By Eugene J. Koprowski, Esq.
March 24, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
It’s was exactly one year-ago this week that “Obamacare” became U.S. law, seemingly transforming this country overnight from a free market economy in medicine into a European socialist state. But that critical conservative narrative is not quite right, is it?
Americans, for some inexplicable reason, have willingly turned to the government for decades for our health care, all the while telling pollsters that we don’t want the feds to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.
FDR sowed the seeds of healthcare socialism during the 1940s, when he created the Social Security system, and LBJ cultivated the collectivization during the 1960s with Medicare and Medicaid. Barack Hussein Obama finished the decades-long revolution last spring with the 2,707 page legislative monstrosity that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would first have to read to actually understand.
During the last 40 years, Americans’ out-of-pocket spending on health care has fallen from 50 percent to 10 percent. Meantime, the part of the tab picked up by private insurance companies, generally provided by employers, as a benefit, thanks to federal tax policy, has grown from a mere 25 percent of spending to a gargantuan 40 percent of health care spending.
Medicare and Medicaid—the government--has increased spending from 25 percent of all health care 40 years ago to 50 percent today. Medicare expenditures averaged an amazing $8,300 per patient by 2006 and ballooned to $11,743 in 2009.
Then there’s the Children’s Health Insurance Program which takes up $21.5 billion in federal funding, projected, for fiscal year 2015. So all kids get their healthcare covered by the feds too.
Only 10 Percent
If Americans’ out-of-pocket healthcare spending is only 10 percent today, how much more will the government have to fund either through legislation, regulation, or taxation policy for Americans to admit that they live in a socialist state, at least when it comes to health care, purportedly 1/7th of the U.S. economy, as former physician and pundit Charles Krauthammer likes to say?
Conservative and tea party activists are deluded if they think this is going to change anytime soon.
Some point to the fact that nearly 30 states have sued the Obama administration to stop the implementation of Obamacare, and have secured two huge court victories against the law in recent months.
Surely, these conservatives, optimistically say, there is a push-back against the socialist health care agenda.
If that’s the case, then why are the same states that are suing to stop Obamacare asking for federal funding to implement new “insurance exchanges” that are called for under the bill?
That’s right. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 48 states have already asked for and accepted $1 million each in federal funds to develop the electronic insurance exchanges called for in the bill.
Even Kansas and Wisconsin, which have GOP governors and are litigating to stop “Obamacare,” have accepted, $38 million and $32 million, respectively, from the puzzle palace on the Potomac to get their new, improved socialist health-care information systems online.
I am proud that the House of Representatives – powered by a new GOP majority – voted to repeal Obamacare. I’m excited about the lawsuit victories against Obamacare. But at this point, knowing what we now know about the overall funding of health care, and the true costs of these deficits, I wonder if these were really the landmark wins I had hoped they would be when I worked on the national “Fire Pelosi” bus tour last fall with then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Rep. Michelle Bachmann and others, like the brilliant rising GOP star Isaac C. Hayes, to elect the new GOP House majority.
We are going to have to reform – i.e. defund -- Medicare and Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance if we are going to trim the socialist power over medicine in this country. We are going to have to give individuals massive tax credits to save for their own health care expenses.
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Barack Obama, despite his grandiosity and narcissism, did not bring this awful state of affairs upon us suddenly last spring, though he probably tells himself this when lovingly gazing at his image in the mirror each morning. We’ve been letting our freedom slide away for decades, and, if we don’t watch it, death panels, as predicted by former GOP Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin, will be the norm, quite soon. Denying expensive federal medical care to granny or grandpa, on a case by case basis, is the swiftest way to go for Washington pols that always look for the easy way out when it comes to “cutting” the federal budget. The death panels will balance the budget on your back, and grandma and grandpas backs, literally.
� 2011 Eugene J. Koprowski, Esq. - All Rights Reserved
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Eugene J. Koprowski is founder of Conservative Young Guns Interactive, a digital political advertising agency, with offices in Washington D.C. and Chicago, which aims to keep the grassroots pressure from the Tea Party movement on the GOP through the 2012 election and beyond. He holds a law degree from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and completed his undergraduate work at Northwestern University. An award-winning journalist, Mr. Koprowski earned an Emmy Award Nomination in 2008 from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) for his work for FoxNews.com..
See some of his opinion pieces/columns for Fox News.
E-Mail: conservativeyounggunspac@gmail.com
