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So, how are we going to pay for Obamacare?

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Last night, while puttering around the apartment tidying up, I switched on FoxNews (to have something to listen to in the background).  Glenn Beck (whom I normally try to avoid) was on, talking some common sense.

He asked a simple question which got at the essence of a post I wanted to write on Obamacare:  “How are we going to pay for this?”

After a $787 trillion “stimulus” package which hasn’t created the jobs the Administration (and congressional Democrats promised) and word that “House Democrats were moving on a dozen spending bills for fiscal 2010 that total 12.1% in more domestic discretionary increases“, all we’ve gotten from the Obama Democrats is the Bush domestic policies on steroids–an ever-expanding federal government.

That’s increasing government spending at 11.3% above the rate of inflation.

So, where’s the money?  And recall, these spending increases come from a party which rose to power decrying those spendthrift Bush policies.

For a more detailed discussion of the problems of financing Democratic health care schemes, read Michael Barone’s The trouble with health care is paying for it.

Comments

  4. I read that Nancy Pelosi says the problem is that some people WRONGLY believe the scheme will be paid for with “public money.”

    I think we’ve identified the problem: Nancy has no idea where all that money she and her buds spend is coming from.

  6. So, where’s the money?

    1. Tax increases ALL OVER the place. Not just a huge tax increase for the wealthy and small businesses, but perhaps a new VAT on eveyone and everything, soda pop taxes, death taxes, taxes on insurance plans, you name it. And when that kills the economy:
    2. With European style health care, you get a European style national defense.

    ALL the socialist health care systems are failing as it is — wait til you see how fast they fail when those countries have to defend themselves because the United States is no longer capable.

  7. The savings from the hundreds of millions spent on primary health care currently doled out in emergency rooms at five times the price

    Well, if you want to fix that problem, maybe you should start with the people who are actually incurring it.

    For a study reported in the October 22, 2008 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers at the University of Michigan evaluated 127 peer-reviewed articles that made claims about the impact of uninsured patients on emergency room crowding. They concluded that “available data do not support assumptions that uninsured patients are a primary cause of overcrowding, present with less acute conditions than insured patients, or seek [emergency room] care primarily for convenience.”

    The JAMA study also found that patients with public insurance, such as Medicaid and Medicare, are more likely to crowd into emergency rooms for minor complaints than are the uninsured. Only about 17 percent of E.R. visits in the United States in the last year studied were by uninsured patients, about the same as their share of the population.

    That isn’t the only way people with subsidized insurance add more burdens to the system than people with no insurance at all. A 2007 study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at charges and payments for 43,128 emergency department visits between 1996 and 2004. “What surprised us was that uninsured patients actually pay a higher proportion of their emergency department charges than Medicaid does,” reported co-author Reneé Hsia, a specialist in emergency medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. “In fact, 35 percent of charges for uninsured visits were paid in 2004, compared with 33 percent for Medicaid visits.”

    And:

    People on Medicaid — a $300 billion federal and state insurance program that covers 58 million adults and children who are poor or disabled — visit emergency rooms at the highest rate, according to the CDC.

    They are followed by patients covered by the government’s Medicare program for the elderly, the uninsured, and finally, people who are privately insured.

    In short, that argument is bullshit. Free health insurance coverage from the government INCREASES, not decreases, emergency room usage as opposed to no insurance.

  8. Remember when the liberal douche bags were whining that we weren’t “suffering enough” during a time of war?

    Now we are. Well, maybe not enough as far as they’re concerned.

    They were aghast that we had the audacity to create jobs for 52 consecutive months, maintain a 5(ish)% unemployment rate, all the while racking up record revenue receipts into the treasury. The libs had to fix that crap and fast.

  9. When Bush made clear that he intended to go to war AND cut taxes, liberals were terrified. FDR had established that going to war requires rationing, price controls, and vast new government power grabs that have absolutely nothing to do with national security … in short, everything liberals love. Bush laid bare that lie. Now liberals are desperately hoping no one noticed.

  12. They don’t care how to/who will pay for it! They only want to grab power, destroy the country and turn it over to the ‘one world government’! Obamacare is the perfect prelude to their scheme! Dick Morris says the best way to now stop ObamaCare is to educate those under 30. This 3-D, anti-Obamacare ad is a great way to do it on their own turf: YouTube.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpQlTN9kgfo

    THIS is how conservatives need to start diversifying their messages to the youth audience so conservative messages all aren’t just scenes of tea parties and paintings of patriotic scenes. Please make this go viral, everyone. Please hurry! We can make an impact!