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ObamaCare is not about Health Care — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux

Bookworm on Aug 12 2009 at 10:24 am | Filed under: Government, Health

Given the many alternative health care reform options that have been proposed by conservatives, some Democrats, the health care industry and the insurance industry, why are they not even on the table for debate? There are government supported health insurance plans in other countries that work pretty well (Switzerland come to mind), but they aren’t being discussed. I would think that politicians reacting to declining poll support and upwelling protests against ObamaCare would be eager to explore middle ground. No such luck!

So, why is the Democrat “single-payer” (all claims to the contrary noted) proposal the only proposal being discussed as an all-or-nothing proposition?

British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan offered a very interesting insight on FOX News Network’s Glenn Beck Show recently when he warned that…the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) is “the world’s 3rd largest employer.”

I did some research into this and found that the U.K. NHS service employs approximately 750,000 people, or about 1.3% of the U.K.’s population. Mind you, that’s not the whole health care industry because, unlike the Democrat Congress’s proposals, the U.K.’s public health sector does coexist with a private option. The U.K’s health system, public and private, employs about 122,000 physicians or about 2.0 physicians per 1,000 population. So, each U.K. physician employs about 5.5 additional national health care employees.

By comparison, the U.S.’s much maligned health care system provides about 2.75 physicians per 1,000 population, or almost half-again what the U.K. provides. ..for now, anyway. But, I digress.

Government bureaucracies are organic entities. They develop immortal lives of their own that are largely immune to constraint. I propose that is highly unlikely that any U.S. health care bureaucracy generated from ObamaCare would prove to be much different than a U.K. health care bureaucracy. I also propose that under the eventual government (single-payer) monopoly that ObamaCare is supposed to achieve, all health care workers will, de facto if not de jure, work for the government and that this will be irreversible.

So, what if the same ratio of government health care workers-to-population in the U.K. (population 61 million) was applied to the U.S. (population 307 million)?

This would translate into an additional 3.9 million jobs obligated to the U.S. government. This is a larger number than the total current employment of the U.S. government and Postal Service combined!

Think of all the opportunities: the numbers of additional employees voters totally beholden to government taxation and spending for their own welfare; unionization and union dues to be gained; job benefits to be granted; management sinecures to be awarded; public contracts to be granted; loyalists to be rewarded; special interest groups to be fleeced for donations, and union thugs to be mobilized to intimidate protesters. And all this over government control over an essential service, with the power over life and death, that can be given to or yanked away from a compliant population at will in the interests of political expediency.

Sound far-fetched? Not really. This is how things are done in Chicago, so the template has been proven and the machinery is well-oiled, in place and good to go. I can’t think of a more illustrative example of this world to come than Michelle Obama’s recent career history at the University of Chicago Hospital.

It’s something to think about!

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12 Responses to “ObamaCare is not about Health Care — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux”

on 12 Aug 2009 at 2:07 pm 1suek

Speaking of health care alternatives, here’s one from an unexpected source (not the WSJ, but from the president of Whole Foods).

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/the-whole-foods-alternative-to-obama-care
on 12 Aug 2009 at 2:40 pm 2BrianE

Suek,
The link above should be required reading for every American!
on 12 Aug 2009 at 3:04 pm 3BrianE

Here’s another great idea to reign in health care costs by the CEO of Safeway.
They offer incentives, through reduced insurance premiums for employees to encourage healthy lifestyles.
Once again, it offers a carrot to move people towards adopting healthier living.

Effective health-care reform must meet two objectives: 1) It must secure coverage for all Americans, and 2) it must dramatically lower the cost of health care. Health-care spending has outpaced the rise in all other consumer spending by nearly a factor of three since 1980, increasing to 18% of GDP in 2009 from 9% of GDP. This disturbing trend will not change regardless of who pays these costs — government or the private sector — unless we can find a way to improve the health of our citizens. Failure to do so will make American companies less competitive in the global marketplace, increase taxes, and undermine our economy.

At Safeway we believe that well-designed health-care reform, utilizing market-based solutions, can ultimately reduce our nation’s health-care bill by 40%. The key to achieving these savings is health-care plans that reward healthy behavior. As a self-insured employer, Safeway designed just such a plan in 2005 and has made continuous improvements each year. The results have been remarkable. During this four-year period, we have kept our per capita health-care costs flat (that includes both the employee and the employer portion), while most American companies’ costs have increased 38% over the same four years.

As with most employers, Safeway’s employees pay a portion of their own health care through premiums, co-pays and deductibles. The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors. Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html

There are many examples of approaching controlling health care without destroying the entire system. These will continue to be ignored by the MSM for a couple of reasons– liberal doubts that individuals can successfully be responsible for their own actions, and a wrong-headed idea of what equality means.

If the country went to the Whole Foods model of high-deductible health insurance coupled with Health Savings Accounts (Suek’s link), and allowed insurance companies to rate their policies for the main causes of health care expenses– smoking, obesity, blood pressure and cholesterol, we could make significant advances in controlling costs and increasing coverage.

We also need to remind the other side that poor uninsured in America receive health care now. Those that opt not to buy insurance or those that are uninsured while between jobs represent a different problem.
on 12 Aug 2009 at 3:16 pm 4Ymarsakar

We’re on the template of helping people. The Democrat is on a different template. The template of power: something Alinsky, Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler all knew about in intimate detail.
on 12 Aug 2009 at 3:22 pm 5BrianE

Safeway’s plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476804026308603.html

If this is a true statement, it may explain part of the reason why the US spends more on health care than, say Europe.
We are fatter and more sedentary than Europeans, though they are making strides toward obesity parity.

