HEALTH CARE IN THE UNITED STATES
The legal "protection" (extortion) racket in place today.
Placed on this website on August 12, 2008.
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The various mafias that started organized crime began to invest money in legal (but often immoral) enterprises as they accumulated greater wealth. They preferred to invest in sure things such as services that people could not do without. Health care was and is one of those services. Health care is needed for survival and health insurance companies make excessive profits which can be loaned to the government to increase the national debt. Congress will not interfere because its members need the dollars for pork barrel spending.
In many locations, hospitals are monopolies - and in other locations, they are so few that they may act like monopolies. This is something that also appeals to the mafia mentality.
1. Hospitals, doctors, testing labs, etc. routinely bill those who cannot afford health insurance - at a rate that is more than double the actual cost of services rendered.
2. Hospitals refuse to provide a list of prices for services so that the first time one discovers how much these services cost is billing time. For those without health insurance, the bill is far in excess of the actual cost of the services. For instance, if hospital personnel are asked what the room is costing the patient, they refuse to answer and do not come back to be asked again. Calling the billing department results a runaround, and the patient is not allowed to escape.
3. The agencies mentioned do not bill until many months have passed, hoping that the patients will have fuzzy memories at billing time and will not realize that they are being billed for many services which were never rendered. Overcharging, charging twice for one service (double billing), and billing for services not rendered are the norm. Hospitals have become criminal rackets.
4. The health insurers make their money by overcharging for health insurance and underpaying for services rendered. The uninsured are the ones who shoulder the costs for the services.
What follows is a letter sent to various politicians in February, 2002. Since that time things have not improved and have, in fact, become worse. Needless to say the politicians did not even answer the letters, much less do anything about the problem.
The war on terrorism is important, but there are other matters of equal import that must be addressed if we are to maintain a republic in which living is worth the effort. Of these, our healthcare debacle is one of the foremost. Its whole structure is a cancer on the face of our nation.
In case you do not already know, HMOs and similar health insurance companies demand that hospitals, testing labs, and doctors accept 40% of the amount they bill as payment for their services. This is standard practice. It means that a hospital room, for instance, may be billed at $1,000 per day while the HMO pays only $400 per day. Truthfully, a hospital room should cost about $400 per day, but the rate is inflated to $1,000 because the hospital administrators know that they will be cut back to 40% by each HMO. This is typical of all services furnished, including testing.
When HMOs are approached for health insurance by older people, they inflate their rates or refuse to insure those applying. The result is that many of us have no health insurance whatsoever. This is bad enough, but it gets worse.
Those of us without health insurance are forced to either do without medical care of any kind or pay the inflated costs of the hospitals and the doctors. So those who have no health insurance and who must pay cash, are charged the $1,000 per day for a hospital room, while the HMOs are charged only the $400 per day.
This is even more unfair because the HMOs delay payment to those they owe, and force the hospitals and doctors to pay a staff to manage their billing to the HMOs and to argue their case. So the cash customers, who do nothing to create extra staff members for the hospitals, testing labs, and doctors, are paying 2.5 times as much as the greedy, God-forsaken HMOs.
Perhaps this cannot all be cured at once, but one thing that can be done is to create legislation that levels the playing field by insisting that the actual amounts paid to hospitals, testing labs, and doctors by the health insurers be NO LESS than the amounts paid by the cash customers. In fact, the reality is that the cash customers should be given a discount below that which the HMOs pay. Furthermore, the hospitals, testing labs, and doctors should be forced to divulge their prices in advance and in plain language, and there should be sizable penalties for double billing, billing without explaining the reason for the bill, and any other forms of corruption in which they currently indulge.
In hopes that you will strongly encourage and sign appropriate legislation,
SignatureThe National Review addressed this problem in their August 4, 2008, issue with a book review, The Right Remedies written by Richard Nadler. Some of the paragraphs from the review follow.
