Saturday, June 13, 2009

So-Called Healthcare reform is actually, "kill the healthcare" reform

It looks like President Obama, once again, doesn't have the first idea about how the Healthcare system works. In his weekly address, he said he'd found 303billion dollars that would be one part of the 600billion healthcare reform.

Of course, this is coming from a man who has never worked in the medical field, has never visited a public hospital, nor can he obviously balance the federal checkbook. I'm going to take a few things from the article and put them into perspective.

In his address Saturday, Obama refers to a 10-year total of more than $600 billion in “savings” for health care. However, he does not explain in his latest comments that, under his revised budget released last month, $326 billion of that amount would come from tax hikes on Americans making over $250,000 a year, “loophole closers,” and higher fees for some government services.

What this means is 1) He's going to raise the taxes on people making 250 thousand a year. In my opinion, this is stupid, because those people who make 250 thousand, work themselves to the bone to earn that money. Most of the people who earn that kind of cash, donate to charity.
(If you close the loopholes, they may decide not to donate.) Honestly, I think it'd be easier if they dropped the graduated tax nightmare that is our current system and would go to a flat 10-15% sales tax. Just between us, when you tax people for making money, you are punishing them for going after the American Dream, and if you tax them too hard, you'll discourage them from even working.

The bulk of the new $313 billion in savings would come from cutting or reducing the growth of payments to hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers and laboratories — though the major cuts don't target doctors.

Oh yippee yay, you won't pay the hospitals (ie, the nurses, radiology departments, lab departments,) the medical equipment manufactureres, or outside laboratories, but you will keep paying the doctors. For crying out loud, if you don't pay the hospitals, equipment manufacturers, or labs, then the doctors will have to practice out of their cars, because without the payments to the hospitals, the nurses, lab techs, and xray techs will look for other jobs, and leave the doctors to do everything themselves, and those of us who have worked in hospitals, know that most doctors never show up in the hospitals, and wouldn't know a blood pressure cuff, from a CBC lab test. Nor would they be able to take xrays, or carry out the lab tests themselves. So in effect, you'd be chasing off the people who do the real work.

Over the next decade, $110 billion is slated to come from reducing reimbursements to take account of what Orszag described as the ability of providers to improve their efficiency. “Health care services should be able to achieve and do achieve productivity improvements over time,” he said. According to a fact sheet released by the White House, future increases in such Medicare payments would be reduced based on an assumption that health care providers achieve half the productivity increases seen elsewhere in the economy.

What does he think this is, an automotive manufacturing plant? Of course hospitals will only be able to achieve half the productivity increases, that because nursing is a full time job, and in more severe cases, one nurse can only take care of one patient at a time. The same goes for surgeries, and major trauma. Medicine isn't an assembly line project. The doctor has to see them, order tests, interpret the tests, and make a decision on their condition, before he can say that they will survive or not. A typical motor vehicle accident that arrives at a hospital takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour (per person) before the doctor can clear them from backboards, or send them home. It's not as easy as "can you feel my fingers, okay you can go."
Surgeries are even more labor intensive, and even the easiest one can not be finished in 30 minutes.

For this administration to think that they can fix it like this, just shows that they don't know what they are talking about. Maybe they should have to be a patient in a local county hospital for a day.

I hate to tell you, but in the last 14 years, the average payment from medicare has dropped from 100% to 40% and that makes it harder to hire staff, and keep them employed. People in the medical field, are just like everyone else. They want a stable job, want cost of living increases, and want to chase the American Dream, but when you cut the cost from Medicare/insurance, etc, a full time position gets changed to part time, and they lose money. For some reason, this doesn't work when trying to keep employees.

So, what's going to happen? Will the government only be happy when the illegal immigrants have insurance, at the expense of the rest of us?

I'll readily admit that I'm not a politician, and hence use common sense, but to me it seems that the dwellers of malaria infested DC don't actually care about us. They only care about lining their own pockets and selling our future to our enemies. However, not once has any of them said, "I don't need 110thousand a year, so I'll vote against the automatic pay raise."