Death Panels
After being told there were no death panels in the Obamacare plan, it turns out there was, but the house voted to repeal the ‘death panel’ rule of Obamacare on June 23, 2015.
Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was criticized for pointing out the inclusion of death panels in the proposed Obamacare law in 2009. Palin was dismissed as a crank by the liberal establishment media.
Palin’s argument was based on Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which proposed paying doctors for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options.
The AMA is now calling for an identical process that will instruct private insurers to reimburse doctors for talking to patients about ending their lives.
In other words, death panel discussions will be paid for by Americans who are now mandated by law to buy expensive health insurance or pay a fine to the IRS.
Diets have worsened for millions of Americans as they struggle with a new large expense. Thus, the effect of Obamacare has been to worsen the health of millions. Indeed, a “glitch” in the legislation allows millions to be priced out of coverage.
No Doctors Willing to Treat You
One of the stated goals of proponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to prevent patients from being denied health care so that others could increase their profits. As then-candidate Obama put it, one of his goals was “making sure that they are limited in the ability to extract profits and deny coverage” (video).
Now, one of the lesser-known provisions of the ACA calls for the federal government to pay physicians and hospitals bonuses if they deny health care to seniors and the disabled – and even encourages them to form local monopolies to make it harder for them to find alternative sources of care. And most patients won’t even know that’s the reason they are being denied care.
Section 3022 of the ACA establishes the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP). The MSSP establishes the notion of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These are groups of health care providers (hospitals, physicians, other providers) who join together for purposes of a obtaining bonus payments based on their participation in the MSSP and Medicare fee-for-service incentive program.
ACOs are paid to “reduce costs” for treating their patients. This sounds like a reasonable goal, but the ACO system has a number of odd and unique quirks. First of all, patients don’t “enroll” in an ACO – they are assigned to an ACO ex post based on the preponderance of their utilization. That is, at the end of the year, if a patient happens to have had a plurality of care (measured by either service counts or dollars of Medicare claims), from physicians who are members of a particular ACO, then that patient is assigned to that ACO. (The methodology for assignment is detailed here.) Not only do patients not enroll in ACOs; they might not even be aware of them, as assignments may take place after the fact.
For patients assigned to ACOs, the ACO receives bonus payments based on the total amount Medicare pays for care of those patients. That total includes all care those patients receive from all providers – specifically, including providers who are not members of the ACO. Bonuses are based on reducing total costs relative to what would be expected risk-adjusted cost based on each patient’s health status.
Because this program is part of Medicare’s fee-for-service system, “reduce costs” means “reduce services” – that is, “give patients less health care.” Even if they ask for it.
The idea is to incentivize providers to encourage patients to utilize less care – say, to recommend fewer surgeries, fewer hospital stays, less frequent follow-up visits, and so on. ACO participants can certainly refer patients to other participants in the same ACO when another type of care is needed, so that the ACO can deal with the patient in a consistent manner.
It is highly ironic that a law proposed, in part, because of the allegation health insurance companies were increasing their profits by denying care to patients – is now the means by which the federal government pays physicians and hospitals bonuses to, in effect, deny care to patients.
Another Lie: No Federal Dollars will be Spent on Abortion
Even worse, for many Americans, was Obama’s phony abortion pledge. During the 2009 speech referenced above he said, “Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” In 2014, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted an investigation of plans certified and sold by the Obamacare exchanges. The GAO discovered that 1,036 such plans covered abortion. In other words, while the Obama administration was bullying Little Sisters of the Poor to cover abortifacients, it was turning a blind eye to Obamacare plans that were breaking federal law by funding abortions.
Insuring Illegal Immigrants
Another fraud perpetrated by the president during his 2009 speech to Congress was included in his list of allegedly inaccurate statements made by opponents of his health care plan: “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false.” That was too much for Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who responded by shouting “You lie.” Representative Wilson took a lot of heat from the media over this, but he was later vindicated when it was discovered that illegal immigrants have indeed been receiving hundreds of millions of Obamacare subsidies. Pretty sad when we have veterans of this country being denied healthcare or put on waiting lists a mile long.
Medicare Effect
Obamacare not only rations health care by what a person or family can afford, but also has implications for Medicare patients. Hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned from Medicare to help pay the cost of Obamacare. The health care provided to Medicare patients will decline with the reduced payments to care providers. Health care seems destined to be rationed according to the age and illnesses of Medicare patients. Those judged too old and too ill could be denied expensive treatments or procedures that would prolong their lives.
