Hey Bernie Thanks for Your Advice on Healthcare

 

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed for President Trump that there is a singular way to repair the broken healthcare system. Berating the President and the Republicans for their failure thus far to repair Obamacare, Sanders offered his suggestion on CNN stating, “Single payer would save the average family significant amounts of money.” True, that might be the case, unless they pay income tax, but then only the wealthy, according to Democrats, pay income taxes. That is because most of the income taxes are paid by those making over $75,000 per year, seemingly what the Democrats quote as the wealthy in their debates on who should be taxed the highest. Forget that such a salary would not support the average family of four in most of the major cities throughout the United States which is why both parents must work in most families. But for those in the bottom 49% who pay no income tax, but do pay Social Security taxes, single payer healthcare is wonderful as when income taxes double, they will not need fear as twice nothing is nothing. But some of them will need fear because to increase revenue the level for paying taxes will drop precipitously. The only income tax free incomes will likely end up being the lowest 25% or 30% with these new taxable paying a fair percentage which they cannot afford. It is even possible that the new rage of a $15/hr. minimum wage will place you into the income tax range; would that not be a hoot? But Bernie loves the socialist idea and wishes the United States could just become part of the failed experiment we call Europe. We understand his viewpoint and hope that he never gets to carry out such plans as President, something Hillary saved the United States from as he might have bested Trump as many polls reported.

 

About that single payer plan that Bernie thinks would be the salvation for healthcare in the United States. It would save the United States and her people from the slow disintegration of the health insurance industry simply by eliminating it overnight. Bernie would say that this was wonderful because these blood-sucking insurance companies are horribly evil as they actually are in business making a profit. That is horrible unless you have stock from your 401K plan or personal stock holdings or if you happen to work for one of these health insurance companies which Bernie wants to put out of business. You see, Bernie believes that any company which makes a profit is making that profit because it overcharges the people using their product, be it clothing at WalMart or health insurance from an insurance company. Bernie would tell you the government could do the same job of providing the payments for your health better than the existing systems which need to make profits. Profits, according to Bernie, never come from efficiency and prices are not lowered by competition, everything is out to steal your money by ripping you off. That is why Bernie believes the government should run every industry. He would likely tell you that the government should run the grocery stores such that you would never have to pay for groceries. All you would do is receive your government food card which would have a color code and when you get to the store, the shelves would tell you how much of any item your color permits you to buy and whether or not you are permitted to buy some things at all. You have the purple card, no candy or sweets for you; the government has you on a low carb, high fiber diet, so enjoy the yummy, government produced granola and soy wafers. You see, if the government is paying for your healthcare, the government will need to control what you eat. Expect certain items to become illegal if the government pays for your healthcare such as alcohol, cigarettes, whole milk and many high fat products or anything else the government deems is not good for you, unless you have that special card which allows you to shop at the primo store where they even sell ice cream. The government would be permitted to enroll you in a mandatory exercise class and if you do not measure up to the fitness reports, expect a fine, it is not a fat tax, it is an under fitness fine.

 

We all got a fine example of where government provided single payer healthcare results in the sad saga of Charlie Gard who was sentenced to have life support removed from his one-year-old body because the costs of treatment were too high for his likely lifetime earnings. Oh, of course they did not put it that way, and it only took this long because his parents had been fighting to be allowed to take him to the United States, where the government does not determine who is worth saving and everybody is worth saving, for treatment which was even offered free for over nine months, or Charlie would have died before his four month birthday because he was too expensive and his earnings would not have repaid the government. Oh yea, that is the criteria that the health boards use, potential earnings against initial costs. That is why once you reach seventy they do not even pay over a minimal amount for prescriptions. At that age, you are really done earning and nobody cares if you live or die any longer anyway, and that includes family. That is what the government has decided and is also kind of what the children are taught to believe as well. Socialized medicine, it is just wonderful as long as you are healthy.

