ObamaCare: Biggest Swindle in History & Death Knell of Our Economy
Think of the most blatant rip-offs in the annals of Con Artistry—the fixing of the 1919 World Series; the selling of the Eiffel Tower (twice) by Victor Lustig, the selling of the Brooklyn Bridge—twice a week for years, by George Parker; think of the most far-reaching political scandals: the Teapot Dome scandal: the secret leasing of federal oil reserves at low rates by the Secretary of the Interior, the Watergate Scandal, which involved the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House.
All of these were as nothing compared with the breadth and depth of the ObamaCare scheme, forced on the American people by the Democratic Party and its leader President Barack Obama—soon to be enabled by the GOP, too craven to stop it.
Was it a swindle?
Most swindles push for a quick decision, lest the mark will lose a rare opportunity. ObamaCare used the same tactic: Our medical system was said to be in crisis, and Speaker of the House Pelosi actually said we must pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. Members of Congress did vote for it—without reading it.
This meticulously planned assault on our medical system must be seen as a swindle because it was rife with trickery and it does the opposite of what it purports to do. Called “the Affordable Care Act, “in reality it will exact an enormous price: it will greatly degrade the quality of care, it will impede development of new treatments and will rob Americans of the right to make medical decisions with their doctors.
No longer will the best care possible be the priority. No more will America be the world leader in development of advanced medical treatments. Sooner than we think, government hacks will decide what care we are to get, based upon age, state of health—and the cost of treatment. Medical progress will be intentionally slowed because new technologies cost more.
A board in the executive branch will recommend cuts to Medicare each year. They will become law, unless Congress specifically votes them down. That board is already at work:
“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act established a 15-member Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to extend Medicare solvency and reduce spending growth through use of a spending target system and fast track legislative approval process….
“By April 30 of each year, beginning in 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Actuary’s Office will project whether Medicare’s per-capita spending growth rate in the following two years will exceed a targeted rate….
“If future Medicare spending is expected to exceed the targets, the IPAB will propose recommendations to Congress and the President to reduce the growth rate. The IPAB’s first set of recommendations would be proposed on January 15, 2014….
“If Congress fails to pass legislation by August 15 each year to achieve the required savings through other policy changes, the IPAB’s recommendations will automatically take effect. The IPAB is prohibited from submitting proposals that would ration care….”
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/advocacy/topics/independent-payment...
Forbes reports on how the Act will damage our medical system:
“Medicaid coverage will go to an estimated 16 million more Americans….In order for individuals with preexisting conditions to get coverage at less than their actuarially rated risk, young and healthy people must pay more than their fair share — a lot more. Many of them will want to drop coverage because it will be so expensive; hence the mandate to try and force them to stay in. But even if everyone is in the pool — which they won’t be — the young and healthy will spend billions of dollars paying higher-than-necessary premiums to cross subsidize others….
“Rationing Is Inevitable.
“And when health care spending explodes, Washington will scramble to find a way to contain what wasn’t supposed to happen — just like the unemployment rate wasn’t supposed to go above 8 percent — both for political and economic reasons.
“The economic reasons are obvious: The government will be subsidizing so many people that even minor increases in health care costs will have huge budget implications. Cuts in care and services will be made. And the mechanism to do that, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), is already in place.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/07/05/seven-things...
Lies and broken promises
The ObamaCare campaign began with a single, obvious falsehood: that the American health care system was irreparably broken and had to be immediately fixed. Central to the alleged crisis was the ever-embellished number of uninsured Americans.
Said to be 30 million; at times given as 45 or 50 million, this number was largely fictitious: it included millions who were eligible for Medicaid, but had not applied and millions more who could afford insurance, but just didn’t want it.
Another facet was the illusion that lack of insurance is the same as lack of care. This was false because vast numbers of the uninsured are able to get free care, in health centers and hospital clinics around the Nation.
Central to the supposed threat was the myth of villainous insurance companies that delight in denying reimbursements or cutting off coverage for sick people by invoking caps on lifetime benefits.
The initial falsehoods sprouted a host of others. One of the most glaring was that the president’s plan for health care reform would not only correct the problems with our health care system, it would actually save money and reduce the deficit. The “non-partisan” CBO seemed to confirm these falsehoods. While the CBO claimed it could only make calculations based on the info provided to it, that qualifier was never stressed during the selling of ObamaCare.
Another is that insurance premiums will go down. Of course, if insurers must cover more, premiums must inevitably go up, and already are.
Among the most brazen whoppers was “If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them.” Only the most naïve among us could believe such tripe because insurance companies and your doctor have to be able to stay in business, for you to keep them.
Moreover, since it is cheaper for an employer to pay the fine than to buy insurance for its employees, there’s a built-in incentive to do just that. We are already seeing many companies converting to a part-time workforce, to avoid paying for employee insurance. It seems inevitable also, that employers will simply cease to offer coverage to their employees.
Any of these fabrications and consequences could have been exposed by an honest press. But our press is not honest; just as they had concealed the president’s flaws to elect him, they concealed ObamaCare’s obvious flaws. Instead, they helped present the plan as viable and well-thought out.
Case in point: on June 24, 2009 by ABC News presented almost an entire day of relentless promotion of the president and ObamaCare. From the press release:
“Good Morning America” will originate from the South Lawn of the White House and will include an exclusive interview with President Obama. He sits down with Diane Sawyer to discuss healthcare and other issues on the nation’s agenda. Wednesday’s program will also feature portions of Robin Roberts’ exclusive interview with First Lady Michelle Obama….
“Charles Gibson will anchor “World News” from the Blue Room of the White House. [at 6pm]
“ABC News’ Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer will moderate a conversation with President Obama about this critical issue on the nation’s agenda. A special edition of Primetime “Questions for the President: Prescription for America” will air on Wednesday, June 24th from 10:00-11:00 PM ET….
