Monday, August 19, 2013

ObamaCare Should Cover Advanced Egomania


The President couldn't be more wrong when he says that no one has yet to offer a credible alternative to Obamacare....he just doesn't feel like listening. Here are more concrete suggestions to get things back on track, but the President has got to get his monumental ego out of the way. Well, you can always hope.

 

Seven steps to replace Obamacare with something that works

By Sally C. Pipes | AUGUST 17, 2013 AT 6:46 AM

Excerpted from "The Cure for Obamacare" (Encounter Broadsides, summer 2013)
President Obama took a shot at opponents of his health care reform law recently, saying, "there's not even a pretense now that they're going to replace it with something better."
Au contraire. Ideas for "something better" abound — but the president hasn't shown interest in them. He has instead remained devoted to his eponymous law, which promises higher costs and worse care.
At this point, Obamacare's critics have to play the long game -- and press for delays in the law's implementation, whether by rolling back certain parts of the law or defunding it through a continuing resolution, until the White House has a new occupant.
Here are seven provisions that should be part of a replacement agenda that would ensure that all Americans have affordable, accessible, quality health care.
First, change the federal tax code so that individuals can purchase insurance with pre-tax dollars, just like businesses can. Most Americans don't realize the full cost of their health care because they get employer-subsidized insurance. Consequently, they over-consume health care. That drives up costs.
To offset the cost of insurance for those who don't get coverage through work, Congress could institute a refundable tax credit.
Second, it's long past time to expand the availability of health savings accounts, where patients can save pretax dollars for health services. And, HSAs must be combined with catastrophic coverage. Doing so would encourage Americans to shop smartly for their care, as they'd be spending their own money.
Third, Congress should allow the purchase of insurance across state lines. Insurance policies issued in Rhode Island cost 2.5 times what they do in Alabama. People should be able to purchase a plan that suits their needs. Such a move would increase competition and lower costs.
Fourth, policymakers need to increase funding for high-risk pools. Such pools were functioning well in many states before Obamacare -- providing affordable coverage to those with pre-existing conditions without raising premiums for everyone else.
Fifth, federal electronic health records (EHR) mandates have to go. The average initial cost of an EHR system is $44,000 per physician, with ongoing maintenance estimated at $8,500 annually. Those costs are passed on to patients. Instead, let providers implement EHR systems when it makes financial sense for them to do so on their own.
Sixth, Congress should scrap the essential health benefits mandates that require all policies to cover a battery of health services. Such mandates can raise the cost of insurance anywhere from 10 to 50 percent.
And seventh, state-level medical malpractice reform is long overdue. Each year, more than $100 billion in health care expenditures are driven by doctors' and hospitals' worries about medical liability. Common sense tort reform that immunizes providers from frivolous lawsuits would usher in lower costs for patients.
Of course, all these reforms are contingent on repealing Obamacare. The House of Representatives has certainly tried to move that effort forward, voting 40 times to do so.
Death by a thousand cuts may be more realistic, at least in the short term. In June, the House voted to repeal Obamacare's medical-device tax, with 37 Democrats joining Republicans to pass the bill.
And in the past three months, 22 House Democrats have signed onto legislation repealing the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) -- Obamacare's doomed plan to have 15 unelected bureaucrats dictate Medicare spending with no real congressional oversight or control.
Public opinion and legislative momentum favor Obamacare's delay, if not its outright repeal. And contrary to the president's assertion, there is a plan to replace Obamacare with something better. Once the president is no longer standing in the way, Congress should implement that plan -- and fix American health care for real.
But if lawmakers allow Obamacare to stand, the next stop will be a single-payer system, where government controls the health care system entirely. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has admitted as much.
When asked last week if he felt that the United States should abandon insurance as a means of accessing the health care system, Reid replied, "yes, yes. Absolutely yes."
This will put America on the road to serfdom, and there will be no off-ramp.
Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is The Cure for Obamacare (Encounter Summer 2013).
View article comments 15Comments

More from washingtonexaminer.com

Top 5 Most Read Stories

From the Weekly Standard

  • The Dread Pony

    By: Matt Labash
    Baltimore
    Read More...

  • ‘Delay Is Preferable to Error’

    By: William Kristol
    The good news is that most of the nation remains as opposed to Obamacare today as it was three years ago, when the law was enacted. Indeed, most polls show the public even more skeptical...
    Read More...

  • Don’t Stop Frisking

    By: Terry Eastland
    Since the early 1990s the New York Police Department has used a crime-prevention strategy that it calls “stop, question, and frisk.” Accordingly, officers stop and question a person based on...
    Read More...

