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LETTERS / We Won’t Solve The Medical Cost Problem Until We Stop Protecting These Medical Monopolies

Dear Editor,

“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

Nobama knew their regulations would cancel policies and claims that he’s only forcing Americans to pick a “Ferrari” plan over a “Ford” but is it “picking” if you’re forced? Defenders of Obamascare say only those with “substandard” insurance will lose their previous insurance. Who decides what’s “substandard” and knows what’s good for you? Nobama speaks of going “forward,” but he’s returning to when despots made your decisions for you. The idea that we have a choice in health insurance is as mythical as unicorns.

Obamascare could easily be called Romneyscare after the creator of the same program in Massachusetts. The law did nothing constructive for American medicine that’s become a hideous racket. You go to hospital with a terrifying illness and you’re fleeced while hoping that you be improved. Even if you’re insured, the charges can bankrupt you. A one-day charge for “room and board” runs $23,000 at some hospitals; for some blood-pressure checks and three bad meals.

Several thousand legal pages of Obamacare written by insurance and medical industry lobbyists, with confusing regulations, enforced by the IRS, and a computer system that doesn’t work; Before Obamascare you couldn’t afford insurance, which you still can’t afford and you’re fined for not having it. Laws of this size make it impossible for anyone but lobbyists and cartel shills to understand the fine print. Only large corporations have the means to explore thousands of legal pages to insure their skim of the national fat grows.

“Our government” has become enforcers for the insurance cartel; like mafia tactics, we’re being sold protection, from them. We’re forced into Insurance from companies that are exempt from anti-trust laws. Your medical charges are different if you’re uninsured or Medicaid pays or your insurance pays. Government/insurance/hospital company choices dictate this situation making doctors as much a victim as patients. More than half of American bankruptcies each year are medically induced.

Private insurance and Medicare rarely pay the full hospital bill but use a voodoo formula to compute payment. The uninsured/underinsured can be responsible for full charges, burying them in debt. The price will vary according to who you are and how you pay. American healthcare is an example of “the unseen hand” failing to optimize since legalized monopoly power allows Insurers to raise prices above what they could in competitive markets. Patients don’t see prices until after the repairs, if they ever see them and there’s no way to shop around.

We won’t solve the medical cost problem until we stop protecting these medical monopolies which are why health care costs so much. Fifty years ago doctors were prosperous and your health care didn’t bankrupt you, and then “our government” got involved.

An emergency room visit for chest pains that are only indigestion can cost more than a semester of college. Simple hospital lab work can cost more than a new car. A drug costing $300 to make, which the hospital buys for $3,500, can cost you $14,000. Examine the hospital bill and you’ll find crazy pricing for reasons the hospital won’t explain. You’re reduced to poverty after a brief hospital stay, even with insurance, money in the bank, with only minor ailments.

Many are reporting major increases in health insurance premiums or cancelations, since Obamascare appeared. Americans die younger and are sicker than people in other rich nations, despite spending noticeably more, per person, on health care. Europe’s nationalized system costs considerably less per person than America’s mafia system. All the developed countries have health care programs partly or wholly run by government, spend less than America, and have the same or better life expectancies.

Obamascare was designed as a blowout patch to allow the maroons in charge to pretend the “system” could continue. How many families will be able to find $12,000-a-year for basic coverage? The eventual result will be the implosion of the medical racket; efforts to manage runaway foolishness with idiocy will fail.

Calling the law “affordable” is curious. If you want a decent plan that won’t crush you with huge deductibles, you’re looking at $200 up to $500/month for one person, after subsidies, with income around $15k. This ain’t “socialized” medicine. This is herding “consumers/sheep” into the same lousy, price fixed, government created, expensive system we already had. Fascism is government/corporations working together.

How’s any price “affordable” if you’re maxed out with rent, groceries and transportation to work, assuming you still have a job? Single Payer, or “Medicare for everyone” would solve many of these problems, but single-payer was rejected, its advocates forcibly silenced. Too much money to be lost by limited interests if all the layers of racketeering were removed.

Limited income makes you eligible for subsidies but if your income is $1 too much, you may lose thousands in subsidies. Don’t increase your income, since that could trigger the loss of more government benefits. If your access to the best medical care is dependent on your income level, being poor makes you less equal. Providing exceedingly expensive medical care to everyone is equally impossible. 

Obamascare encourages companies to avoid insurance bankruptcy by only hiring part timers and cutting regular staff to 29 hours. Once they said the earth was flat. Then it was found to be round. Now it’s “crooked”. Everything mandated by “our government” is agenda driven lies.

Congress keeps their subsidy that pays 75 percent of their insurance costs. Your money pays their insurance while millions have lost their own. Citizens can’t vote themselves a subsidy like your ‘representative’ does, but you continue to vote for them.

 Craig Dudley