 

Helicopter landing at MedStar Washington Hospital Center

 

There are all the stories about the wonderful care in Canada. Well, I worked at one of the finest heart hospitals in the world located in Washington D.C. and of our heart patients needing life saving surgeries, there were two main countries from which they came; Saudi Arabia and Canada. We also got a decent number from Europe though most of the Europeans with that kind of money belong to private care groups which are actually membership hospitals or clinics. That is how the really wealthy get around national healthcare. They either belong to a private health provider or go to the United States or, oddly enough, Israel and India. But the rest of us in the regular person on the street category, we are rated by our earning potential in Europe and Canada. Part of the reason the system in Canada works is that the United States is rather close to Canada and all too many Canadians simply slip across into the United States, rent a place and head to the hospital with their driver’s license and get their care and pay for it, often arranging payments with the hospital. Why wait in Canada for two years for a new hip when you can get one in the United States in ten days?

 

There is a reason that the United States has about the best healthcare system in the world and definitely the largest which performs the most procedures. There is no healthcare system in the world which places a higher priority on the lives of their patients than the United States spare one, and that is the nation which values the lives of every human being so highly that even their enemies enter their hospitals for treatment knowing that everything possible will be done to preserve their lives.

 

Our warning to the wonderful (and the less than wonderful) people of the United States is, please keep your wonderful, privately-run healthcare system as is because once you lose it to the government you will never be able to extract the same system. By the time you manage to extricate yourselves from the horrors to come, the system will be as broken as your streets, bridges and highways have become. Would you trust your life to the snow removal in most cities where it is run by the city or the state, and those levels of government are more efficient than the federal government, except maybe for the city government in Washington D.C. due to the horrible example they have right there to emulate. Yes, many times people complain about how long they waited in an emergency room just to get five stitches in their child’s lip after a slight altercation on the playground. Keep in mind that an emergency room is not first-come-first-served basis but on a most serious first basis as somebody with a broken leg or sucking chest wound comes in after you, they will be treated before you and your five stitches is about the lowest form of injury once the bleeding has been treated which often requires a cold cloth to stop the bleeding. Heart attacks usually take first priority, which we can attest to by personal experience. We will grant you that emergency rooms could use larger staff but then somehow whenever we end up in one, it is always when they are bust with seeming thousands arriving by the hour; and we never see them on a Wednesday morning at 10:00AM and there were no major car accidents and everybody is watching “The Price is Right” or doing crossword puzzles. If the United States ends up with universal healthcare run by the government, then the emergency room might become the most efficient place even time-wise in the entire hospital. Honestly, after the debacle with the Veterans Administrations Hospital System and them even using two lists, one for their reports which showed how promptly they dealt with caring for the veterans and the real list which had vets dropping dead in the hallways waiting for a bed or even to see a physician for an initial diagnosis, let alone treating their problem; and this is the kind of system people honestly desire? Ask the Native Americans about their government run healthcare. After checking out those two disaster cases, then tell me that is the healthcare you want for you and your family. Sometimes you want the different choices competing for your business, because it makes them try harder. Public run healthcare means every choice is run by the same administrators and could not care about your business as they get paid no matter how poorly they treat you, or even if they refuse to treat you.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

If You Hate Your Obamacare, You Must Keep Your Obamacare

 

America was promised that first thing out of the box, given the power, Obamacare would be repealed and some things improved if they were to be kept. Well, that did not happen, did it. They have tried at least twice to repeal and replace it with what they said would be a system based more on competition and less on government. The first was rejected by many conservative commentators and healthcare specialists. That was probably predictable as they are politicians, not geniuses. Well, the House went back and presumably asked for advice from physicians and insurance executives as well as heads of healthcare facilities of every level and type and came up with a Plan II. The Senate spent a fair amount of time in debate and made alterations amending parts, adding and cutting until they felt they had molded something worthy of sending back to the House of Representatives and presenting to the people. The Republican leadership requested the party come together and send the legislation back and advised that after the House of Representatives had their shot at altering, adding and cutting the Senate would have another go at what they received. The Republicans were likely guaranteed that unlike Obamacare, which was passed in haste and fearing the replacement for Senator Kennedy would topple their chance to pass anything different, they passed the legislation as it stood in a state of sheer panic, unfinished and knowing it would fail. This was acceptable as they defined the plan to murder the insurance leg of the healthcare support system. That would place healthcare at the precipice and without the financial support of the insurance leg, soon the entirety of the healthcare system would be pushed beyond the cusp and the American people would demand that they be saved from the collapsing healthcare system. They would demand from the very people who allowed the crisis, actually enacted the necessary infection of the system forcing its collapse, the authors of the problem to save them and repair the problem.

