SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY

• Insurance companies are evil and must be stopped from screwing Americans.
• The healthcare plan will reduce deficits by $136 billion in the 1^st ten years and $1 trillion in the 2^nd ten years.
• The healthcare plan will reduce Medicare waste by $500 billion.
• The biggest middle class tax cut for healthcare in history.

Even the pea brained pundits on CNBC know the stock market is a discounting mechanism that looks forward 6 to 12 months. With Obama blaming insurance companies for everything that is wrong with our healthcare system and declaring an end to their reign of terror, you would think their stocks would reflect a miserable future. The five biggest insurance companies in the country are dancing in the aisles of Congress over this plan. It is funny how their stocks have doubled the market while Obama declares he is going to stick it to them. Considering insurance company and drug company lobbyists wrote large portions of the bill, maybe Obama was stretching the truth, just a little.

The truth is that Obamacare will increase budget deficits, increase costs for everyone, decrease levels of service, increase wait times for procedures, and drive doctors out of the profession. Only a delusional liberal ideologue could believe that throwing 32 million people into the healthcare system could possibly reduce costs. Democrats specifically wrote the bill in a way to manipulate the CBO scoring system. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the CBO director from 2003 to 2005, knows all the tricks of the trade. His honest assessment of the bill concludes that the federal deficit will increase by $562 billion. The major deceptions in the healthcare bill are as follows:

• The bill declares it will trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress will continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers. With an anticipated 200,000 doctor shortage by 2020, Congress will never make these cuts.
• To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office's tabulation.
• $70 billion in premiums are expected to be raised in the first 10 years for the legislation's new long-term health care insurance program. This money is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits it is intended to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they appear nowhere in the cost of the legislation.
• The bill uses $53 billion in anticipated higher Social Security taxes to offset health care spending. Social Security revenues are expected to rise as employers shift from paying for health insurance to paying higher wages. But if workers have higher wages, they will also qualify for increased Social Security benefits when they retire. So the extra money raised from payroll taxes is already spoken for. It cannot be used for lowering the deficit.

These are just the costs that were purposely misrepresented in the healthcare bill. The unintended consequences in a 2,400 page bill that was not read by the people who voted for it will be immeasurable. The Bill will bring 32 million high usage people into the healthcare system and force insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Sounds like a humane thing to do. The last time I looked, insurance companies are for-profit entities. If they are forced to take on riskier customers, they will increase premiums on all their customers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, insurance premiums will double in the next few years. The bill will do nothing to lessen that increase. Obama pays for large swaths of the bill by taxing people making over $200,000 and imposing fees on drug manufacturers, health insurers, and medical device manufacturers. The rich will change their behavior to avoid these taxes. It seems ironic that many of the Americans that earn more than $200,000 per year are doctors. The corporations will pass along the fees and taxes to the consumers of their products.

It is clear that prices for all forms of healthcare will be going up. At least we can be sure that services levels and care will decline while wait times for service go up. A survey in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that 46% of doctors may give up their practice in the wake of this bill. There is no doubt that many doctors will choose to shrink their patient loads or retire. In Massachusetts, after the passage of Romneycare, the wait to see a primary-care physician increased from 33 to 52 days. Surely adding 159 new programs, thousands of new rules and regulations, and a boatload of government bureaucrats will improve healthcare for all. According to a recent report by the Association of American Medical Colleges:

• There are currently 700,000 doctors in the U.S. today. That is one doctor for every 450 people.
• With the rapidly aging population, the need for doctors would have been 860,000 by 2025.
• With the passage of universal healthcare, the need will be 910,000 by 2025.
• The number of people graduating from Medical school has been flat at 16,000 per year since 1980.
• The supply of doctors will only be 750,000 in 2025.
• Approximately 53% of all the doctors in the US are over 50 years old.
• Only 1% of doctors under 35 are in General Practice, while 47% of those over 50 years old are in General Practice.

Doctors will face greater workloads, lower reimbursements and still be subject to frivolous lawsuits by ambulance chasers, as the Democrats surprisingly chose not to address medical malpractice lawsuits. The fact that 96% of the contributions from the Trial Lawyers of America go to the Democratic Party couldn't have had an impact on Democrats not addressing this issue in a 2,400 page "reform" bill. Despite the future doctor shortage, higher premiums, longer wait times, more paperwork, and boards of bureaucrats deciding your treatment, at least you have the comfort of knowing the IRS will be enforcing the 2,400 pages of rules and regulations with threats of fines and imprisonment. The IRS is well known for their extreme competence and ability to enforce rules and regulations. There are already 100,000 pencil pushing, mouth breathing thugs occupying the offices of the IRS. They are so efficient in their existing endeavors that it is estimated that they have somehow not collected $354 billion of taxes that they are owed. They now have the green light to hire 16,500 more hooligan enforcement agents to crack skulls if you fail to purchase government healthcare. Thomas Sowell sums up the fantasy that only a liberal intellectual could believe:

"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it."

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant."

H.L. Mencken

The paranoia is in bloom,
The PR, the transmissions, will resume,
They'll try to push drugs to keep us all dumbed down,
And hope that we will never see the truth around,
SO COME

H.L. Mencken was a renowned newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Sun from 1906 until 1948. His biting sarcasm seem to fit perfectly in today's world. His acerbic satirical writings on government, democracy, politicians and the ignorant masses are as true today as they were then. I believe the reason his words hit home is because he was writing during the last Unraveling and Crisis periods in America. The similarities cannot be denied. The Roaring Twenties of decadence, financial crisis caused by loose Fed monetary policies, stock market crash, Depression, colossal government redistribution of wealth, and ultimately a World War all occurred during his prime writing years. I know people want to believe that the world only progresses, but they are wrong. The cycles of history reveal that people do not change, just the circumstances change. How Americans react to the undulations of history depends upon their age and generational position. Mencken captured the essence of American politics and a disconnected populace 80 years ago. Even though many people today feel the average American is less intelligent, more materialistic, and less informed than ever before, it was just as true in 1930 based on Mencken's assessment:

"The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

You can make your own judgment on the accuracy of his statement. His appraisal of U.S. Senators and citizens in our so-called Democracy captures the spirit of the travesty that occurred in Washington DC over the last month:

"Democracy gives the beatification of mediocrity a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world--that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebacks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power--which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters -- which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy."

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