One of the rationales for the democrat health care bill is increased preventative medicine and its supposed cost savings. The problem is, no matter how many trips to the doctor are included– most of these problems can only be overcome by lifestyle changes.

Anyone know how many health care workers smoke? If anyone in society should know better, it’s them. So knowledge doesn’t necessarily produce action.
on 12 Aug 2009 at 3:35 pm 6» Financial News Update - 08/12/09 NoisyRoom.net: Where liberty dwells, there is my country…

[...] ObamaCare is not about Health Care — by guest blogger Danny Lemieux [...]
on 12 Aug 2009 at 4:15 pm 7suek

Unfortunately, Brian, Y’s right. If the goal was truly to solve the problem of inability to pay for health care, we could reach some sort of agreement. In fact, the goal is to grab power. There’s no compromise that’s possible – or even desirable. The Leftists won’t accept frustration of complete control of the nation, and many of us are unwilling to accept their control. Health care is merely the piece of cheese to entice us into the trap….
on 12 Aug 2009 at 6:00 pm 8Charles Martel

I completely agree with Danny and others here that healthcare is just the lever the statists are using to pry us apart from our liberties.

What I can’t understand is why they’re trying it here in America. We are not herd animals like the Europeans or scared s**tless vassals like the Chinese or Cubans who will put up with being bossed around forever (or at least until the U.S. Army liberates them).

Do these jiveass idiots know who they’re dealing with here?

Apparently not.

PS: I’m on my way over to the local leftist bookstore to watch Sen. Babs Boxer talk about her new fiction book. A warm welcome has been arranged for her—but not by her toadies. Knowing my Babs, who is a congenital political coward, she will probably beg off appearing and then blame her no-show on well-dressed Nazis like me.

I’ll report when I get back.
on 12 Aug 2009 at 6:11 pm 9Ymarsakar

e are not herd animals like the Europeans

They don’t really have a choice about it. Their power base, after all, is here, in this democracy. Not somebody else’s democracy or even autocracy. And they wouldn’t want it any other way. This system is perfectly understandable to them and easily manipulated. They have been doing this their entire lives, after all.

They wouldn’t change even if you gave them the option to and paid them to do it. They’re at the level where simple wealth isn’t enough. They also need the power and influence, the enforcement ability of the federal government, as well.
on 12 Aug 2009 at 8:49 pm 10Charles Martel

Back from Babette’s Feast.

Sorry to say, I didn’t go inside to watch Babs. The bookstore owners decreed that unless you bought her book you couldn’t sit in on the love fest.

There are things that even I, a simple Christianized Frankish semi-barbarian warrior king cannot bring himself to do, and buying a book by Barbara Boxer is one of them.

So I stayed outside where there were dueling picket signs—some in favor of the public option and about three times more opposed to it. There were occasional tense moments as people tried out their arguments on each other, but things were actually surprisingly civil. The leftists were waiting for us to break out in shouts, screams and the Horst Wessel Lied, but we continued with our perplexing soft-spoken ways.

(One woman, clearly a loon, had both sides confused as to where she belonged until she yelled out, “Single payer! Single payer!” One of the leftist pickets then rolled his eyes and said loud enough for us to hear, “Oh, crap, that means we have to claim her as one of ours.”)

A guy I know from Marin named Ed, who used to be involved heavily involved in the local GOP, got into a verbal tussle with a bearded leftist who apparently thought that the way to talk Ed and his ilk out of doing vulgar Townhallish things was to call him a moron.

I interrupted the contretemps to tell him that “Ed here is Jesuit-trained, and you know what that means.” The guy look confused, so I continued, “It means he’s schooled in logic, a tool we fascists use to convert the unsuspecting. You should thank God you’re immune to it.”

That was about the highlight of any confrontations I had with anybody. I talked to a former Coast Guard guy who was a leftist, but I saw that he was deeply troubled by some things the statists are doing. He was impressed that when he pulled put that old chestnut about “racism is on the rise because right-wing militias are gaining recruits,” I pointed out that the latest FBI figures for KKK/militia types nationwide is about 20,000. “If you do the math, in a nation of 300 million people, 20,000 amounts to one in every 15,000 Americans. It’s kind of hard to lose sleep over numbers like that.”
on 13 Aug 2009 at 8:54 am 11SADIE

Excellent review, Charles.

They are their own worst enemy as quoted below:

“Oh, crap, that means we have to claim her as one of ours.”

A lovely 5-Star retort …

“It means he’s schooled in logic, a tool we fascists use to convert the unsuspecting. You should thank God you’re immune to it.”

To use one my old favorites and repeat your usage of it… Jiveass Idiots (well not the Idiots part because yours is the clean version of my usage), I am posting the link, again, to this site, which clearly and informatively lays out the trail of money.

My thoughts keeps going back to the point Danny made:

This would translate into an additional 3.9 million jobs obligated to the U.S. government. This is a larger number than the total current employment of the U.S. government and Postal Service combined!

Combine the above with the list of the beholden below and hoist a Skull & Cross Bone Flag and we have been hijacked by pirates, who have taken our ‘booty’. Is it any wonder that the Town Hall Meetings or book review soirees are like sailing the Gulf of Aden.

Obama’s voice is no longer dramamine – and we are sea sick and adrift.

http://bailout.propublica.org/
on 13 Aug 2009 at 10:25 am 12suek

More reading. The original article is short, back up is linked and is much longer. Comments are mostly worth the read…

http://www.floppingaces.net/2009/08/12/its-in-the-bill-dems-cannot-deny-what-we-can-read-with-our-own-eyes/#comments