 

The repair was going to be single payer government healthcare, the British styled system just like the system which just allowed Charlie Gard to die. The single payer style British, or Canadian, French, Swiss, German or any other European styled healthcare or similar to any socialist system’s healthcare system and then the government would control life itself. Many are probably wondering why the British Courts decided that Charlie Gard, Charlie the Innocent, had to have his life support terminated and thus making Charlie terminated. There will be reports that he was unsavable, but not all treatments had been tried and New York – Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center was willing to try an experimental treatment free of any cost if the British courts would permit them the opportunity to attempt and save his life. The parents through a funding site had raised more than sufficient money to pay for any incidentals to allow them to accompany their newborn son. But the problem was simple for the courts, could the government allow their citizens to chase treatments which might actually save their lives outside the British system. Allowing Charlie Gard to be treated, even for free, could set a dangerous precedent and if such became anything approaching normal, then their entire system would be called into question. They could not allow for the British government single provider system to be questioned and called into doubt. The risk that the people in Britain might come to doubt whether they were really receiving the best conceivable healthcare from their government could not be risked and Charlie Gard had become the test case before the world. Charlie against the British government healthcare system, Charlie had to lose, Charlie had to be allowed to die with dignity because that was the British way, or at least it is now. Charlie had to be denied any chance to live outside the British healthcare system.

 

Charlie Gard
with Tweets of Pope Francis
and President Donald Trump

 

This is the eventuality which Obamacare was and will bring about. Should the number of insurance companies dwindle until there were only a few, possibly just one, and the government’s job would be made that much easier. Part of Obamacare was the government covering the losses of health insurance companies and using bureaucratic delays, they could starve the weaker insurance companies into folding leaving fewer providing coverage until the government could simply absorb the remaining companies and merge it all into government single payer healthcare. Presto Change-o and the government would respond to the cries of the sheeple who would not know where to turn and would be willing to accept anything because they were scared. That plan is still working, and working right as planned and the system to give the government control over life and death is still working because there are those who desire the government to absorb this power. These are the government lifers who have been in Washington D.C. so long that they have come to believe their own propaganda. They believe that government will be exactly what the people need and if the government just took over all the healthcare, then things would be perfect. When, after taking over healthcare, they still did not have all the power required to control the population, then what, then what would they grab next? What would be next, the food stores?

 

Who are the people who desire to run everybody’s life from Washington D.C. and are blocking any hope of changing the current Obamacare trap from snapping shut? Well, the Democrat Party leadership is all behind this and were the ones who enacted this to begin with. When the Democrat Party leadership wants something, they get what they want because they appear to have complete control over their members. When the Democrat leadership wants something passed, it passes. When the Democrat Party leadership wants something opposed, it is opposed. Then there are the Republican Party faithful. When the Republican Party needs their votes, they get them. Then there are the government faithful, those for whom the government means everything. They will support government even over the people. These Republicans just shot down the latest Republican healthcare plan. The plan likely was not perfect, but nothing is but it would have given some hope against Obamacare. Who are these Republicans who prefer Obamacare and the government over the people? Well their names are Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; Dean Heller, R-Nev.; John McCain, R-Ariz.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Rob Portman, R-Ohio. For many these names are not of any surprise and they all live in states where they will very likely be reelected and will die while serving, or is that disserving in the Senate.

 

Senator John McCain has taken his objection to a whole other level when he stated to the media that the “major failures” of ObamaCare were that it was “rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict party-line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to ObamaCare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona, where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of the aisle, heed the recommendations of the nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people.” That is a mouthful and probably would escape many that what John McCain, Mr. Loyalty when on the campaign trail, what he just stated is that he will join any Democrat effort to oppose any efforts to repeal or replace ObamaCare. He has just joined the Democrat offensive to refuse anything that the Republicans offer unless it is to further fund ObamaCare and continue to inflict its heavy toll on the American people. So, as long as the Democrats continue their rejection, they can count upon Senator John “I’m a loyal and trusted Republican” Sidney “but I am also a ‘Never Trump’ loyalist and with his opposition on anything which makes him look bad or not honor his evil promises” McCain, thus I must join the Democrats once again on this effort to save ObamaCare and “Stump Trump.” So, the Republicans in the Senate can add John McCain to the Democrat Party opponent list for the duration and should put up an honest and valid challenger to his next election or force his retirement. He has joined the left and will not be retrieved; he has gone round the bend.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

