Unless one has been living deep in a cave, without communication, it is evident to all Americans that the health care system advocated by the Obama administration and passed by the Congress, is a disaster. Not only is the roll-out mess on the internet a prime example of government incompetency and waste, increasingly other inherent flaws are appearing in the law itself. Perhaps the 425 members of Congress should have really read the Affordable Health Care Act before casting a vote for a complex and misguided legislative proposal.
Politics, as demonstrated by Obama Care has again demonstrated that there are some aspects of American life that are best left primarily in the hands of the citizenry rather than the federal government.
Allowing a President and his compliant Congress to:”fix “our medical and health care system has failed. It will continue to fail. Raw political power and a lapdog Congress is not the way to repair the best health system in the world. Like a well used car, the system needed some tweaks, dents removed and systems improved. However, destroying the entire system can only lead to chaos in the entire medical system. Doctors are leaving practices, hospitals are closing or consolidating, small companies and larger corporations are reducing the hours of employment to escape unaffordable insurance premiums, and citizens are experiencing higher insurance premiums and cancellation of existing health insurance policies.
This is chaos. And, young, healthy persons seem not to be buying into the new health care scheme. Even though our government will not release the enrollment figures, it is now obvious that the underlying assumption made by the administrations central health care planners were seriously flawed. Simply because young people may have voted for the President does not translate into buying into a pig in a poke plan they neither can afford, at present and in the future. Higher insurance premiums coupled with high burdens of debt from education loans do not paint a pretty picture for many young Americans.
Getting to the nut of the health care disaster, politics rears its sometime scary and diabolic presence. Anything to win. Including promises made that are impossible to keep. Fabrications of basic facts. The crude salesmanship of a launch disaster emanating from the White house Rose Garden. No wonder the American propel are disillusioned and increasingly angry.
The health care system in the United States, even with its faults, remains the envy of the world. Peoople in need of quality health care, from over the world arrive in the U.S. every day to become patients at Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic, and Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, Cornell University Medical Center and many other outstanding medical facilities found in many parts of America. People rich and poor, from democracies and dictatorships seek to avail themselves of America’s quality health care systems and facilities. Should a poorly designed, misguided piece of federal legislation prevent this migration to the United States for the best of reasons? Curing disease and preserving life?
Let us let physicians continue to practice medicine. Let hospitals provide the best of care, through collaboration and compromise, innovation, technological advances, improved management practices and competitive cost realities. The private sector in America will and must take the lead to ensure the fundamental improvements needed in our health care system. Government has now very successfully proven that health care should not be a political football. Too many lives, in a nation with a large aging demographic, cannot afford nor endure such government intrusion. Remember prohibition did not work either.
The United States is now really at the crossroads regarding health care. This administration and its political obsession with, power and control may have not improved our health care system, but created real chaos. We shall see.
Leonard Hoyt says
Editor,
I full agree with this article. How can congress expect young people to sign up for Obama plans when most are either in college or out of work because of the economy and not earning any money to pay the premiums of Obamacare.
Young people either need to earn the money or given the money to pay the premiums. To earn it you must work and in most parts of the Country there is no work.
The economy and work should have been the first priority be fore Obamacare was started.
Tom Timberman says
Editor,
Let’s see, the Affordable Care Act is the first comprehensive national health legislation since Medicare and Medicaid. The Bush Administration’s $780 billion prescription aid for the most vulnerable was national, but simpler, focused on one deliverable. Parts of the ACA have been introduced over the past several years to praise and low levels of cavil particularly from those millions whose children were over 18 and had no coverage or those additional millions with a pre-existing condition that prevented them from finding reasonably priced coverage. These and other benefits already exist.
And then 41 days ago, the web site intended to allow tens of millions to sign up for insurance imploded. To say the IT preparations were wholly and completely inadequate is a gigantic understatement. Whoever was involved in designing, constructing and testing the system deserves all the opprobrium they are receiving. I seriously and sincerely hope they get it right by the end of this month.
