Cuts That Won’t Heal
Every time Barack Obama comes out with another one of his historic groundbreaking initiatives all I hear is the song “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” playing in my head.
News wires and television talking head shows are again buzzing with the latest in this string of misguided loads of poppycock. This time it is for what the Democrats continue to portray as the ominous “Heath-Care Crisis”. The reality is we do not currently have a health-care crisis but if the president is successful at instituting his plan we certainly will.
Senator Christopher Dodd was on the Sunday morning TV circuit as lead man trying to bolster support for the president’s plan to immediately cut what they are claiming is $313 billion in short term health-care costs. The ultimate goal is to cut nearly one trillion dollars in government supported health-care spending. Dodd repeatedly used the Democrat bugaboo of blaming “profits” as the cause of this imaginary crisis. “Health-care providers are too profit driven” he said, along with the “need to rein in the profit mentality of health-care”.
During his Saturday radio address the president targeted health-care providers and drug companies as being some of the initial targets for these cuts. Obama’s new proposals would decrease payments to hospitals and doctors that provide care to Medicare patients. He also said “If the drug makers pay their fair share, we can cut government spending on prescription drugs”. Fair share? Fair share of what?
The obvious question that none of the adoring press is asking is if our country has such a health-care crisis why do citizens of countries with socialized medicine come here for medical treatment?
Profits are not the enemy; they are the reason that drug companies invest tens of billions of dollars every year in research and development of new life saving drugs. Drug companies and health-care companies are just that, companies. They live on their profits and they die without them. The quickest way to ensure a complete halt to medical discovery is to remove the incentive of being able to make money after completing the arduous task of getting a new drug on the market. Americans are not dying because of profits they are living longer because of them.
The president’s socialist approach to nonprofit medicine is a very dangerous road indeed. Doctors will be forced to reduce the number of Medicare patients they are treating just to stay in business. Yes Virginia, doctors are in business. And like any business, if you can’t make money doing it you have to stop.
Senator Dodd also made a very revealing disclosure on the talk shows when he discussed smoking and obesity as prime targets for cost reductions. Prepare yourself for the next catch phrase connected to this socilaist mentality, particularly if you are dependent upon Medicare. Smokers and overweight people will soon be known as “Enemies of the People” for it will be their reckless and irresponsible behavior that will be blamed for driving up everybody’s health-care costs. Can Soylent Green be far behind?
Through all this mealy-mouthed rhetoric so far nobody in the Obama administration has addressed the number one cost of providing health-care, that being malpractice insurance. All things health related are forced to pay ever increasing premiums to protect themselves from the avalanche of alleged malpractice lawsuits. The cost is so high that some of the more specialized and risky areas of medicine have seen a dramatic drop in the number of doctors willing to roll those dice.
In Illinois there was an exodus of high quality OB/GYN doctors because anyone who suffered discomfort during childbirth was suing for malpractice. The malpractice insurance rates went up and the doctors could no longer afford to do business.
If Congress and the President want to reduce the rapidly escalating cost of health-care they need to pass some meaningful TORT reform.
Focusing reform on the profitability of health-care providers and drug companies will only reduce costs through a reduction in the population.
