The Time-Tested Socialist Big Lie Gambit

There are many lies in the Obama - Pelosi - Reid plan to exercise fascist controls over health care insurance and through that mechanism over the entire health care industry. Whether they succeed in getting their "public option" or not, they may get the biggest plum of all, which is the power to set the requirements for what is a legal health insurance plan in the United States. In the effort to do this, Obama has said over and over,

If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.

Well, no you cannot. The media has often backed Obama on this assertion, but nothing is further from the truth. This is an overt lie, except in the childish sense in which he can say this in the context of a short period of time. The law does not take effect immediately, so you can keep the insurance you like until then. Or, in some cases you can keep your insurance for up to 5 years. But, most Americans will not be able to keep the insurance they now have into the slightly longer term future. Period. Do not take just my word for this, but read Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute on this here.

According to the House bill HR3200, an approved plan must cover

• hospitalization
  
• outpatient hospital and clinic services
  
• services by physicians and other health professionals
  
• supplies and equipment incidental to their services
• prescription drugs
• rehabilitation services
• mental health
• substance-abuse treatments
• preventive services, a list of which will be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
• maternity, well-baby, and well-child care
• dental, vision, and hearing services for children under 21
• additional requirements set by the Health Benefits Advisory Committee

Now, if you lose your present insurance coverage or significant changes are made to the plan you have now, you will be required to get an approved plan. The onset of this new legislation is going to change the health insurance market so greatly, that it is very unlikely that plans will not have to change significantly, so you cannot count on a unchanged plan for protection.

70% of those now covered by a health insurance plan get that plan through their employer, and all of these plans will have to meet the federal requirement in five years. This means your plan will change. Of course, your plan may also change because the new legislation is predicted to cause as many as 89.5 million workers to lose their coverage from their employer, according to the Lewin Group.

Many others will lose their current plan because it is a high deductible plan. This was the kind of plan I had in the earliest years when I started my business. It was all we could afford for my family at the time, but it served us well under the circumstances. Now, such high deductible plans are often very beneficially combined with Health Savings Accounts, which the new bills will almost eliminate. The new bills do not allow high deductible plans, since they require that 70% of claims be paid by the insurance in the House bill and that 76% be paid by the Senate bill. No deductible or co-pay is allowed at all for preventive care! So, you lose this kind of plan, no matter how well it suits your needs!

Seniors on Medicare can participate in the Medicare advantage program and 10.2 million now do so. This program may be ended by the Obama - Pelosi - Reid bills also.

So, "If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it" is a blatant socialist lie, in the great tradition of the Big Lie Told Over and Over Again of the fascists and the communists. Besides which, the dedicated socialists define the truth as that which leads to socialism, so they really do not think this is a lie. But, those of us who live in the real world, must recognize this as the cruel and brutal fraud it really is. And we are not the ones who say, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." We will leave that otherworldly nonsense to the socialists.

Those of us who recognize our own existence and our own uniquely individual characters and lives, must be adamant in demanding our right to exercise control over our life, most necessarily including our individual control over our personal health.

Update on the Uninsured

Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has updated us on the uninsured Americans, who according to the Census Bureau number 45.6 million. I have dealt with this issue of the uninsured in previous posts on 25 November 2007, 23 July 2008, 27 August 2008, and 29 August 2008.

The story now is similar. The uninsured are:

• 12 million eligible for Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, including 64% of uninsured children and 29% of parents with children. If these people go to a hospital for treatment, they are automatically enrolled in the relevant program, so they are not really uninsured!
• 10 million who are not citizens of the United States, where 5.6 million are illegal immigrants and 4.4 million are legal immigrants.
• 43% of the uninsured have incomes greater than 250% of the poverty level or greater than $55,125 for a family of four. More than one-third have incomes over $66,000.
• Nearly three-quarters of the uninsured can afford health insurance coverage.
• 60% of the uninsured are under age 35 and 86% say they are in good or excellent health.
• About half are uninsured for less than 6 months, 30% for less than one year, 16% for less than 2 years, and less than 2.5% for 3 years or longer.

Tanner then says that with this information in hand, we should be able to produce a more focused plan to address the issue of the uninsured. The young and healthy who choose not to have health insurance, would be more willing to buy it if their premiums were not jacked up by community rating [plans have to accept the already ill, those with unhealthy lifestyles, and the old] requirements often required by the states, by eliminating the many mandated benefits that many people do not need or want, and by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines [in the spirit of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution].

The generally short durations in which people do not have health insurance suggest that many lose it when they lose or change jobs. Some lose it because they have started a small business and current tax policies exclude many small business owners from tax deductions for health insurance. The best way to deal with this is to give everyone a large Health Savings Account (HSA) to purchase health insurance, but the Democrats hate this for no reason but that it removes health care decisions from politics and deprives them of political power. A great advantage of the HSAs is that they give health care users a reason to care about the cost and effectiveness of the health care they seek from providers. In the government-run system, no one has such reasons for personal interest so costs balloon.

Democrats claim that the massive health care overhaul is needed to address two issues:

• The many uninsured.
• The ever-increasing cost of health insurance.

Their answer is to create a new, government-run system which will force everyone to buy much more expensive health insurance than that bought by most people today. This will hit the young and the healthy the hardest. Then they will force the wealthier to pay for the insurance that the less wealthy are already buying or could buy at present prices. Of course, the unfunded Medicaid and Medicare programs will remain inadequately funded and will require either a huge future rationing of health care or huge additional taxes. This makes no sense at all, but never let it be said that Democrats are ever constrained by rationality. Demagoguery is so much more emotional fun. It is so easy to make people imagine that 47 million Americans are so poor that they cannot afford health insurance and they live for decades in terror of becoming ill without any way to pay for care.