Obama: Making Health Care Worse

As part of my continuing series on Obama-care, his death-inducing proposals for health care, I previously quoted him on "democratic decisions" about whether patients should live or die. What essentially is Obama's plan for people with catastrophic care needs and those in conditions that appear to be terminal?


As one analyst on FOX News said Saturday morning, Obama essentially is proposing the "European solution," which is to tell very sick people to wait in long lines . . . until many of them die. At that point, they no longer will qualify as a "cost burden" on the health system. Ah, the joys of cost savings!


Am I exaggerating what Barack Obama said in his interview with the NY Times? Read his chilling words for yourself (at the very bottom of this piece).


Don't get me wrong: great as it is compared to other countries', our health system does have some serious flaws. In a capitalist society, efficiency and cost control depend greatly on the amount of information we have from businesses. In health care, alas, we have very little transparency.


Consider the following statement by health care expert Dr. David Gratzer (in his superb book The
Cure), speaking of the time a few years when he was a young Canadian-trained physician who'd moved with his wife to the US.


"In 2003, when my wife ruptured a disc in her spine, I set about to find her a neurosurgeon in western New York. Uninsured and uninformed, I resorted to cold-calling neurologists, asking for their opinions on reputable surgeons. Few were willing to speak to a stranger about a colleague's skills.


"Meanwhile, having a choice of two hospitals and on information on either, we selected one at random . . . and then spent a nervous night before the operation at a Hampton Inn, which I had chosen after reviewing detailed reports at www.hotels.com. I found myself musing darkly that for a mundane accommodation decision, we had a surplus of data, whereas for a critical medical decision, we had little or nothing to go on."


Gratzer continues, "The surgery itself required only an inch-long incision, took under half an hour, and resulted in an inscrutable bill for an extraordinary sum. When we called in to inquire, a hospital administrator hinted that the bill was 'negotiable.' Before we could negotiate, however, we started to receive threatening letters from a collection agency." (The Cure, p. 1)


In one sense. Gratzer's story is mind-boggling. At the same time, it's not atypical. It's a lot easier to get details and the quality and price of hotel accommodations than it is to get useful information about health care. There is no real doctors.com or hospitals.com equivalent to hotels.com.


Unlike local grocery stores, pharmacies, and motels, health care operations do not advertise their comparative prices. They also don't provide any useful information about the kind of care patients might receive. If there are low-cost, high quality health alternatives available, you -- and hundreds of millions of other Americans -- have no way of finding out who or where they are.


How do your doctor's charges -- and skills -- compare with those in your area? If you know the answer to that, you qualify as a veritable fount of knowledge. Years ago, my mother had one of the most incompetent family care physicians imaginable. She loved him because as she said, "He's such a nice man." He was a nice man. He was also a health provider much more likely to read People magazine than a medical journal.


Apparently, local and national medical societies like it that way . . . and so apparently do state and federal governments. It allows doctors and hospitals to avoid competing on messy matters like price and quality of service.


Where there is no transparency -- basically, no advertising -- there is no incentive to compete on price. There's also no incentive to provide evidence that not all doctors and hospitals are created equal. What evidence does exist shows that some low-cost hospitals provide superior outcomes to their high-priced counterparts.


Yes, the US government's rules and regulations -- along with rapacious trial lawyers -- are responsible for most of American health care's problems of affordability and availability. But they're not the only culprits. Without transparency, health consumers -- even ones as knowledgeable as Dr. Gratzer -- can't make good decisions.


The end result is that health care in the US costs a great deal more than it should. Where there are no real informed choices, neither efficiency nor capitalism exists. It makes no sense for us to be fully informed about motel choices . . . and totally in the dark about health care options.


Note, the following are Obama's scary comments (in italics) I referred to earlier:

"There's always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider," Obama said. "And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options." In other words, the federal government would be a middle-man, basically usurping a doctor's and patient's determination what treatment is appropriate.

In addition, Obama stated that "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here." (Note: it should not come as a surprise that people who are sick are big consumers of health care. People who are well don't need it.) The actual percentage cost of end-of-life care is about 30% (according to health expert Dr. John Donaldson).

