Mar 24 2010

The whitewash in the media continues

Category: Uncategorizedharmonicminer @ 6:58 am

Obama’s friends in the media continue in campaign mode for him. Test question: can you find an article like the one quoted below that debunks, in USNews and World Report, the myth of 47 million “uninsured” that the Democrats keep bandying about?

5 Overblown Fears About Healthcare Reform

In Washington, everybody knows about unintended consequences: the outcomes you fail to anticipate when you change the way something works. But there’s another phenomenon that works somewhat in reverse: Preregulatory paranoia, or the fear that new rules meant to make the system better will instead produce mayhem and disaster.

It will be a long time before we know whether the historic healthcare reform finally passed by Congress will make the system better or worse. But the rhetoric surrounding the yearlong ordeal has already set new standards for overwrought fearmongering.

Hmm.. I would say that’s true, but the fearmongering and overblown rhetoric, not to mention simply lies, is mostly on the side of those promoting a much larger federal role in healthcare.

And the reason why it will be a “long time before we know whether the historic healthcare reform finally passed by Congress will make the system better or worse” is because the bill was deliberately designed NOT to do much of anything until this congress and president are no longer up for re-election, or at least are far distant from it. Not that much changes in the short term… which was done deliberately to dissociate the pernicious effects that are coming from the language of the bill, or simply to delay the electoral consequences.

The government will <not> take over one sixth of the economy. ………. In fact, it’s hard to identify any part of the private-sector healthcare industry that stands to lose under reform.

Which is why, of course, the private-sector big-pharma, big-law, big-insurance and big-med were more than happy for the government to take money from the people and give it them. The fact is that under the new plan, the total amount of healthcare spending in the USA will RISE to about 1/6 of the total economy, and instead of the about 1/2 that is currently under direct federal control, ALL of it will be in one way or another.

The federal debt will <not> explode. It might, but not because of healthcare reform.

No one with a lick of sense believes the CBO numbers. The author of this article needs to sit down with Paul Ryan and have a talk.  It is beyond incredible that anyone believes it’s possible to add tens of millions of new people to the rolls and not balloon the deficit.

Socalized medicine is <not> on the way. ……. Those who fear the advent of “socialized medicine” mainly seem to worry that the current set of reforms is just Phase 1, to be followed by bigger changes that will replace doctors with bureaucrats and render individual patients even more powerless than they are now.

Well, yes.

This is supposed to happen despite the likelihood that the Democrats who supported reform will lose seats in the November elections, while Republicans who opposed reform will gain seats.

Obvious this author doesn’t know a thing about the history of entitlement programs in the USA. Or worse, is simply concealing the facts for some political purpose. But everyone who can read knows that entitlement programs of this kind GROW, that government control always GROWS, and that the cost of this mess is going to multiply hugely beyond the Left’s predictions.

It seems much more likely that after surviving the battles of the last year, the current for-profit healthcare industry will be with us for the foreseeable future.

And costing us all a LOT more.

Read the history of the Medicare program and the rhetoric surrounding it at its passage, the predictions of what it would cost and what it would control, and the facts of what it now costs and what it controls.  And consider that it’s getting worse all the time, and that everyone who knows anything about it, and will tell the truth, admits it will not be able to keep its promises, made by the Leftists in government to buy votes, so that the baby boomers aren’t going to begin to get the benefit from it that the current senior generation has gotten while the boomers were funding it.

This will be worse. Far worse.

Of course, at the time Medicare was passed, there were plenty of “feel good articles” like the one quoted here, too.

But this is quack medicine and quack journalism.