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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (14694)	3/18/2010 2:39:17 AM
From: FR1	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Nobody is even mentioning the major problems that will come with ObamaCare from outside what is obvious. 1) In ObamaCare the government will be in charge of designing and enforcing the medical insurance pools. As Obama said "Well of course the government will set the minimum standards that the health insurance industry has to abide by." This means that 250 years of developing an actuary science to determine insurance rates will be thrown out the window and replaced by a bureaucrat who knows absolutely nothing at all about the medical industry. The politician will pick a number and that will be it. Since there is no tort reform the number will be crazy and meaningless. No insurance company will be able to survive this and so the government will take over everything. 2) This also means that our drug industry is toast. The way you pay for drugs is through medical insurance. From now on, the government, not the market, will be deciding on how much should be paid for drugs. Consequently no drug company can invest in drug research unless the government pays for the research in advance because the drug companies do not know if they can charge enough for a drug to recoup their research when they finally get to the finish line. Of course everyone knows the answer is no. So our drug companies will become pill manufacturing units. There will be a tiny amount of research in universities and some money given to the drug companies that the political party in power likes (ie those that contribute to their party). The productivity of the drug industry will fall off a cliff. 3) Not only will the government be in charge of all the hospitals and all the drug companies but they are also in charge of all the suppliers to this industry such as the medical device makers. Nobody will be able to do research without getting money or guarantees for payment in advance from the government because there is no market. The bottom line is that the productivity of our entire economy will take a major hit because of the above items plus the fact that we have a huge huge new federal bureacracy to feed. And that brings up a major problem: People are kind of like governments in that people have credit cards and governments have bonds. If you have a $30,000 credit card balance but you earn $180,000/year you can probably survive. With a government you can issue tons and tons of bonds as long as you, like the individual, have a large cash flow. If the individual with the $180,000 job suddenly gets their income slashed to $50,000 they will not be able to service their debt and they are basically bankrupt. The same thing will happen to the USA. Our productivity will fall off a cliff and we will simply not be able to service our debt. It is already happening now because we are at our limit and issuing bonds to pay for bonds coming up for redemption. When productivity takes a major hit the politicians will first jack taxes up to the roof and do things like VAT taxes to try to make up for the shortfall but that will fail because you simply cannot squeeze water out of a rock. Another thought to consider: the supporters of ObamaCare say that health care is a right and therefore the government needs to take it over. Using the same reasoning you can say that food and shelter are even more of a human right because you will die without food. Therefore the government should take over the supermarkets. Great civilizations all rot from within. We had a great run because we were founded on the idea that the people owned the country and, with the constitution, we granted the government very limited powers. After 250 years the socalists have finally won and the government has now become the controller of the people. Oh yeah...the fundamental reason why we failed: This can best be expressed in a question: "Do the citizens of a democracy have the right to know how accurate the news is?" Think about it. A democracy is based on the idea that we have journalists and they tell the public in a unbiased and accurate way what the news is so the public can discuss it and vote. We made the mistake of turning this duty over to the advertising companies and we left absolutely noting in place to make sure they did their job. Ad companies, in a sentence, are in the business of broadcasting and printing the maximum number of ads to the largest possible audience at the highest cost per ad to the advertiser and at the lowest production expense. This means you promote the causes that riles the public the most which means promote socalism, etc.