The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
A number of people have written that Obamacare is a good thing for the American people. On the surface this might appear true. A closer review [exposes] the following [fallacies]: 1) The original cost promised by the president was $900 billion over 10 years. The current projection by the Congressional Budget Office is $1.6 trillion, and by the Senate Budget Committee $2.6 trillion. 2) All Americans will have health insurance. Millions would not because many states will not expand Medicaid given the cost. For New York state, the additional cost would be $52 billion over 10 years. Forty percent of those without health insurance were supposed to get it through Medicaid. 3) People can keep their current health insurance plans and current doctors. It is estimated that half of the current health plans do not meet the essential coverage requirements of Obamacare. So these people will have to have different plans to be in compliance, most likely at a higher rate. Seeing current doctors will be problematic. There is currently a shortage of doctors, and according to recent polls many doctors are considering retiring, quitting, cutting back practices, not taking Medicare/Medicaid patients or changing to specialities like plastic surgery or Lasik [eye surgery] that don’t require third-party transactions; or moving to specialities like dermatology that require less malpractice insurance. Add to this the 30 million people the government claims that have no health insurance coverage, the chances of keeping your current doctors or seeing them timely are not good. 4) Health care costs will be contained/ reduced. They will continue to rise if only based on the new taxes — $47 billion — assessed against drug companies and medical device makers. 5) No funds for abortion. Religious employers and facilities are being forced to provide services such as birth control and abortion that go against their beliefs. 6) There will be exchanges to buy insurance. Many states are not going to set up the exchanges. Federal subsidies can only be provided through state exchanges. This allows employers to not provide or drop coverage for their employees and not face any “tax.” The tax can only be assessed if the company has at least one employee getting a subsidy. The result could be fewer people getting coverage. 7) No additional taxes. There are taxes. There will also be additional costs when people figure out that it’s cheaper to pay the tax than to get insurance. They can wait until they are sick and then get coverage as pre-existing conditions don’t preclude getting coverage. Unfortunately, the promises made for health insurance for all cannot be kept.
LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 20: Health care workers begin a drive to make 100,000 calls to Congress urging law makers to pass a reform bill to make health care coverage more affordable for the American public on October 20, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. With the upcoming holidays, Democrats in the House and Senate have only about eight weeks to deliver a healthcare reform bill to President Barack Obama by the end of this year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed optimism and hope that they will have a bill by Thanksgiving. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
In a book set for publication Tuesday, a politics and government professor at The Citadel claims President Obama’s 2009 health care reform law was, in part, a union-driven effort to organize 21 million health care workers.
In ”Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind,” Mallory Factor describes a December 9, 2008 memo from Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare president Dennis Rivera to the Obama-Biden transition team.
That memo outlined a legislative proposal calling for “increasing the capacity of the health care workforce” as part of a larger health care reform initiative.
The SEIU and the Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Factor writes, later coordinated with other public-sector unions to spend “literally hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Obamacare.”
The Daily Caller requested comments for this article from the SEIU, AFSCME and a White House spokesman. None of them responded.
“We … will not stop until every man, woman and child has quality, affordable care they can count on,” it read. “The time to fix health care is now.”
And in an April 9, 2011 memo, the United Healthcare Workers — a union affiliated with the SEIU — articulated its future vision, including “an ambitious plan to fight for our future by organizing healthcare workers.”
In 2010 the SEIU elected Mary Key Henry as its new International President. Henry’s background was in health care organizing. She led efforts to unionize workers at Beverly nursing homes, Catholic Health Care West, Tenet Healthcare Corporation and HCA Healthcare.
Factor, who is also a Forbes columnist and senior editor of money and politics for The Street.com, recounts emails from former federal Office of Labor-Management Standards staffer Don Loos, now a senior adviser to the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
“It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees,” Loos told Factor. That, he said, would make them eligible for involuntary unionization through public-sector unions like AFSCME and the SEIU.
“Obamacare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net,’” Loos claimed, “designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers.” New health care jobs created by Obamacare, he said, will eventually be filled by “federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees.” The Obamacare law, once fully implemented, will dramatically increase the number of health care workers receiving payment for their services through government programs, including Medicaid and so-called “public option” government-run insurance plans.
“The government employee unions can then enlist pro-union state governments to treat these health care workers as ‘government employees,’” Factor told The Daily Caller, “and unionize them just like they unionized the care providers” themselves.
“For every million additional health care workers unionized in the 27 non-right-to-work states,” he told TheDC, “the unions stand to earn $1 billion in dues.”
