinsured? Brilliant legislative work, that.

Hearing the Democrats constantly whine about obstructionist Republicans blocking Obamacare, I was reminded of one of the lesser-known of Aesop’s tales…

One day some wealthy men were walking together when they came across a hungry man. They formed a committee of ten to determine how best to address the situation. Six of the men declared, “This hungry man has no food. Tomorrow we should make him a sandwich–a crap sandwich.” Alarmed, the other four protested, “Crap will do the poor man no good. We should make the sandwich of roast beef instead. After all, you wouldn’t eat a crap sandwich would you?”

Replied the six, “But we don’t have to eat a crap sandwich. We have roast beef. He, however, has no roast beef and will be content with crap.”

When the four refused to feed the man a crap sandwich, the six huddled together. They did not want to be held solely responsible for feeding the man a crap sandwich and sought the assent of the other four. After some consideration, they returned to the four and said, “We have just the thing. Rather than a mere sandwich we will make him a foot-long crap hoagie.”

Concerned that the six would prevail and provide nothing of value to the hungry man, the four proposed at least adding lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo to make the crap hoagie more nutritious and palatable. The six agreed but, after hearing the poor man declare he did not want a crap sandwich, one of the six decided it would, after all, be better to make the hoagie of roast beef rather than crap.

When the time came to feed the man, the four–now five–refused to make the sandwich at all. The six–now five–cried, “Why will you not feed this poor man? We allowed you to add lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo.”

“Because,” replied the four–now five–, “a crap sandwich, dressed however nicely, is still a crap sandwich. The man does not want one and we will have no part in it. Why, when you were six, did you not feed the man crap yourselves?”

In his address to Congress Wednesday, President Obama asserted once again that his health care plan would not fund abortion. Let’s examine that claim using the most widely quoted current proposal.

HR3200 Subtitle B Section 2511 (p. 992) provides for “School-Based Health Clinics” (SBHC) to be funded with your tax dollars. This sounds great on the surface. Who doesn’t want to provide health care for our kids? The problem is that the language is, deliberately, overly broad and opens the door for groups such as Planned Parenthood, our top abortion provider, to open clinics in our schools.

(c) USE OF FUNDS.—Funds awarded under a grant under this section may be used for—

(1) providing training related to the provision of comprehensive primary health services and additional health services;

What, exactly, are the “additional health services” here? We don’t really know, as the bill does not specify. You can, however, connect the dots. Oversight of the clinics is left to the Secretary of Health & Human Services (SHSS), currently Kathleen Sebelius who is a radical pro-abortion advocate and supporter of late-term abortionists (e.g., the late George Tiller).

(d) CONSIDERATION OF NEED.—In determining the amount of a grant under this section, the Secretary shall take into consideration—

…

(3) other factors as determined appropriate by the Secretary.

This gives quite a bit of leeway to the SHSS. She could, for example, grant greater funding to SBHCs that provide “family planning” counseling of the sort she approves.

(l) DEFINITIONS.—In this section:

(1) COMPREHENSIVE PRIMARY HEALTH SERVICES.—The term ‘comprehensive primary health services’ means the core services offered by SBHCs, which shall include the following:

…

(C) OPTIONAL SERVICES.—Additional services, which may include oral health, social, and age-appropriate health education services, including nutritional counseling.

Sounds innocuous enough but what, exactly, are “age-appropriate health education services” under this definition? Would pro-abortion counseling qualify? Given the current SHSS you can count on it.

(3) SCHOOL-BASED HEALTH CLINIC.—The term ‘school-based health clinic’ means a health clinic that—

(A) is located in, or is adjacent to, a school facility of a local educational agency;

…

(4) SPONSORING FACILITY.—The term ‘sponsoring facility’ is—

…

(D) a nonprofit health care agency;

Bingo! Planned Parenthood qualifies. In fact, they wouldn’t even have to operate on school grounds. Any Planned Parenthood clinic near a school would qualify under this plan.

Now back to Obama’s claim that our tax dollars would not fund abortions. First note that nothing in this bill excludes abortion and great leeway is given to the SHSS to determine how funds are meted out. There is no guarantee here that funds would not be used directly for abortion. Assume, for the sake of argument, that none are. Even in that case Planned Parenthood clinics on or near school grounds would qualify for these funds. In practice every dollar they receive for even legitimate purposes frees up another dollar to fund the rest of their practice…being America’s number one provider of abortions.

Republican Congressman Charles Wilson may have been out of line concerning the venue of his outburst, but he was correct. Mr. Obama, you lie.

No pun intended, but our federal government is spending almost $500K to determine just why men don’t like to wear condoms during sex. You have absolutely got to be kidding me! Seriously, have you ever worn one? Did you like it? Is this really that complicated?

Over a 4 year period a hospital in the UK had around 400 unnecessary death due to horrendous emergency care. Per an inquiry into the outrage,

managers pursued targets at the detriment of patient care.

Targets, in this context, being financial targets set in order to keep costs down. This is what happens when medicine becomes more about cutting costs than treating patients. What else do you expect when the government runs the (increasingly expensive) show?

Gotta love the quotes from British politicians.

Liberal Democrat Shadow Health Secretary, Norman Lamb, called for a “cultural change so that every part of this trust has open and transparent systems in place to ensure patient safety”.

and

Bill Cash, Conservative MP for Stone, said: “There have been systemic failures in the organisation and I have asked for resolute action to be taken.”

Mr. Lamb, that “cultural change” would be called the Hippocratic Oath. It makes the patient’s health a pretty darned high priority. There must be someone in the UK who’s heard of it.

Mr. Cash, how about this for “resolute action”: scrap socialized medicine. Otherwise you’ll just keep fighting this battle over and over again.

This is, of course, what you get when medical decisions are made by bureaucrats. Obama’s proposal for universal healthcare includes provisions for decisions regarding the availability and coverage for specific treatments. This will lead to denial of care and a reduction in the quality of healthcare we receive…just like we see in the UK.

The World Health Organization would like to see universal AIDS testing, claiming it would cut rates by 95%. Here’s an alternative from the old fashioned, conservative school of thought: keep it in your pants. That’s not only 100% effective, but free.

New methods are being developed to fight malaria. Of course, they’re in limited supply and rather expensive. You know, we already have a sure fire way to make a huge dent in this major killer. It’s called DDT, and if it weren’t for environmentalists who care more about harming animals than the deaths of almost 900,000 humans annually, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

A recent survey indicates that almost half of America’s primary care physicians would leave medicine if they had the opportunity. The main reason given was “red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.” Per the same article another survey shows less than 2% of medical students are going into primary care. Insurance payments are going down and Medicare/Medicaid just don’t pay. The solution to this problem is obviously not to increase the involvement of insurance and government—the plan proposed by our next president—but to reduce it.

One step in the right direction would be to have patients pay more (or all) of the fees for primary care and to reduce (or eliminate) the share paid by insurance. A number of benefits would immediately accrue. First, physicians would receive more immediate payment (increased cash flow) and be encouraged to stay in primary care. This is crucial to avoiding a critical crisis in our health care system. They’d have less paperwork to deal with and be far less dependent on prompt payment by insurance or Medicare/Medicaid. Second, with patients responsible for a higher share of the payments they’d become more cost conscious, generating competition and driving down costs. Additionally, insurance premiums would come down as the industry moves toward plans that cover mainly, if not exclusively, major medical (e.g., surgery, chemotherapy) rather than primary care.

The current system doesn’t work. The fix is not to add more of the same (by making insurance available to everyone) but to make a fundamental change toward individual responsibility.