Conclusions
The list of individual lies goes on and on, but perhaps they can be summarized thus: The basic premise of Obamacare is deliberately deceptive. The president and his supporters sold it as a health reform bill meant to control costs, increase access, and improve quality. But virtually none of its provisions really addressed the components of our medical delivery system that affect these things. So, the most important deception was the pretense that it was ever about health care. That was the big lie. Obama and his accomplices called it “health care reform” when it was really just a government power grab. (Source)
The ACA was not selflessly designed with the intent of providing affordable and equitable medical services to those in need, but rather to acquire taxpayer money for the private insurance companies under the seemingly helpful guise of health care and the ideological excuse of personal responsibility. It takes money from ordinary people and gives it to a medical insurance industry that profits handsomely from this legally-enforced corporate welfare – all while keeping Americans locked in the same broken system that puts profit before patients. The law was essentially written by business executives from the industry so that special interests would not be upset and profits assured.
Dr. Dave Janda is an expert in the medical & insurance industries and says in an interview on the Hagmann report that Obamacare was a BAILOUT of the healthcare industry. Watch his informative interview below…
An original ebook from the current US senator to Utah, explaining why Chief Justice Roberts was wrong to disregard the Constitution in making his historic and controversial healthcare decision.
uring Chief Justice Roberts’s first seven terms on the Supreme Court of the United States, he distinguished himself as a fair-minded jurist and a true constitutional scholar—a man seemingly committed to the rule of law and to core constitutional principles. That hard-earned distinction was turned on its head when, on June 28, 2012, the Chief Justice—writing for a five-to-four majority in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebilius—essentially re-wrote key provisions of Obamacare in order to uphold the law, and allow it to be approved, in the face of a justified constitutional challenge.
Now United States Senator Mike Lee presents a conservative critique of this controversial ruling, and explains why John Roberts in particular was wrong to vote to preserve the act. In an attempt to be perceived as fair in the mainstream media, Roberts allowed himself to be swayed by outside influences — influences to which a Supreme Court justice is supposed to be absolutely immune. Not only that, Senator Lee explains, Roberts conceded that much of the Obamacare act was unconstitutional; yet he instructed states simply to ignore those parts, instead of recognizing that those parts made the entire act invalid.
A smart, fair and evenhanded argument, Why John Roberts Was Wrong provides a definitive, concise argument against Obamacare.
In 2012, the United States Supreme Court became the center of the political world. In a dramatic and unexpected 5–4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts voted on narrow grounds to save the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Unprecedented tells the inside story of how the challenge to Obamacare raced across all three branches of government, and narrowly avoided a constitutional collision between the Supreme Court and President Obama.
On November 13, 2009, a group of Federalist Society lawyers met in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to devise a legal challenge to the constitutionality of President Obama’s “legacy”—his healthcare reform. It seemed a very long shot, and was dismissed peremptorily by the White House, much of Congress, most legal scholars, and all of the media. Two years later the fight to overturn the Affordable Care Act became a political and legal firestorm. When, finally, the Supreme Court announced its ruling, the judgment was so surprising that two cable news channels misreported it and announced that the Act had been declared unconstitutional.
Unprecedented offers unrivaled inside access to how key decisions were made in Washington, based on interviews with over one hundred of the people who lived this journey—including the academics who began the challenge, the attorneys who litigated the case at all levels, and Obama administration attorneys who successfully defended the law. It reads like a political thriller, provides the definitive account of how the Supreme Court almost struck down President Obama’s “unprecedented” law, and explains what this decision means for the future of the Constitution, the limits on federal power, and the Supreme Court.
Government health care has never in the history of the world, anywhere, delivered the same quality of medical care as has the free market. As we have lost the battle for competitive health care, today we are traveling along the path to a centrally controlled Soviet-style system that means doctor shortages, limited availability of procedures, scarcity of specialized drugs, long wait times, and an overall increased cost for a decreased quality of our healthcare. Over half of the surgeons who cover emergency rooms are over fifty years old. Many are retiring early; many are dramatically reducing their patient load. And the new regulations required by Obamacare are only making this much worse. You need to be medically prepared.
Surviving the Medical Meltdown is a guide to preparing you and your household to prevent and deal with a multitude of medical issues. It explains how we got in this situation, tells how to plan ahead when doctors and insurance aren’t there to help, offers the latest medical breakthroughs so you can best maintain good health, and provides a home care handbook full of health tips for everything from rashes and fevers to fractures and chest pain. It will help you prepare for a future where immediate access to the modern medical care of today is simply not available.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation.
But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury.
