by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, www.nofica.com
The Democrats and the Republicans each have sabotaged American health care, though in different ways.
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Before we discuss the sabotage, here is a bit of background:
In one sense, health care for Americans is a fairly simple concept. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, other health care workers, and pharmaceutical companies do the actual work.
No one has suggested that be changed. The entire battle in Congress concerns just one question: Who pays for it?
The real question: “Who pays?”
No one is opting for “socialized medicine.”
Though that is an epithet deceptively used by those who despise all forms of federal spending, socialized medicine would involve government ownership of hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, with doctors and nurses being government employees.
Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA, Obamacare) are not socialized medicine. The closest we have to socialism in America are such functions as our public schools, police, fire departments, public parks, the military, and the Veterans’ Administration, wherein all parts of the program are government owned and directed, and the employees are government workers.
Socialism is not government paying for things. Socialism is government ownership.
All of the current controversy regarding the “repeal and replace” of Obamacare has to do with one, simple little question: Who pays?
There are three methods of paying: Some American people can pay the doctors, hospitals, etc. directly. But for the vast majority of us, the cost of treatment for serious illnesses would be unaffordable.
Even the most basic healthcare – annual checkups – can be beyond many people’s budgets.
So, we created a second system: We and/or our employers pay indirectly. We pay insurance companies, which in turn pay the health care providers.
But there are three problems with that indirect system:
Health care insurance companies are middlemen, providing no health care services
- The insurance companies are nothing more than middlemen. They do not provide health care. They simply accept money from the public, remove their profits, and pay what’s left to the health care providers. This system adds extra middleman costs beyond the health care costs.
- People who already are sick, cannot buy insurance at an affordable rate.
- Poorer people cannot afford insurance at all.
The first two systems – American’s paying directly, or insurance companies paying as middlemen, both ultimately require the people to pay.
The result has been that too many Americans either have been doing without health care, so they sicken and lead lives of misery, or die early. Or they are left financially destitute.
Not only is this inhumane, especially in the wealthiest nation on earth, but allowing people to sicken puts a drag on the economy and so, negatively affects us all.
There is a third system: The federal government pays. This is known as “single-payer,” which is as opposed to the current multiple-payer system.
Fortunately, we live in a Monetarily Sovereign nation, in which the federal government (unlike state and local governments) has the unlimited ability to create dollars.
The federal government never can run short of its sovereign dollars.
The federal government is not like state and local governments. It uniquely creates dollars, ad hoc, by spending dollars.
The federal government does not spend tax dollars. Taxpayers do not pay for federal spending. The federal government actually creates brand new dollars, ad hoc, every time it pays a bill.
When you are paid by the federal government, it sends instructions (not dollars) to your bank, in the form of a check or a wire. These instructions tell your bank to increase the balance in your checking account.
The federal government doesn’t send dollars. It sends instructions.
The instructions to your banks are: “Pay to the order of [your name]. That tells your bank to increase your checking account balance by the amount indicated on the check.
At the moment your bank does as the federal government instructs, brand new dollars are created and added to the nation’s money supply.
The federal government’s instructions always clear because they are approved by the Federal Reserve Bank, which is owned by the government. Thus, the federal government can create endless dollars because it approves its own checks. That is why no federal check ever has bounced or ever will bounce. The government writes the rules.
No tax dollars are not involved in the instructions. Unlike the monetarily non-sovereign state and local governments, which do use tax dollars, the federal government neither needs nor uses any form of income.
Even if the federal government didn’t collect a single dollar in taxes, it could continue paying its bills, forever.
The federal government has the power to completely eliminate the FICA tax and still fund Social Security and Medicare into perpetuity.
The federal government can cut out the middleman
So, the federal government, having this unlimited ability to pay bills, can eliminate the middle men (the insurance companies) and pay all the doctors, nurses, hospitals, other health care workers, and pharmaceutical companies, and do it without collecting a dime in taxes.
The federal government has the power to fund a comprehensive, no-deductible Medicare plan for every man, woman, and child in America, and even include long-term care – all at no cost to the American public.