Factor writes in “Shadowbosses” that Canada’s national health care system has provided an apt example. Heritage Foundation labor economist James Sherk told him that “60 percent of Canadian health care workers and a stunning 80 percent of nurses belong to unions — more than quadruple the levels in America.”
Only 10 percent of them were union members before the advent of socialized medicine in Canada, Factor said.
The SEIU’s designs on health care reform surfaced in a meeting at the union’s headquarters held in November 2007, during the early days of the 2008 presidential election season. During one session, former Clinton senior health care policy adviser Chris Jennings made a presentation titled ’”Rx for Successful SEIU Strategy for Health Care.”
Making comprehensive health care reform a key issue during the election, Jennings’ PowerPoint presentation indicates he told an audience of mostly SEIU policymakers and executives, would be good union policy because it “creates demand for SEIU-provided services.”
In a book set for publication Tuesday, a politics and government professor at The Citadel claims President Obama’s 2009 health care reform law was, in part, a union-driven effort to organize 21 million health care workers.
HEEEEEEEERE IT COME'S.....unions don't make cheaper services....they just take it from another pocket.....
hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahaha
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
pretty soon it will be how are those healthcare exchange franchise fees making out?
be prepared to read THAT paperwork....no different than the sh!t we don't read now....who reads their health insurance book?
Just look back at all the "PRETTY SOON'S" on this board... they predicted $5 and $6 a gallon for gas... they predicted ObamaCare would be ruled Unconstitutional... they predicted lots of Right Wing Opinions... but very little in the way of facts.
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
Just look back at all the "PRETTY SOON'S" on this board... they predicted $5 and $6 a gallon for gas... they predicted ObamaCare would be ruled Unconstitutional... they predicted lots of Right Wing Opinions... but very little in the way of facts.
ok...tell me how the $$ works
show me the $$ trail....you are not an idiot and you know that nickel and diming the sheople is #1 business.....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
More than 2,200 hospitals face penalties under ObamaCare rules
By Jonathan Serrie
Published August 23, 2012
Report: Gov't to punish hospitals for 'excess...
A provision of ObamaCare is set to punish roughly two-thirds of U.S. hospitals evaluated by Medicare starting this fall over high readmission rates, according to an analysis by Kaiser Health News.
Starting in October, Medicare will reduce reimbursements to hospitals with high 30-day readmission rates -- which refers to patients who return within a month -- by as much as 1 percent. The maximum penalty increases to 2 percent the following year and 3 percent in 2014.
Doctors are concerned the penalty is unfair, since sometimes they have to accept patients more than once in a brief period of time but could be penalized for doing so -- even for accepting seniors who are sick.
"Among patients with heart failure, hospitals that have higher readmission rates actually have lower mortality rates," said Sunil Kripalani, MD, a professor with Vanderbilt University Medical Center who studies hospital readmissions. "So, which would we rather have -- a hospital readmission or a death?"
But according to federal government figures, nearly one in five Medicare patients is readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of release, costing taxpayers an estimated $17.5 billion.
"Readmissions has been a low-hanging fruit for Medicare," said Jordan Rau, a staff writer with KHN, an editorially independent program of the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation. "They've been very unhappy that about 2 million Medicare beneficiaries are being readmitted every year between 30 days of discharge."
Medicare evaluated readmission rates at 3,367 of the nation's hospitals and will impose penalties on 2,211 starting in October, according to KHN. The analysis shows 278 hospitals will receive this year's maximum penalty of 1 percent. On the other side of the spectrum, 50 hospitals will receive the minimum penalty of 0.01 percent, KHN reports.
The penalties are intended to create financial incentives for the quality of care hospitals provide, instead of the number of procedures. But physicians debate whether readmission rates are the best measure of outcomes.
Kripalani and some other physicians are concerned that readmissions-based penalties may have a disproportionate effect on research hospitals because they handle large numbers of complex cases.
"Often these kinds of institutions take care of the most sick patients," Kripalani said. "They're sent patients by other hospitals because of specific expertise they have. So, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that some of the nation's best hospitals do have slightly higher readmission rates compared to other hospitals."
The list of hospitals facing penalties includes nationally known names such as Vanderbilt, University of Chicago Medical Center and Massachusetts General, according to Medicare data compiled by KHN.
Some physicians are also concerned about what impact Medicare penalties will have on "safety-net" hospitals that treat large numbers of poor patients with limited access to primary and followup care. However, researchers who helped Medicare develop its quality assessment guidelines say the measures take into account the relative illness of patients coming into each hospital.
in order to keep the $$ ebbing and flowing without it looking like a complete burden on the taxpayers is to 'make sh!t up' that constitutes a fine for the government to collect then reinsert said 'compensation'.....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
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