As chairman of Golden Rule Insurance, [J. Patrick] Rooney built an empire on individual health insurance policies. He was a close student of health-care economics, and he concluded that the laws passed to promote universal coverage had quite the opposite effect. Indeed, the whole system was structurally tilted to favor those institutionally protected, while forcing others out of the health-insurance market. High-premium, low-deductible policies meant higher profits for the insurance companies, and bigger commissions for the agents selling them. Medicare reimbursement based on plant as well as procedure encouraged a building binge in the hospital industry, just as it had in utilities. Legislation passed during the Clinton administration to force small businesses covering some employees to cover all drove many firms to eliminate health-care plans altogether.
The impetus of the entire system was to increase insurance prices, drive people out of the insurance market, and then gouge them with even higher prices while they were unprotected. The growth of the uninsured population (most of it neither elderly nor poor) would then form one political base in the demand for a "national" plan. The other base was business itself - those crushed by the double-digit inflation in employer-provided coverage, and those driven out of the market by mandate.
"Hospitals," wrote Rooney and Perrin, "are the trend-setters for the health-care industry." As major employers in almost every congressional district, and as institutions shrouded in a mantle of good works, they generate many increases in public-protector outlays (notably in Medicare) through capital spending. But they have kept their profits healthy by extorting the unprotected - the 27 million Americans with individual, rather than employer-provided, policies, and the 47 million with no insurance at all. "The unwritten rule," our authors write, "is to avoided uninsured when possible, and when not, to gouge them with prices three to five times higher than what others pay. Almost all our hospitals are doing this."
Those Americans not under the umbrella of Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided group coverage are systematically overcharged, not on the basis of their percentage of default, but on the basis of their insurance status alone. The uninsured and individually insured, who make up less than a quarter of the population, regularly generate one-third to one-half of hospital profits. It is this gouging of the unshielded that has enabled the health-care insurance industry to evolve seamlessly from a risk pool to an extortion racket...
The title of the book that Nadler reviewed is America's Health Care Crisis Solved by J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin. It is "a book of theory, a historical narrative, and a manual of practical advice. The reader who tackles it will come away richer, sometimes literally."
[Some of us had to learn these lessons the hard way - which is what happened with my wife and I when we were badly mauled financially by Marshall Hospital in Placerville, California. We learned our lesson and went heavily into alternative medicine, refusing to use the hospital any further than absolutely necessary. Many people we know have chosen this path for the same reasons. Marshall Hospital conformed perfectly to the mold given above and bullied their way into forcing payment that was at least 2.5 times the actual amount paid by HMOs. The hospital also attempted to bill us at least twice for some services and to bill for services not rendered. There was no way to properly expose the hospital as the state agency which should have been responsible could not legally go after the hospital for overcharging. A lawsuit is too expensive to consider as a rule. Unfortunately, Marshall Hospital is probably no worse in this regard than the other hospitals in Northern California. This became increasingly apparent when I was the co-executor the of my parent's estate and able to look at their past medical expenses.]
Universal Healthcare - 2009
It was discovered, after the "Stimulus" (spending) bill was passed by the predominantly communist U.S. Senate, that one of its provisions was for universal healthcare. The whole 647 page bill was presented originally in the House, then in the Senate, without time for anyone to adequately dig into it. It includes massive amounts of pork, much of it for the states that are primarily Democratic and none for the states that are primarily Republican. It was written surreptitiously behind closed doors as a means to put through every wish of the communists in our Congress. It was pushed through before anyone could discover the depth of its subterfuge.
One reason the old health insurance racket was never cleaned up by Congress was to make people want a new kind of healthcare system - one that the communists could use to forward their agenda. Communist legislation is almost never for incentives so that people want to do something. Instead, communism legislates for force to make people do something that is against their will.
The result of pushing through the spending bill - that will place the communists in a more powerful position and ruin our economy even further - is that Americans are beginning to realize that the communist triumverate (Pelosi, Reid, and Obama) cannot be trusted. Their true agenda is becoming even more apparent.
Universal healthcare as placed into law by the spending bill, forces everyone in the U.S. to have health care under the federal government. Under this plan, every health care provider must send the medical records of every one of their patients to the federal government. The federal government then decides who will be treated and who will not, what their treatment will be, when their treatment will be, who their doctors will be, and what facility will be used for their treatment.