It has the power to do this without collecting a penny in taxes, because it creates new dollars every time it pays a bill.
The Democrats’ Sabotage of the health care system:
The Democrats commit their sabotage of the health care system by pretending that the federal government needs and spends tax dollars (aka “The Big Lie.“)
While state and local governments do need and spend tax dollars, the federal government does not. But the average citizen doesn’t understand the difference.
So the Democrats designed a plan (Romneycare, Obamacare) that feigns the need for taxpayer dollars. It unnecessarily copies private insurance by forcing healthy people to pay in advance for coverage later.
That is known as the “Individual Mandate,” wherein you either must pay for private health care insurance or pay a fine which supposedly would be used to fund Obamacare.
For a Monetarily Sovereign nation’s plan, the individual mandate not only is wholly unnecessary, but it provides a false basis for objecting to Obamacare. The supposed need for the individual mandate sabotages American health care.
The Big Lie makes Obamacare unnecessarily complex
Because of The Big Lie, that federal taxes are needed to pay for federal spending, Obamacare was created as a complex, convoluted Rube Goldbergian mess, almost incomprehensible to all but the most astute policy wonks.
By contrast, a simple program providing comprehensive Medicare to everyone would require much less labor and far less misunderstanding by the public and by health care providers.
The Republicans’ Sabotage of the health care system
In addition to duplicating the Democrats’ Big Lie that taxpayers fund federal spending, the Republicans go much further.
The Trump administration has actively sabotaged Obamacare at many levels. The Secretary of The Department of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, has converted his department from an agency that helps people acquire health care into a powerful, ACA-sabotaging force.
The Department’s function now has transitioned into denial of medical aid to the poor.
Tom Price Open To Waiving Obamacare’s Individual Mandate
The move by the Health and Human Services secretary would hobble the Obamacare exchanges.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price would not rule out Sunday the possibility of using his regulatory authority to waive the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate that requires all Americans to buy health insurance or pay a tax.
The mandate may result in higher individual costs for Americans who previously went without health insurance, but it also functions as a check on overall costs for people who get their coverage on Obamacare’s individual insurance exchanges by bringing healthy people into the risk pool.
Eliminating the mandate unilaterally is liable to create chaos in the individual exchanges as insurers scramble to offset the departure of healthy enrollees.
By pretending that the federal government cannot afford to pay for health care, the Democrats created the individual mandate. Then the Republicans, continuing to mouth the Big Lie, wish to eliminate the individual mandate, but not replace it with federal funding.
For seven years, the Republicans tried to kill Obamacare and the many millions who depend on it, by voting it out of existence. While that has not worked, they currently try to destroy the program by starving it of funds.
Price has already taken action to effectively discourage enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges. Under his leadership, HHS has used funds earmarked for promoting the Affordable Care Act to blast it on social media and downplay the law’s benefits on the federal agency’s website
Price declined to comment on the possibility that HHS would withhold cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers that subsidize exchange plans for Americans with incomes under 250 percent of the federal poverty level.
Trump implied that he would hold the payments hostage to a successful Obamacare repeal bill. Previous threats not to proceed with the payments sent tremors through the insurance markets.
Ending them would prompt insurers to increase premiums for typical plans by 19 percent, on average, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and create major disorder in the exchanges.
President Trump has stated he would “allow” Obamacare to implode, but he has gone well beyond “allow.” This is outright sabotage, intentional and intense.
The billionaire President actively is trying to destroy the only health care plan for the poor.
The Democrats have sabotaged health care for the poor, out of a combination of ignorance and cowardice. Those Dems who understand Monetary Sovereignty simply are afraid to explain it to the populous, lest they falsely are accused of being “socialists.”.
In contrast, the Republicans sabotage health care out of animus. As the “Party of the Rich,” the GOP will do everything possible to widen the Gap between the rich and the poor.
Watch for Trump/GOP sabotage of the poor to get worse and worse, until health care for the poor disappears in America.
This is the American disgrace.