“The conversation with the President will continue on “Nightline” at 11:35pm ET.”
During "Questions for the President: Prescription for America," Obama was to “answer questions from an audience made up of Americans selected by ABC News who have divergent opinions in this historic debate.”
But Obama was not pressed with difficult questions. The most telling Q and A was from Jane Sturm, caregiver for her 105-year-old mother. Ms. Sturm said her mother needed a pacemaker when she was 100, but the arrhythmia specialist said she was too old, until he met her. Here is the key part of the exchange:
STURM: “….when the other arrhythmia specialist saw her, saw her joy of life and so on, he said, I'm going for it.
So that was over five years ago. My question to you is, outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life? Or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?”
OBAMA: “….I don't think that we can make judgments based on peoples' spirit. That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people….
“….what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that's not making anybody's mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller….”
The hosts did not criticize this icy statement and never addressed its utter lack of humanity.
Few noticed, but we had just seen a window into the essence of government-controlled medical decisions: The old, the sick may be expected to forego treatment so that the majority can get some kind of care.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/HealthCare/story?id=7920012&page...
Dirty political tricks
The process of passing the law was fraudulent and laden with tricks, to an unprecedented degree. A myriad of deals were made, buying votes by giving out exemptions from the law to states or even parts of states, Plus: an exemption to members of Congress!
After Scott Brown was elected, Senate Democrats could no longer stop a filibuster. Democrats therefore knew they could not rewrite the bill in conference, to satisfy the House’s preferences. It was decided to pass it under reconciliation rules—intended to resolve disputes in budget matters only, which ObamaCare definitely wasn’t. The motive? Senate rules allow reconciliation bills to pass with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.
It was even discussed, at one point, that the bill could be “deemed” passed, rather than voted upon. All of this shows that Democrats were desperate to pass this bill, no matter what the cost.
It did pass, without a single Republican vote.
Undue influence on the Judicial Branch
Afterward, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court involved himself in the ever-widening web of deception. The president had declared:
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
This statement was absurd on its face, and also contained two lies.
SCOTUS has been overturning laws since 1803; and ObamaCare was not passed by a strong majority by any means, but 219 to 212, with all Republicans and 34 Democrats voting against it.
But, apparently cowed by an organized media blitz, and to the horror of the other conservative justices, Roberts essentially rewrote part of the bill, in order to uphold it. The Anti-Injunction Act forbade the Court’s taking up a tax case before the tax took effect, yet, in NFIB v. Sebelius, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012), Roberts ruled that the fine for not having insurance was not a tax:
“The Anti-Injunction Act applies to suits “for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax.” §7421(a) (emphasis added). Congress, however, chose to describe the “[s]hared responsibility payment” imposed on those who forgo health insurance not as a ‘tax,’ but as a ‘penalty.’ §§5000A(b), (g)(2). There is no immediate reason to think that a statute applying to ‘any tax’ would apply to a ‘penalty.’ [Page 12]
He then reversed himself and said it was a tax:
“The Government asks us to interpret the mandate as imposing a tax, if it would otherwise violate the Constitution. Granting the Act the full measure of deference owed to federal statutes, it can be so read, for the reasons set forth below.” [Page 32]
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf
The WSJ reports:
“In their brutal (and, in a rarity, jointly signed) dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito write that the Chief Justice's logic ‘is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. . . . One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression.’ They score the Chief Justice for carrying ‘verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.’"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304058404577494400059...
Single Payer was the plan, all along.
One thing has finally become clear: the plan was and is to wind up with a single-payer system, like that in Great Britain, according to America’s most loathsome, Sen. Harry Reid.
Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.”
“What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said.
When asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/aug/10/reid-says-obamacare-jus...
Unprecedented damage to our economy
The true cost of a single-payer system in America has been underestimated and unreported. That cost can be seen by the United Kingdom experience:
The single-payer system in the UK is an enormous bureaucracy. According to its National Health Service website:
“The NHS employs more than 1.7m people. Of those, just under half are clinically qualified, including, 39,780 general practitioners (GPs), 370,327 nurses, 18,687 ambulance staff and 105,711 hospital and community health service (HCHS) medical and dental staff.
“Only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain and the Indian Railways directly employ more people.
Now, for the cost, in the UK:
“Funding for the NHS comes directly from taxation…. For 2012/13 it is around £108.9 billion.”
What would a similar system look like here, if the Democrats get their wish?
Taking into account the population difference (5 times larger, in the U.S.) and salary difference (About 40 percent higher in the U.S.) We could expect the same system in the United States to eventually employ 8.5 million people--This will make an enormous voting bloc that will resist repeal of ObamaCare--and, sit down for this:
It will cost more than $1 trillion per year.
[£108.9 billion = $169.5 billion X 5 = $847.5 billion + 40% = $1186.5 Billion]
See: http://www.nhs.uk/nhsengland/aboutnhs/Pages/About.aspx
The last betrayal
The final betrayal of the American people is unfolding today. Republicans, who could stop much of ObamaCare’s funding in the House are loathe to do so under three absurd transparencies: 1. We can’t shut down the Government, 2. We should let the bill take effect, so America can see what the Democrats have done to us; and 3. Defunding is just not the “right strategy.”
The truth is, if ObamaCare is fully activated, very bad things will happen that will wreak irreversible damage on our medical system, the process of development of new medical technologies, and our economy.
It is so obvious that these effects will ensue that we have to accept two facts: those who engineered this scheme consciously mean to harm America; and those who could stop it, but won’t, know what will come and just don’t care.