That being said, the major goal of the ACA was not to breath life into a new and more marvelous web site with dozens of electrifying apps and manipulations. It was to allow 35-40 million people, mostly poor, get reasonably priced health care insurance that provided certain basic essential coverage. If you paid more, i.e. silver and platinum you got more, but no one should be excluded. That intent has not changed.
Since the ACA’s passage, certain extremists vocally and raucously disagreed with the Administration’s goal, that is to provide affordable health care coverage to tens of millions of poor Americans. They challenged it before the Supreme Court, and lost. They rounded up TPX governors and state legislators and prevented Medicare from being expanded (at little or no cost to the states) , thus denying tens of millions of Americans who unfortunately live in those states from gaining access to the ACA.
These same politicians were thrilled when the unfortunate website was still born. See they said, it’s a complete and total disaster. And what about those people,they shout, who weren’t able to keep their sub-standard existing coverage. The President lied to us, he said that wouldn’t happen they scream. No doubt he should have been clearer, but it was an election year. I know, I know only extremists are righteous politicians. However, had anyone of these individuals gone on line they would have found the explanation. You get to keep the insurance you have if it contains the basic ingredients as stipulated by the law.
It’s probably worth remembering at this point that these same people and their antecedents for decades have tried to bring down Social Security and more recently Medicare and Medicaid.
What would have happened three or four years ago if these extremists and their fellow-travelers, or enough of them, had agreed with the Administration’s premise, i.e. let’s enable tens of millions of poor people to get medical coverage, most for the first time, and then worked to help the folks on the other side of the aisle who were drafting the legislation, identify the kinks and help to make it better. However, when you’re dedicated to wrecking rather than correcting and destroying rather than building, this is what you get.
Anyway, let me finish my harangue with a quote from Jimmy Carter, which should challenge all of us: ” If you don’t want your tax dollars to help the poor — then stop saying you want a country based on Christian Values, because you don’t”.
Tom Timberman
Nicholas Stoer says
Editor,
It is hard to tell if the author is a dormitory or a lobbyist, but the professional anti-ACA flavor in the Op-Ed comes through clearly. This week, Gene Lyons, a syndicated writer in Arkansas, took issue with the superficial press coverage about people having insurance cancelled. I will include the link to his article below – it was in today’s Star-Democrat. Fletcher Hall seems to qualify for the superficial team. The health insurance industry has been planning to game the ACA every since it was enacted. They have sold dirt cheap policies with terrible coverage for several years. Now they are cancelling them. hey are trying to sell new, overpriced policies outside the state and federal exchanges to avoid price and feature comparisons. A classic bait-and-switch tactic. Lyons’ article note that Humana has been sanctioned by at least four states for these and similar tactics. Read Lyons’ article and draw your own conclusions.
Yesterday’s announcement about expanded mental health coverage is also a feature of the ACA, one of the many features of the ACA that the Op-Ed ignores. Here is the link: https://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/media-misses-full-health-insurance-story/Content?oid=3098198
Peter Buxtun says
Editor,
I can’t muster the energy to offer a rebuttal right now, but I am linking a pretty good Op-Ed article which perfectly refutes Mr. Halls arguments. Pertinent excerpts below:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/11/how-the-tea-party-s-apocalyptic-politics-are-destroying-the-republican-party.html
“Although the issues are secular, the prophets’ anti-Obamacare rhetoric rings with religious, end-times cadences. So to understand why they invoke chaos, we need to know where their ideas about an “apocalypse” came from.
For these apocalyptic prophets, the issues aren’t even political anymore; they’re existential, with Obamacare serving as the avatar for all evil. In this construct, any compromise whatsoever leads to damnation, and therefore the righteous ends justify any means.
Now if you are battling the forces of evil for the very survival of the nation, there can be no retreat, no compromise, and no deals. Like the Jewish zealots at Masada, it’s better to commit glorious suicide than make peace with the devil. There can be no truce with the Tea Party because its apocalyptic zealots can never take “yes” for an answer.
