Healthcare

It seems that our politicians have not yet struck that balance between safety net and individual responsibility, given already disastrous budgets as we plow full speed ahead toward the fiscal cliff and a mandatory healthcare plan that will lessen the quality of our healthcare system as we know it and muddle our mission toward the poor. At the same time, we also have a moral duty to take care of our fellow man, regardless of the cost.

As it becomes more difficult for people to find primary care physicians, we must begin to look for solutions before a complete crisis engulfs us.

Many primary-care physicians who have moved to the concierge model accept a certain number of patients, all of whom pay several thousand dollars a year, and they don't accept any kind of healthcare insurance. This greatly reduces their expenses, guarantees a stable income and allows some quality in their lives, for they don't have to rush through patients in 15 minutes.

The controversy swirling around Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin's (R-Mo.) comments about abortion in the case of rape or incest is telling, indeed — but not about Republicans. It's the Democrats who are, yet again, misrepresenting the facts (that's the politically acceptable language to expose the fact they are lying) and hope voters are too lazy, misinformed or stupid to learn the truth.
 
Even though Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his VP selection, Paul Ryan, and literally every leading Republican have resoundingly criticized Aiken, insisted he drop out of the race and pulled funding from his campaign, the Democrats are desperately trying to link the GOP to Akin's comments.

There is much conversation about Medicare in the presidential campaign and on Capitol Hill.

The thing that has not been highlighted enough is that Medicare has been in existence for decades already and many physicians under the current reimbursement plan do not participate. This is because reimbursements are very low and sometimes do not even pay for the time and equipment necessary to treat the patient.

Healthcare costs are escalating dramatically under ObamaCare simply because there is a lot more to government-mandated healthcare than meets the eye. This is why the bill required more than 2,000 pages. As those pages unfold, more requirements are uncovered, which have financial consequences.

A fair and honest reading of the bill, which has occurred in almost no cases, demonstrates that it is more about tremendous expansion of government bureaucracy than it is about healthcare reform. For example, if government controls healthcare, there will be no competition to keep prices affordable for the American people. People will not have the ability to be smart consumers with their healthcare and providers will not be able to compete to keep costs low when the vast majority of expenses are paid for by government programs. There will also be no choice in how treatment is administered.

My friend Walt, who inhabits the world of finance but maintains a social conscience, sent me an article and a note reminding me that key portions of the healthcare bill were, in fact, Republican ideas. In fact, the totality of the healthcare law as enacted closely tracks healthcare proposals offered in the 1970s by President Nixon, offered in the 1980s and 1990s by senior Republicans in Congress, and enacted into law in Massachusetts under a governor whose name I cannot remember, who stood next to Ted Kennedy celebrating passage of the state law that became the model for current federal law. Isn't it strange that Republicans now demonize plans that were originated by Republicans?

Anyone who reads my blogs has heard me say before that what unites the left is a vision of an ideal society, and what unites the right is a vision of an ideal state. The left will take or use any state necessary to get to that ideal society. At times they will argue for freedom in the language of the libertarian right; at others, they will defend Big Government outright. They think that this incoherence makes them centrists, pragmatists, reasonable, and they pat themselves on the back for it.

The Supreme Court's ruling on Affordable Care Act last Thursday notwithstanding, "We the People" must recognize that good healthcare for everyone is beneficial to our national interest. This is not a partisan issue, and we can't succumb to the forces of division that increase their power base by dividing segments of society against each other. We spend more than adequate resources on healthcare, but this doesn't happen in a logical manner and waste is abundant.

The ObamaCare ruling by the Supremes this week dramatically changes the political landscape. Justice Roberts’s decision is being called by MSM the “Compromise of 2012.” But compromise will not work to appease contention. It will instead inflame opposition and bring states’ rights issues to the mainstream. It is already doing so. As Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner on Saturday, backlash is forming and 85 percent of Republicans want to see ObamaCare repealed either in whole or in part.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been called the "Great Compromise." But it forced slavery on the North and offended states’ rights and the 10th Amendment. The effect was to infuriate the North and drive it closer to warfare and the great tragedies that lay ahead. As one major commentator claimed Friday in The Washington Post, “John Roberts’s Compromise of 2012” is “historic because it is a compromise — a crisis-averting pact across lines of ideology, party and region, the likes of which we have not seen since pre-Civil War days.” It is indeed, and as the court did in 1850, Roberts has now infuriated the right and the 30 states that brought opposition to this federal mandate.

Life after the healthcare ruling has begun. The Supreme Court's shocker Thursday was much anticipated, long awaited and, in the end, quite humbling, since nearly no one had it right.

The big, immediate question was, who gains politically from the fact that the highest court not only upheld the president's controversial healthcare reform law — including an individual mandate to purchase care — but then likely broadened the authority of Congress to tax? The answer is one side gets a short-term win and the other enjoys longer-term benefits.