On the surface this may sound just fine. Where it has been tried, it has often created a long line of recipients to be treated and treatment may or may not be of the quality desired. Furthermore, such a system creates a huge central power base (a government monopoly) which will be subject to the same politics found in any large bureaucracy and will cost more in taxes than even our current system. Such a huge bureaucracy creates many delays and problems that smaller, private systems do not. A huge black market in treatment will evolve very quickly under such a system. But the worst thing is that such a bureaucracy will eventually become a tool in the hands of the communists - to decide who lives and who dies, to blackmail and extort, and to keep track of where everyone is so that an American version of the KGB can find them.
Even if the current administration under Obama should strangely turn out to be benign, future administrations may not be. By choosing who can live and who can die, one can control which party is elected and which is not so that eventually there is a single-party system which is a dictatorship. With the new healthcare system, the government can know everything, including one's race, religion, political affiliation, income level, etc. This means that any of these known factors can be used to eliminate a segment of population by an administration headed by an individual who might want to eliminate a certain race, a certain religious group, a certain political group, or any other group that the leader deems to be a danger to him. The holocaust could happen all over again with different types of victims.
Other Comments
They got the airline pilots in 1991...now they will get the doctors ..
"But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
July 23, 2009
The healthcare bills (one in the House and the other in the Senate) now have over 1000 pages and are in the process of being discussed in both houses of Congress. Obama has been pushing for early passage, but since many Democrats now are balking, afraid that the recent public reaction will prevent their re-election, healthcare "reform" has been stalled for a time while the politicians take a longer look - and they might even read the bill on which they are voting - something they have not been doing. Obama knows that people are beginning to discover who he really is - and he is fighting to finish his secret agenda against the United States before he becomes impotent as a political force.
A poll in Science News that was taken from those who suffer from chronic disease (in Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the United States) showed that the socialist systems of healthcare were better thought of by their users than ours in the United States. Unfortunately, those polled were the ones who were still alive and the dead ones might have changed the results of the poll. Science News merely parrots what comes from other sources. The source in this case is 2008 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Sicker Adults. Those who were near death and were forced to come to the United States to survive were not polled as they were not suffering from chronic disease. Since the move began by Obama and the communist democrats to nationalize healthcare, a number of people from Canada, the U.K. and other nations with socialist healthcare have come forth and explained that a government-run healthcare system leads to less doctors and nurses, uncaring doctors and nurses, long waiting lists for needed care, poor diagnoses, rationed care, frequent death for the elderly since they are preferentially denied care, and often death for the young due to failure to gain timely treatment. As one Canadian said, "In the United States we are treated as patients while in Canada we are treated as numbers."
Bear in mind that older people are, on average, wiser than younger people and come from generations which were less brainwashed by UNESCO-type textbooks and teachers. The under-educated youth is much more easily manipulated. A healthcare system that eliminates the old and keeps the young is a great boon to the communists and their useful idiots. But remember, youngsters - you too will be old someday.
A government bureaucrat can be more easily bribed and a communist mole can be better installed in a government bureaucracy so that communist-oriented people can be treated and dissenters allowed to die. In Russia today we see this going on - the "dissenter is an enemy of the State."
September 25, 2009
Healthcare "reform" is still being pushed by B.O. A prototype bill from the House and another from the Senate are evidenced but the Democrats will not allow anyone to see either. The prototypes are in legal language rather than language most can understand. It must be put in even more legal language to become a bill. (Why did bills ever become things to be created by lawyers? Long ago engineers proved that their language, designed for people understand, was far superior.) At that point, the Democrats plan to push it through before it can be analyzed by those who can see its monetary implications, what it each part will cost, etc. In any case, it won't be transparent or placed in view for analyzing before it is rushed through. Last minute changes will be made as has been the case in every bill that has been pushed through.
There are the usual problems with funding it. Even though B.O. states that certain things are not in the bill, in reality they will be implemented.
1. It will be cover abortions because there is to be nothing saying that it cannot cover them.
2. It will take money from Medicare and will therefore take away care from the elderly even though it does not say that care will be taken away.
