Herman

Cain

Read Herman's bio and previous columns

July 20, 2009

Obamacare: Medicare’s Ugly Twin Sister

While President Obama continues to give speeches that make health care reform sound like a beauty queen, the legislation moving through Congress resembles Medicare’s ugly twin sister.

The Medicare system is a bureaucratic morass of price controls, restrictions on medical services, hospitals, doctors and patients. If in doubt, just ask any doctor or patient or hospital administrator. The system is also operating in the red.

Now add to that scenario an employer mandate, an individual mandate, penalties for not obeying the mandates, a government health insurance option, surtaxes on upper income individuals, and a new bureaucracy to insure that this nightmare works smoothly and we have Medicare’s ugly twin sister.

Despite the real facts about the uninsured, access to health care, the major determinants of health outcome and the experiences of countries inflicted with socialized government-controlled medicine such as Canada and England, President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress are still trying to force a shotgun wedding between the public and government-controlled health care.

There are not 46 million chronically uninsured people in this country. Ten million are not citizens, 17 million make $50,000 a year or more and millions of people choose not to buy health insurance. Even the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation put the number of chronically uninsured Americans who do not qualify for existing government programs between eight and 14 million people.

No one is denied access to health care in this country, even though access to health care is not the major determinant of health outcome. Former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher pointed out in a recent interview that access to health care is only a 15 percent determinant of health outcome, whereas human behavior (choices) determines 40-to-50 percent of a person’s health.

President Obama and the Democrats believe that with their superior leadership they will be able to do what Canada, England and other countries could not do. Namely, they could not control costs without health care rationing and lower quality of care.

To make matters worse, Congress cannot determine how much this wedding is going to cost. The latest guesstimate is between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, with some of the money to pay for this disaster coming from cutting the costs of Medicare, because the maid of honor (Medicare) is too fat.

Congress has promised to put Medicare on a diet in the past with no success, but the president and the Democrats keep telling us that they can do it this time. They just have not told us which set of smoke and mirrors they will use this time.

It is completely outrageous for Congress to propose this $1.5 trillion “Health Care De-form” plan. The mandates in the legislation will simply make our current health care system worse, while making the delivery of health care more costly and inefficient. Just ask the Canadians and the British!

No matter how much lipstick they try to put on this “pig”, it is still ugly.

The 1,000-plus page legislation that the Democrats are trying to steamroll through Congress (again) also contains a sneaky provision to make it illegal to purchase private health insurance. We have no idea how many more sneaky provisions are buried in this legislation.

There are many practical and sensible alternatives for making health care more affordable and accessible if those are the objectives, but they are not. If they were, then the president and the Democrats would not be ignoring all the signs that their bill is not a marriage made in heaven with the public.

It would be a living hell – and she’s not even pretty.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.