Since the apocalyptists cannot compromise, they must be beaten. President Obama and congressional Democrats seem to have finally grasped this fact, and are learning how to deal with them. By refusing to knuckle under to extortion in the government shutdown drama, Obama exposed their reckless radicalism and won resoundingly.
But Democrats can’t solve this problem alone. To bring any semblance of order back to the American political system and restore a functioning two-party system, the GOP has to find its own equilibrium. Thankfully, this process has already begun.”
Pete Buxtun
James Nick says
Editor:
OMG, doctors are leaving, hospitals are closing, companies are reducing hours, the citizenry is in revolt. The best health system in the world is under assault. Sacrebleu!!!!! Katie bar the door… Run for your lives. The inmates are running the asylum.
I go back and forth trying to decide if Mr. Hall really believes all the scare-mongering nonsense he posts or if he is just the local, self-appointed, bomb throwing agent provocateur. His rant isn’t really about Obamacare, of course. He clearly sees himself as a fifth-columnist doing his bit to sabotage President Obama at every turn. To him, President Obama can’t get out of the right side of his bed in the morning.
Ok, so the rollout of the healthcare website has had start up problems. It would have been better if it hadn’t. But the problems are being blown out of proportion… if you can imagine that. The ACA is much more than a website intended to service the 5% or so of population shopping for insurance in the individual marketplace. To declare the entire law a failure six weeks after turning on the website is premature and purposely over-wrought. At the time, it would be the equivalent of demanding NASA pull the plug on going to moon after the fatal Apollo I fire or to terminate the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster. Staying with the space program metaphor, President Kennedy could be paraphrased here by the current administration declaring that “We choose to reform health care in this decade and do the other things. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard”.
The fact is, the ACA is almost always mischaracterized as health care reform. While significant parts of the law are aimed at substituting outcomes-based fee structures for the current fee-for-service model that induces high prices by hospitals and unnecessary procedures by doctors, the bulk of the law, and the part that is getting the most attention, is health insurance reform. Fundamentally, the law seeks to set up free market competition to lower prices while controlling the profit motive that can limit how and how long a person is managed in our health care system. A law, by the way, that originated at the conservative Heritage Foundation that even included the individual mandate. Stated another way, the law is attempting to make sure insurance payments actually go toward legitimate, non-redundant treatment and not into year-end bonuses for insurance executives who denied coverage to the most people or to hospitals who got to use their new whiz-bang, multi-megabuck diagnostic gizmo the most.
The quality of our medical facilities and doctors is not really an issue here. Mr. Hall offers that sleight of hand only to distract and agitate. He voices only a reflexive, knee-jerk response to everything Obama to the point where he and other conservatives no longer have any credibility.
One last thought. Mutual assured destruction (MAD), ie, you can’t destroy us without being destroyed yourself, was the de facto policy adopted by the US and the former Soviet Union that effectively prevented global nuclear warfare. It has also been an accepted principal by our two political parties in Congress for most of our history that actually used to allow this country to be governed. But the Republicans in Congress these days seem to have shredded the rule book. Do they really expect that if/when they regain control of the Senate and/or the White House the Democrats will or should cooperate with them after their vendetta to destroy President Obama and the agenda he was twice elected to enact?
Bill Parks says
Editor,
“Getting to the nut of the health care disaster”, is getting greedy for-profit insurance companies out of the doctors’ offices. For the average citizen, “the health care system in the United States, even with its faults, remains the envy of the world” – if you live in Slovenia rated 39th in the world. But if you live in Costa Rica ranked 37th, you are one step up on the U.S., being ranked 38th by the World Health Organization. But the United States does rank number one in health care costs, thanks to greed, and those, like Fletcher Hall, who champion it.
Steve Payne says
Editor:
I can’t refute these many claims any better than some of the others already have. I would like to point out they sound familiar to many because they are part of an actual stratgey launched by the GOP:
https://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/10/new-gop-playbook-obamacare-old-gop-playbook-everything-else/70885/
https://www.scribd.com/doc/182692863/House-Republican-Obamacare-Playbook