3. It will cover care for illegal aliens simply because it does not say that they will be exempted and other laws already force them to be treated.
4. It will increase taxes drastically because there is no other way to pay for it.
5. There will be fewer doctors because it will cut their funding.
6. Rationing will take place because there will be fewer doctors and less money to cover costs.
7. If universal coverage is put through, it will give the government the option of eliminating those those who do not favor the policies of the government - such as the older Americans who know better - or any dissidents who object to the President or Congress.
8. If universal healthcare is put through with the government acting as an insurer, the government will unfairly compete.
9. Other parts that might still be in the completed legislation are fines for those who do not subscribe, taxes for employers, taxes on individual benefits, and like measures.
In any case, we have a government that has rushed through legislation, added unwanted last-minute amendments, claimed that provisions were not in bills that were in bills, and used any means possible to gain more power for the government while removing power for the individual. These communists and communist-sympathizers cannot be trusted.
ObamaCare Today (July 2012)The Supreme Court (actually Justice Roberts) ruled that B.O.'s healthcare is constitutional because it is a tax. This means that it will ultimately break our economy by targeting small businesses. It will also make us dependent upon the federal government rather than our doctors to decide who will have care and who will not. Lately, it has affected religious liberty with B.O. insisting that employers provide free contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. The Court did rule that states have the right to not accept ObamaCare (the states were to be badly penalized for refusing it). In any case, the only way out of extreme delays in treatment and death panels is to completely repeal ObamaCare, and that can only be done by eliminating the democrat majority in the Senate and throwing B.O. out. Actually, he should be tried for and sentenced for his actions, but that cannot happen while he is president unless he is impeached or his correct place of birth established (it certainly was not Hawaii).
Committee for Justice (June 2013)
Summary of Legal Arguments for the Supreme Court to defeat ObamaCare
What follows comes from an Amicus Curiae brief which provides a summary of the legal arguments that the Committee for Justice is making in support of Oklahoma and other states, businesses, and individuals. It is stated by the Committee for Justice that it will reach the Supreme Court later in 2013. The complete address for the Committee is:
Curt Levey, J.D.
President and Lead Constitutional Law Attorney
Committee for Justice
P.O. Box 96740
Washington, DC 20090-6740Donations are welcomed.
I. The Independent Payment Advisory Board that will ration health care under the Act (informally referred to as the "death panel") violates the Constitution's separation of powers because it is unaccountable to and untouchable by both Congress and the courts.
1. The Independent Advisory Board (IPAB) created by the Act is a 15-member panel appointed by President Barack Obama to cut spending by rationing Medicare dollars and services. IPAB will exercise virtually unchecked power to deny seniors and other Americans healthcare coverage under Medicare.
2. IPAB's "recommendations" about healthcare will be automatically enforced as law without any action by Congress or the President: indeed, Congress is specifically barred from modifying IPAB's directives.
3. Moreover, IPAB is not dependent upon annual appropriations from Congress, it need not follow traditional procedures for adopting administrative rules, and its actions can't be examined by the courts.
4. Never before has Congress tried to create an unaccountable and unreviewable agency like IPAB. Nothing in the Constitution supports the creation of such a body.
5. IPAB violates the Constitution's separation of powers and the Supreme Court's non-delegation doctrine and should be struck down as unconstitutional.
II. The Act's rule that requires employers, regardless of their religious beliefs, to pay for health insurance that includes abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception is a clear violation of the protection for freedom of religion in the First Amendment and the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
1. This rule, issued and administered by Barack Obama's Department of Health and Human Services, requires religious and pro-life employers to provide services and procedures they believe to be abhorrent and sinful. It is a direct attack on the religious freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
2. Because the Defendant's rule requires Americans to provide and pay for services that offend their sincerely held religious beliefs, it is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
3. This rule also violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which states that:
"The federal government may substantially burden a person's exercise of religion only if it demonstrates that
[the burden] is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest."Defendants have demonstrated no such compelling interest to justify the burden their rule imposes on America's
religious freedom.III. If the Act's mandate that individuals purchase health insurance is a tax, as the Supreme Court has now ruled, then this is a tax that was not lawfully enacted.
1. Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, known as the Origination Clause, states as follows:
"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives."
2. But ObamaCare's "Individual Mandate" to purchase health insurance (which the Supreme Court ruled is a tax) originated in the U.S. Senate, not the House of Representatives, as the Constitution requires. Therefore, the "Individual Mandate" is unconstitutional.
3. The Supreme Court has already ruled that the "Individual Mandate" cannot be justified as Constitutional under the Constitution's Commerce Clause.
4. So the fact that this "tax" originated in the Senate, not in the House as required, removes the last remaining argument that Congress had the Constitutional authority to enact the "Individual Mandate".
IV. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has no legal authority to grant tax credits and subsidies for qualifying health plans, nor to force employers to provide such health plans, in states that decide not to set up health insurance exchanges.
1. The Act provides tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans, and penalizes employers for not providing such plans, only in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. Many states are refusing to create such exchanges.
2. So the IRS has issued a rule that purports to extend the tax credits and subsidies, and the employer mandate they trigger, to the federally-run exchanges Defendants are creating in states that refuse to set up their own exchanges.
3. But there is nothing in the text, structure, or history of the Act, or in any other federal law, that gives the IRS the power to expand the scope of ObamaCare by issuing such a rule.
4. Moreover, this new IRS rule is contrary to Congress' intent when it enacted ObamaCare.
5. Therefore, the Act's tax credits, subsidies and employer mandate - all key provisions of ObamaCare - are unlawful as applied to the states that choose not to set up their own insurance exchanges.
V. The Entire Act must be struck down because key unconstitutional provisions are not severable from the rest of the Act.
1. Congress intentionally omitted a severability clause from the Act.
A. Congress' own attorneys at the Congressional Research Service warned Congress that legal challenges to Obama would have merit, including a warning that mandates on the States might well be ruled unconstitutional. See CRS analyasis.
B. Nonetheless, Congress specifically and intentionally made the decision to delete the severability clause in an earlier draft of the Act. So the lack of a severability clause in ObamaCare was clearly not an oversight, but was intended by Congress precisely because the provisions challenged here are critical to the proper functioning of the Act.
2. It would be impossible for the Act to fulfill the will of Congress without the challenged provisions.
According to the Defendants' own arguments and actions, key unconstitutional provisions in ObamaCare - including the Act's mandates on the states to pay for and administer much of ObamaCare, the tax credits and subsidies for qualifying health plans, the employer mandate, and Independent Payment Advisory Board - are essential to the proper functioning of the Act.
A. With the key unconstitutional provisions removed, almost the entire Act would need to be rewritten - with an entirely new financing and regulatory scheme - for the Act to function in accordance with the President's and Congress' stated intentions.
B. For all these reasons, the Act and all of its challenged provisions must survive or fall together.
C. The Act's challenged provisions, including the mandates on the States to administer and pay for much of ObamaCare, are clearly unconstitutional. Therefore, the entire Act must be declared null and void.
[The fact that the IRS has been used as a political tool by at least ten Democrats to make certain that Obama would be re-elected has been discovered and is being investigated. The shameful arrogance and criminal activity of the IRS people (and possibly Obama) is now quite evident, and forms a pattern that shows incontrovertibly that the IRS cannot be trusted to handle any part of our health insurance. In fact, the IRS should be dismantled and a new and better means of taxing created. The IRS has been an American Gestapo for much too long.]
ObamaCare as of November 2012)The federal websites for healthcare sign-up are a failure so far. Obama's favored people have been granted either delays or complete exoneration from the overburdening caused by the Obamacare law. As of this date, it is estimated that over 129 million people will lose their health insurance. Small businesses are in trouble and laying off workers due to Obamacare.
As a classmate recently reminded me, Obamacare was never meant to be healthcare for people. It was put in place for an entirely different reason. Using the strategy in a book by Cloward & Piven, the left expects to bankrupt America. Actually, the left is using many means to bankrupt our nation, but Obamacare was to be the final stroke. As one of our locals mentioned, communist dictators have killed millions of their own people, and Obama is no exception.
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