And the Courts Sentenced an Innocent to Death

 

We hear all the time that the death penalty is the most dangerous concept because as long as it remains an option, then it is guaranteed that the courts will sentence an innocent person to death for a crime they did not commit. Well, there has finally come just such a case except in this particular case the person sentenced to death has not committed anything against any law except the law that costs must be contained. Yes, this case a person was sentenced to death because their continued existence might prove overly costly. For the threat of costing too much in order to continue their life, a human being has received sentencing to be put down. What is even more frightening is that almost nobody appears to care. The person in question here is an infant in Britain who has a condition which the medical personnel have determined is incurable. Any infant with the exact same set of conditions in many other nations would have procedures attempted seeking to cure them. Yes, such experimentation on one with such a condition would prove costly and would not be covered nearly as sufficiently as parents financial ability might find comfortable, but there can be ways around such problems. The person sentenced to death is the infant Charlie Gard. The United States has physicians willing to treat Charlie Gard, if for no other reason, but simply to try to find the correct means of treating his disorder. The question is, will they get a chance.

 

Charlie Gard Sentenced to Death in Britain

 

The cost will not even prove to be impossible to handle as there already exist an entire web site which tells of Charlie’s medical condition, the proposed potential life saving treatment and offers contributions to assist with the legal fight and the treatments would doctors get the opportunity. New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center went on record last week to say that it was willing to admit Charlie as a patient or send an experimental drug to London, subject to Food and Drug Administration approval. The British courts realizing the pressure they were facing have permitted an American neurologist to examine Charlie but we expect that this is just their ploy to try and find a means to either complete their sentencing of Charlie or potentially unload the responsibility onto anyone else willing to take Charlie off their hands and clear the British medical system from this burdensome case. This is an example of the lovely single payer plan and what occurs eventually when a case presents a challenge beyond what the government is willing to cover. There are little secrets built into any universal coverage plan where the government ends up responsible for paying for the care. They have a ‘wonderful’ age scale recommending which ages are worth how much in coverage costs. What is most interesting is not that senior citizens, those past retirement age, are considered only worth minimal coverage but that the very young are equally worthless in the government’s considerations. Those children under the age of approximately fourteen are considered not yet close enough to earning age to be worth expensive treatments. This is what is Charlie’s predicament turns out to be, he is too young to be worthy of life. Wonderful system of healthcare, is it not?

 

Charlie Gard’s Parents Leaving the High Court in London

 

Charlie’s Parents have run through the entire British court system even to reaching the High Court in London. What is frightening about this case and others of a similar nature where the State has decided a life is unworthy of the potential for expenses to rescue is that when it is a child, the parent’s and their willingness to pay all expenses does not determine the child’s fate, the courts and the State reserve that right. Even should the parents be extremely wealthy of have a foreign hospital willing to treat the child just to gain knowledge which can benefit future treatment of patients with the same or similar conditions, the court can refuse to release the patient for treatment elsewhere and still rule and have the patient, the child, removed from life-support and allowed, forced, to die. When the State is ultimately presumed to be responsible for healthcare, then the State determines who gets how much care and in cases where a life hangs in the balance, who lives and who is put to death. The liberals who are so concerned that some day a person will be sentenced to death wrongly by the courts apparently have little problem with the courts sentencing Charlie Gard to death simply because treating him would prove costly and inconvenience the State. Well, we finally have a case once more where the leftists sentence an innocent to death simply for the good of the State because the State stands as the ultimate good and all who oppose the ruling of the state in a case of a young child’s life simply due to their medical condition are the evil ones. Charlie Gard proves the lack of innocence of the State and if he is allowed to die, the sole reason will be that the State’s rulings must be carried out for the good of the people otherwise setting a precedent where the State can be countermanded simply because another State or individual is willing to pay the price of medical care. When the State decides you are incurable, suffering, and should be permitted to die with dignity, then you must be permitted to die with dignity. There is no dignity in death, only finality and when the death is an infant who is unable to speak up and say, ‘I want to live,’ then death it must be, or so say the British courts, and they are probably indicative of most European courts responding to the limitations dictated by the health gods. Why would any civilized peoples allow cost to determine the life of any child?

 

Beyond the Cusp