Most Commented Articles

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=12318 3d8da" >Examiner Tweets</a>
Posted by at No comments:

Politicians Never Lie

  This is a very serious piece. It clearly highlights the new game that the media is playing with the political class when it becomes obvious that politicians have not told the truth. It used to be the standard joke that no one in Washington lied, they prevaricated (gee that makes a world of difference). We have previously written about the ludicrous congressional testimony of National Security Adviser James "Clap-Trap" Clapper, but the piece below goes directly to the President and traps him in his own words.



Friday, Aug 16, 2013 08:46 AM EST

What if the president lied to us?

So many of President Obama's statements about NSA have been wrong. But he's too smart not to understand the truth

By


Topics: NSA, Washington Post, Surveillance, Obama, White House, Barton Gellman, Spying, , , ,
What if the president lied to us? (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
With the latest major revelation about National Security Agency surveillance, there’s a huge taboo question that needs to be put out on the table: Has President Obama been deliberately lying about the NSA, or have his statements just been repeatedly “wrong”?
After Barton Gellman’s blockbuster story today about the NSA breaking “privacy rules or overstepp(ing) its legal authority thousands of times each year,” the Washington Post published an attendant commentary with a headline declaring the president was merely “wrong” in last week suggesting that the NSA wasn’t “actually abusing” its legal authority. The implication is that when Obama made that comment — and then further insisted the surveillance programs “are not abused” — he may have been inaccurate, but he didn’t necessarily deliberately lie because he may not have known he was not telling the truth.
This is not to single out the Post commentary because, of course, such a rhetorical dance is fairly standard for the official political discourse these days. Since at least the Iraq War if not before, the media and political class typically goes out of its way to avoid declaring a lie a lie. Simply put, from “we know where (the WMDs) are” to Obama’s “actually abusing” declaration, seemingly deliberately inaccurate statements are rarely ever framed as outright lies. Even when such statements come from those with vested interests in hiding the truth, words and phrases like “misstated,” “wrong,” “least untruthful” and “misspoke” are trotted out.
advertisement
These words and phrases now comprise a whole Washington vocabulary crafted specifically to avoid the L word. That’s because once the L word comes out, it means the official in question is deliberately misleading the public — and that is rightly considered an abhorrent act in a democracy.
But just as it is utterly absurd to claim Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t lie before Congress (and some reporters thankfully admitted that truth in the open), it has now become almost silly to insinuate or assume that the president hasn’t also been lying. Why? Because if that’s true — if indeed he hasn’t been deliberately lying — then it means he has been dangerously, irresponsibly and negligently ignorant of not only the government he runs, but also of the news breaking around him.
Think about three recent presidential declarations. A few weeks back, the president appeared on CBS to claim that the secret FISA court is “transparent.” He then appeared on NBC to claim that “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Then, as mentioned above, he held a press conference on Friday to suggest there was no evidence the NSA was “actually abusing” its power.
For these statements to just be inaccurate and not be deliberate, calculated lies it would mean that the president 1) made his declarative statement to CBS even though he didn’t know the FISA court was secret (despite knowing all about the FISA court six years ago); 2) made his declarative statement to NBC but somehow didn’t see any of the news coverage of the Snowden disclosures proving the existence of domestic spying and 3) made his sweeping “actually abusing” statement somehow not knowing that his own administration previously admitted the NSA had abused its power, and worse, made his statement without bothering to look at the NSA audit report that Gellman revealed today.
So sure, I guess it’s possible Obama has merely been “wrong” but has not been lying. But the implications of that would be just as bad — albeit in a different way — as if he were deliberately lying. It would mean that he is making sweeping and wildly inaccurate statements without bothering to find out if they are actually true. Worse, for him merely to be wrong but not deliberately lying, it would mean that he didn’t know the most basic facts about how his own administration runs. It would, in other words, mean he is so totally out of the loop on absolutely everything — even the public news cycle — that he has no idea what’s going on.
I, of course, don’t buy that at all. I don’t buy that a constitutional lawyer and legal scholar didn’t know that the FISA court is secret — aka the opposite of “transparent.” I don’t buy that he simply didn’t see any of the news showing that spying is happening in the United States. And I don’t buy that he didn’t know that there is evidence — both public and inside his own administration — of the NSA “actually abusing” its power.
I don’t buy any of that because, to say the least, it makes no sense. I just don’t buy that he’s so unaware of the world around him that he made such statements from a position of pure ignorance. On top of that, he has a motive. Yes, Obama has an obvious political interest in trying to hide as much of his administration’s potentially illegal behavior as possible, which means he has an incentive to calculatedly lie. For all of these reasons, it seems safe to suggest that when it comes to the NSA situation, the president seems to be lying.
But hey, if Obama partisans and the Washington punditburo want to now forward the argument that the president has just been “wrong” or inaccurate or whatever other euphemism du jour avoids the L word, then fine: They should be asking why, by their own argument, the president is so completely unaware of what his government is doing. After all, if he’s not lying, then something is still very, very wrong.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)