Obama Voters Swallow Stupid Pills

NOTE: ON SUNDAY, MONDAY, AND TUESDAY, I'LL HAVE COLUMNS THAT I HOPE WILL BE THE SIMPLEST, MOST HELPFUL PIECES AVAILABLE ON THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS -- AND HOW TO GET OUT OF IT. PLEASE VISIT. There was an old nonsense game that college guys used to play on spring break drives to Florida. Here's one question: "On the stupidity scale, what's dumber -- a doorknob or a doorbell?" It turns out that the correct answer to that question is: Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary who now heads the IRS but didn't pay his taxes. Prior to his current high position, Geithner was head of the Federal Reserve's New York branch, an institution with heavy responsibile for the financial crisis.


There's abundant survey evidence that most Obama voters in 2008 were not exactly valedictorian material. It may have something to do with all those homeless types and convicts registered by ACORN. As the material below (in smaller print, scroll down) from yesterday's column illustrates, tens of millions of Americans are uninformed about some of the most basic realities of life in America. They are dumber than doorknobs. [Note: If you come here often, please sign up with other "followers" on the sidebar to your right.]

As frequent readers know, this blog is not to be confused with The Complaint Department. In fact, its purpose to come up with solutions rather than to whine about the outrages of any particular day.

As you know, I'm an optimist. I believe "Low-knowledge" voters, the kind who flocked to the polls for Obama, are a problem, but perhaps not an insoluble one.

We need to figure out ways to get some basic knowledge to people who curiosity is extremely limited. Such individuals aren't going to read books about economic declines -- and they're unlikely to tune into Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. In whatever way we can we must get our message across -- or they'll continue voting for Obama types until the country is totally bankrupt and devoid of individual liberty.

During the past election, I made a lot of phone calls on behalf of John McCain and Sarah Palin. Like any good caller, I didn't argue with people hell-bent on voting for Obama. However, in one case, I violated that rule. The person I called let me know he was "totally in favor of universal health care."

I couldn't help myself. I said, "Universal health care . . . does that mean I pay for your care . . . or that you pay for mine?" The man didn't hang up, but there was an extremely long pause on his end of the line. Heretofore, he had been under the impression that he would take -- and someone else would give.

II was making a simple point, one I probably knew about age 5 or 6 The point was that nothing in life is free, NOTHING. Somebody pays for the things we receive, and usually that somebody is us.

A political slogan like "universal health care" is not a solution to problem that a service -- like health care -- is costly. In short, I may have taught the man a simple truth that he hadn't encountered in his many years on earth. Was it the beginning of wisdom for him? Probably not, but it was better than nothing, which is what he knew previously.




Above: Obama Supporters chanting "Yes We Can!" as they march confidently into a bottomless pit labeled "Hope" and "Change."

Most hilarious opinion survey in history: Opinion Research did a survey for FOX, and here's one of (many) thigh-slappers it produced. When asked where the government gets its money, 65% said it got it from taxes on wage-earners and businesses.

Twenty-four percent affirmed (I love this) "The government has its own money."

Eleven percent said either that it got it from some other source (aliens? payoffs from lobbyists? Christmas gifts?) or that they just didn't know.

I wonder whether to worry more about the 24% that think the government has a night job or the 11% who are just plain clueless.

Just before the last election, the BBC in London had me on their early morning radio show and the subject was "low-knowledge voters." These are people who aren't knowledgeable about politics, candidates, the issues -- or, in fact, anything much of social and economic significance.

The Opinion Research survey shows us exactly what the lowest of low-knowledge voters don't know. It could -- and does -- fill all the books in the Harvard Library.How many of the 36% who think the money government spends comes from some source other than taxpayers are Obama voters? Without more information, I'd hazard a guess that most of them are.

As a famous post-election Zogby Poll demonstrated, most of what Obama voters know is true . . . isn't. A majority of Obama knew that Sarah Palin said, "I can see Russia from my house." In fact, Sarah never said any such thing. The remark was made by comedienne Tina Fey.

It turns out that many "Obama voters" are that only -- and not much more. That was illustrated in the early December run-off for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia. It was supposed to be a close race between Democrat Jim Martin and incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss, perhaps even closer than the tight November election where neither candidate won the required majority

.In fact, Chambliss in December won by a landslide -- 57% to 43%. Apparently, a great many Obama voters -- tens of thousands (and some estimates are a hundred thousand-plus) -- stayed away from the run-off. They just weren't interested if Obama wasn't on the ballot.

Will something similar happen in other states in the 2010 election, when there will be no Obama running? Could be.