HOME :: PUBLICATIONS :: House Health Care Repeal More Reality TV than Theatre, by STAR PARKER

House Health Care Repeal More Reality TV than Theatre

by STAR PARKER January 22, 2011
Democrats who are calling the House's decisively passed repeal of Obamacare -- the so-called " Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care" act -- theater are hallucinating.
 
Perhaps it was theatrical to include in the name of the repeal act "job killing", though that is what it is.
 
But I prefer melodrama to dishonesty. Calling Obamacare -- government mandates, subsidies, price controls, taxes, and rationed care -- "patient protection" and "affordable" is the height of dishonesty.
 
The House repeal vote was important because the House is the legislative body closest to the people, and the people voted unequivocally last November to repudiate socialized medicine.
It is the beginning of responsible government to start representing what the American people want and repeal is what Americans voted for.
 
Although repudiation of Obamacare was the most tangible message of the 2010 elections, there were other important messages.
 
Most Americans are sick of the socialist direction in which our great nation has been moving. They are sick of dishonesty and word games emanating from Washington and politicians. And they are sick of special interest groups in Washington sucking the oxygen out of all opportunities for good public policy.
 
The "Affordable Health Care" Act, besides being bad health care policy, has all the above characteristics -- duplicitous Washington accounting games that pretend to save money by spending it subsidizing all the nation's health care, taking what was already broken in the way we deliver health care -- most of it already being controlled by government and third party payers -- and giving us more of it rather than less, and accomplishing all this by working with the big health care special interests -- insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.
But what makes me most heartsick is to watch our great and free nation transformed into a second rate welfare state.
 
Again, even before the "Affordable Health Care" act, our health care system was already largely taken over by government. Ninety percent of our health care bills are paid by third parties, and between Medicaid, SCHIP, and Medicare, well over half of American health care was already directly controlled by government.
 
What else do you have to know about what was wrong? Yet, Obamacare's answer was to give us more of all of it.
 
I challenge any sitting Democrat who continues to push socialized medicine on us to move into any of our inner cities and find out first-hand about life on the government plantation.
Twelve percent of the nation's population is black, but 30 percent of the 60 million on Medicaid are black.
 
They live under the hallucination perpetuated by Washington that they have health coverage. Yet 40 percent of our doctors refuse Medicaid patients because they are not adequately reimbursed. And study after study shows that the health care they do get is substandard. That Medicaid patients are, for instance, far more likely to not survive an operation, compared to someone with private insurance.
 
Obamacare's answer to this is to expand the income level qualifying for Medicaid and put another 20 million on it, with the same pretense about being "covered."
 
At the same time, as Dennis Smith, former Director of Medicaid at HHS, points out, the new qualifying structure of Medicaid has the same characteristics as did welfare that led to wholesale breakdown of black families.
 
An individual earning $10,800 qualifies for Medicaid. For two individuals, that is $21,600. But qualifying income for a family of two is $20, 107. So efficient incentives are built in to discourage marriage among low-income earners, a reality in all likelihood already contributing to their shaky economic status.
 
The House repeal of Obamacare was not theater. It was reality TV.
 
The follow up act must be to reform health care with real freedom and capitalism.
 
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker@urbancure.org. 
 

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