Health Care Rhetoric vs. Facts

President Obama is pushing Congress to deliver health care legislation by the end of the year. A big problem with that is simply, what is it?

It was “universal health care” all the way through the last presidential campaign from then-candidate Obama. Last week the buzz words were “government health insurance option”, and now it’s just health care legislation so he can claim victory.

Meanwhile, even many Democrats in Congress are not sure what they are supposed to be producing in the way of legislation, so it’s no wonder the public is confused.

The rhetoric is confusing but the facts are not. The president and the Democrats are inflating, distorting and ignoring many of the verifiable facts about health care to increase public support for a total government takeover of our health care system.

In other words, they are taking advantage of the public’s health care ignorance.

In a May 28, 2009 Associated Press article, the president was quoted as saying, “If we do not get it done this year, we’re not going to get it done.”

He’s right, because enough people are seeing through the confusion and discovering the facts about health care. The same phenomenon happened from April 1993 to April 1994 when public support for the Clinton Health Plan went from 71 percent to 43 percent (USA Today/CNN polls, 1993, 1994).

The biggest fact that’s being distorted is the number of people uninsured. It is not 50 million people as the president claims, nor is it the 46 million people claimed throughout the last presidential campaign.

CEO Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute clearly explains in her latest book, The Top Ten Myths about American Health Care, that the real number is about 8 million people who are chronically uninsured.

If the goal was to really provide health insurance for the truly uninsured, a $2,000 health insurance voucher would cost $16 billion a year. If it were provided for five years, the cost would be $80 billion. So why are the president and Congress trying to find $1.5 trillion to pay for a government health care plan that will most likely end up looking like Medicare’s ugly twin sister.

The answer is that it’s not about providing health insurance coverage for the uninsured. It’s about more government control, and another government bureaucracy that would eventually resemble Medicare, and we know how well it is not working.

The most misleading perception being perpetrated on the public is that somehow our government will be able to run a completely socialized system better than any other country in the world. Somehow our political elites will be able to avoid a system with rationing and massive cost overruns.

The trustees of the Medicare System just reported that Medicare will be operating in the red starting this year. That’s accounting lingo for losing money! What the trustees are not telling people is that indirect rationing is already underway through Medicare price controls and increased regulations.

Those are also facts the mainstream media have conveniently chosen not to report.

There are cost effective and non-traumatic ways to improve our health care system. Some changes need to be made, but to follow the failed path of countries who are now trying to undo the unavoidable pitfalls of government-controlled health care makes no sense at all.

It also makes no sense to continue to ignore the $56 trillion unfunded liability for Medicare, Social Security and other “entitlements”.

That’s not rhetoric, that’s just another fact.