Healthcare Reform; Obama Lied…America Died

What makes it difficult to move the healthcare dialogue in any direction is the intense emotional attachment most attention paying Americans hold. And…”as usual in heated debates” the first casualty is the facts. Then again; democrats never let the facts get in the way of a well timed crisis. A crisis by the way, that…as usual, democrats created and then act as innocent bystanding gawkers to the wreck they were in charge of. If you think about it you might see an analogy with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
President Bamster has often argued that health insurance companies need more competition, and he's proposed a public option for health insurance to provide it.
"There have been reports just over the last couple of days of insurance companies making record profits, right now," Obama said during a prime-time news conference. "At a time when everybody's getting hammered, they're making record profits, and premiums are going up. What's the constraint on that? ... Well, part of the way is to make sure that there's some competition out there."
Usually, I take for granted that when the liar in chief is moving his lips, America is getting a dump truck full of bovine excrement but; lending to the import of this legislation on the future of our country I took the time for due diligence and gum-shoed the hell out of this subject. Here are the facts.

1.Insurance company profits. "For every premium dollar that they take in, about 83 cents goes out in medical costs -- doctors, hospitals, and drugs," says Carl McDonald, health insurance analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. The rest is spent on overhead. Net income comes to just a few cents per dollar of premiums. Consider WellPoint, the biggest private health insurer on Wall Street, which has about 35 million customers nationwide. Last year, it paid out 83.6% of revenues in expenses. Net, after-tax income as a percentage of total revenue came to a princely 4.1%. Returns on assets, a key measure of profitability, are typically pretty modest too. According to analysis by Fact Set, WellPoint's ROA has averaged 5.8% over the past five years, Aetna's, 4.2%. Those were, remember, supposedly boom years. UnitedHealth was higher, at 9.6%, but fell to 6.4% in 2008. These are reasonable, but hardly spectacular, results. By comparison, Wal-Mart averaged a 9.2% return on its assets and Dell, Inc. 12.4%.

2.Obama claims that a government-run, “public option” would increase competition and lower insurance premiums. In baseball parlance this is a lobbed pitch, right over the plate and I’ve got a bat the size of a giant redwood. Contrary to public perception there are not a handful of evil, monolithic insurance providers gleefully denying coverage to all but Olympic sprinters and millionaires. At last count there were over 1300 health insurance providers. The fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench is that the states allow very little competition.
3.Healthcare is a right. Oh really…? The best of my recollection as to the bill of rights excludes any mention of healthcare. If we were to include healthcare as a right where then do we draw the line? Food, shelter, transportation? We are endowed by our creator with rights. Yet, rights exist not in a vacuum. My right to speak doesn’t require you to listen. My right to keep arms doesn’t require you to subsidize that right by purchasing a firearm for me. Our freedom of the press doesn’t allow for taxpayers to finance the fourth article of government. My point is this, rights are not reciprocal. Your rights end when they burden me. Extrapolated; government healthcare cannot be a right as it won’t exist without impinging on my rights via a subsidizing taxation to bestow upon you a right that is not one.

4.The real costs of healthcare are insurance. No so Skippy. Consider this scenario. I own a construction company with one hundred big, burley, belching, and ass scratching men. And…because deep down I am a benevolent employer, all around good guy and soft hearted. So…I offer to my men comprehensive health insurance. Enter the state. I cannot buy a group policy for my burley worker that does not include free, annual breast exams, screening for breast cancer. It’s the law and more often than not referred to as a mandate. States often require insurers to insure there workers for smoking cessation programs, mental health, drug and alcohol rehab, sexual orientation counseling, In-Vitro Fertilization, Morbid Obesity Treatment, Hair Prosthesis, Viagra, Penis pumps, Athletic trainer, Circumcision, Hair prosthesis, Midwife, Naturopath, Oriental medicine, Pastoral counseling,
Port wine stain elimination (birthmark removal)
Residential crisis service
Source: Council for Affordable Health Insurance etc., etc. I also learned that there are nearly 2,133 mandates like these, “spread throughout the states” which are responsible for group health insurance premium increases of 20 to 50 percent.
5. Insurance companies routinely refuse per-existing conditions leaving the most infirm SOL. This postulation ignores Congressman John Shadeggs state High Risk Pool Finding Extension Act of 2006. President Bush signed into law the State High Risk Pool Finding Extension Act of 2006. This bill authorized grant funding for the establishment and operation of state high-risk insurance pools. Now, 35 states offer such pools that already insure more than 200,000 Americans with another 4 million who are eligible to participate.


Republicans’ work has not stopped there, though. In fact, every current Republican health care proposal addresses the issue. Shadegg’s bill, the Improving Health Care for All Americans Act, H.R. 3218, would expand state high-risk pools so that all 50 states can offer choices for affordable health insurance coverage to those who need it most.

6. Insurance companies can compete with the government. Not bloody likely mate. With the most profitable of the gargantuan, Satin loving insurance companies posting profits of between 2% and 4% percent, “compared to the standard return on investment of the S&P 500 at 11%” consider if you will them having to compete with an entity that need not show a profit, has the ability to print monies and can apply regulations to the insurance companies that their federal competitors need not abide with.

There are inequities in healthcare capitalism; mainly because, in that arena, capitalism has been adulterated. Government is already responsible for 47% of health insurance and it is their heavy handedness most culpable for the rising costs. In Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements providers are normally paid pennies on the dollar. In many cases this accounts for a net loss to the provider necessitating increased charges to those patients not enjoying Uncle Sams’ largess.

Estimates from, “the Council for Healthcare reform” estimates that the cost of government compliance represents 25% of the providers’ costs. The same watchdog group posits that defensive medicine accounts for as much as 35% of the physicians cost. These are widely viewed as unnecessary tests to protect the doctor from legal action. In this vein imagine the financial results of tort reform capping malpractice judgments to compensatory damages only. An honest medical mistake should not be a winning lottery ticket. For those gross instances of a drunk or drugged up surgeon and similar cases, patients should be compensated for their loss and doctors would be accountable under the rules of medical standards and practices as well as criminal laws of negligent conduct and reckless disregard.

Though, constitutionally congress does have a role to play. The failure of states to allow insurance companies to operate across state lines is the quintessential role of the federal government to exercise its constitutional authority without overstepping its role. The Commerce Clause is an enumerated power listed in the United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, and Clause 3). The clause states that the United States Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the states, and with the Native American tribes. Courts and commentators have tended to discuss each of these three areas of commerce as a separate power granted to the Congress of the United States. It is common to see the Commerce Clause referred to as "the Foreign Commerce Clause," "the Interstate Commerce Clause," and "the Indian Commerce Clause," each of which refers to a different application of the same single sentence in the Constitution.

It might sound convoluted and complicated but simply stated it is this. The federal government has only the enumerated authority to allow insurance providers to sell their wares across state lines and no other federal authority exists. The, “fixes” to soaring healthcare cots are as simple as they are stark. Less is more; the solutions involve the free market, capitalism and limited government. Government needs to simply get the hell out of the way and let America work; after all, it always has.
Conservative Springfield Staff Writer