Banging Healthcare

Lord help us - just watched Obama's speech on healthcare. Sick of it.

Basic high school economics tells us, or used to, that if a commodity is offered at zero price, demand will increase, supply will drop, and a shortage will develop.

When prices are zero, demand exceeds supply, and queues form. You think that ER wait is long now ...

The economics was obvious within a few years after Medicaid and Medicare rolls swelled. Locally, only the worst dentists and physicians accept Medicare or Medicaid now, and I suspect that has become SOP around the nation.

Most physicians didn't immediately cut their numbers, there was too much money in it initially, overbilling, over testing, making money hand over fist for doing next to nothing other than booking patients at 5 minute intervals and writing a prescription. When government began to cut the reimbursement percentages and/or the procedures it would cover - many doctors simply limited the number of welfare patients they would keep on the roster.

However, most public hospitals still love Medicaid/Medicare. The average public hospital, supported by fundraisers, subsidies, private donors, and welfare patients, keeps limping along - after paying administrators and physicians 6-figure incomes. After all, people have to be well paid for removing ear wax and prescribing Cymbalta for your flat affect.

The idea that health care should be equally distributed is part of the progressive/egalitarian culture. In those areas where there is socialized medicine, Canada, Europe, etc., the majority overall believe people should pay nothing to see a physician and hospital care should be free. Never mind that quality is lowered and cost takes a huge chunk of national revenue. Taxing productive folks will take care of it.

As in all other countries with some form of socialized medicine or nationalized medicine, medical personnel salaries drop because of government control. Europe, the old USSR, Hugo's Venezuela, Cuba all cap or control salaries - and surprise surprise income control/salary caps have a negative effect on incentive.

You know what's amazing? The folks I know who have no medical coverage but found the funds for breast implants, rhinoplasty, and tummy tucks. Will Obamacare pay for elective plastic? Did government healthcare pay for Pelosi's "scrotum stretched over a doorknob" face?

Obama keeps reading letters of despair from the common folks who just cannot hang on - b.s. as all would be eligible for either emergency or permanent Medicare and Medicaid - such as poster person Natoma in Ohio, who by the way owns the home her parents built in 1960, on 5 acres with an annual tax bill of $3700 and carrying an equity loan, expenses which Natoma managed to pay from her house cleaning business which earned her reportedly an annual profit of $6000. I read yesterday that when questioned, Natoma says she has found she is eligible for "something called Medicaid and Medicare disability." I have a problem with folks who support socialized medicine yet are seemingly unaware of "something called Medicaid and Medicare disability" benefits. Don't sob in your bedpan. What Natoma doesn't know is in 10-15 years when she is 60-65 years old, if she has another bout of cancer, she will not find treatment as quickly and easily as she does today. Her letter to the president will not be published or used as a political talking point.

Do politicians have staffers smoking medical marijuana with a little wine, sifting through mountains of mail and newspapers in search of poignant letters that can be used in a stump speech?

Regardless how Obamacare is initiated - part private/part socialized, yadayadayada, future this and later that, the end game is that it contributes to the "progressive" social ideology which is - that economic conditions should be equalized for one and all, well, for most people; you'll still have the rich living as they always have.

Read my lips - there is no society on earth that is "egalitarian" - never has been, never will be. There is always a pecking order and some peckers have more than others, some less.

The end game is what it's all about. Total control from cradle to grave. Health, education, welfare, employment ... shrinking class mobility. The only folks supporting more government control of a citizen's life are either those who will profit from it or those who have no life. Both groups unconcerned that the US is smelling more and more like a third world nation, i.e. - the masses becoming more "equal", living in government provided squalor, preying on one another, in a nation dependent on foreign loans, ruled by corrupt political families who are happy to be part of the inner circle of the new world empire, whomever that may be (China?).

On the bright side, in 10 years, those egalitarian social progressors will no longer be bashing the military as unfortunate poverty driven grunts or killers of innocents- but as patriots willing to defend the American way of (progressive) life, brave soldiers stopping the spread of capitalism - maybe dissidents will call it gunboat egalitarianism, spreading progress at gunpoint.

Obama promises you will get more "bang for your buck." Yes you will. Problem is - it isn't your buck - it's BigDaddy government's buck (after the IRS confiscates it from someone) and BigDaddy alone will determine how much banging you get for it.