American Elephants

We recently demonstrated how free-market medicine works with a post about the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which is a shining example. ObamaCare, on the other hand, is the left’s attempt to gradually funnel us all into single-payer, government-run health care.

Please note that ObamaCare is not about health, nor is it about medicine. It is about insurance and who pays for what. They tell us that ObamaCare will reduce costs and promise you all sorts of free goodies. Obama partly won the election by promising free contraceptives. (Well, of course they are not free because the rest of us will have to pay for them. I should clarify that: the young women who are getting “free” contraceptives will be paying for the “free contraceptives” of all the women in the country who are using contraceptives. Probably paying more than the $9.00 a month’s supply costs at a discount pharmacy. But I guess that’s how you learn about basic economics.

ObamaCare: think of it this way — draw two stick figures with a space between. Label one ‘patient‘ and the other ‘doctor.’ Between the two stick figures, draw a small box. Label that ‘insurance companies‘. Then above the small box, draw a much bigger box. Label that one, oh, just ‘government’ to represent the over 100 agencies and offices and euphemistically named bureaus that will supervise and control the patients and the doctors, the insurance companies, the pharmacies, the suppliers, the hospitals. All those agencies have who-knows-how-many employees who all have salaries which are excessive, except by DC standards. That little exercise alone should tell you that ObamaCare is going to cost a lot more. Yet ObamaCare is all supposedly about how much it will save you. (Not really, it is really about making you dependent on liberal government, so you will always vote for liberals.)

So, while free-market medicine is about competition and creativity, innovation and plain old American free enterprise, ObamaCare is about folding you into the arms of bureaucracy, where you will forever be dependent on government, until they decide that it costs too much.  Medicine becomes not a matter of the care a doctor gives to a patient, but for the physicians, it becomes a matter of trying to get paid enough to cover costs. For hospitals and suppliers, it becomes a matter of trying to cut costs to comply with government budgets.  The British NHS provides a running example of what we will become in time. To wit:

A BID to save nearly £3billion by slashing appointments with a doctor and treating patients via computer will put lives at risk, ministers were warned.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is planning a technological revolution that could spell the end of the traditional doctor’s surgery.

A new system of “virtual clinics” is being planned in which GPs connect with patients via iPads and Skype, an idea that NHS bosses are importing from India.

The reforms would save £2.9 billion “almost immediately” and improve the lives of most patients, for example by avoiding the need to find child care during appointments, Health Minister Dr Dan Poulter said last week.

However, critics are concerned the initiative would create a two-tier NHS in which the less technologically able, particularly the elderly, would be left behind….

The ideas, contained in a Health Department report called Digital First, include arming community nurses with iPads in rural areas and making more use of Skype video calling between GPs and patients. There will be more online assessments “augmented” with video calls.

Mobile phone “apps” will be used to access lab reports and health records and negative test results will be sent by text messages rather than delivered in person. Mr Hunt, who made a fortune by creating an internet company, believes that while mobile broadband technology is revolutionising most walks of life, there is a problem once ­people encounter the relatively antiquated systems of the NHS.

The Government is trying to fill a £20 billion NHS funding gap and health chiefs want to reduce “needless” appointments that clog up staff time.

Well, the NHS has kept patients parked in ambulances outside hospitals because they can have only a specified number of admissions a day, they’ve conveniently offed seniors in their final years with ‘”do not resuscitate ” notes on the charts, cut back on cleaning and linen changing and drinking water and food. The battle has become — how to cut costs, not patient care and saving lives.

The innovation and inventiveness that produce savings are eliminated by the overweening bloated weight of bureaucracy, once established, is always seeking more power and more control, and attempting to reduce the costs that they themselves created with their processes.