Obamacare

REPRINTED FROM BEYOND HEALTH® News by Raymond Francis ObamaCare has been passed and signed into law. While healthcare reform is desperately needed, is this the reform we need? The existing drugs-and-surgery approach to healthcare is a failure; it keeps people sick and costs high. ObamaCare traps us into this failed system and makes change even more difficult. This is not the reform we need, and it comes at a huge cost not only in dollars but in more government intrusion into our lives, loss of freedom and serious constitutional questions. ObamaCare is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, hoping it will keep us from sinking! Disease-care costs are out of control. Rapidly increasing and economically unsustainable, these costs threaten to bankrupt our governments and businesses. The unfunded liability for Medicare and Social Security alone is well over $100 trillion. There is no way this money can be paid without crippling taxation and confiscation of wealth (as has been done in Argentina with confiscation of bank accounts and pensions), catastrophic consequences for our economy, a lower standard of living, and a bleak future for our young who will have to pay the bills. Economists are predicting that the U.S. is plunging toward bankruptcy and third-world status. Even the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicare and Medicaid alone will eventually take up every tax dollar raised, leaving not a cent for anything else, including national defense. ObamaCare does nothing to address these problems. Instead, it makes them worse, adding trillions of dollars to our existing liabilities— driving us toward bankruptcy even faster. Social Security is already paying out more than it is taking in—a cruel Ponzi scheme that is robbing our young of their future. We need healthcare reform, but ObamaCare doesn’t come close. It perpetuates the same failed approaches with another unfunded entitlement program that expands the power of the federal government, making even more people government dependent. Now that the government is in charge, healthcare decisions will soon become political decisions. This is certain to reduce the quality and availability of care, just as it has in every place that has tried such a system. After a bigger, more-costly government, what is the largest single beneficiary of ObamaCare? The drug industry! And why is that not a surprise? The reason healthcare costs are out of control is that conventional medicine doesn’t work. It’s a disease industry that depends on millions of people getting sick and staying that way. Conventional medicine doesn’t prevent or reverse disease. It waits for disease to happen and then runs up the bills by treating symptoms and keeping people sick, pumping profits into the drug industry. Preventing and reversing disease is the only true way to reduce costs, but our physicians have no training in how to do that. About 85 percent of conventional medicine has never been proven by scientific method to be safe or effective. Yet this unscientific gobbledygook is what we teach to our medical students. No wonder it isn’t working! Conventional medicine not only keeps people sick, it makes them even sicker by poisoning them with toxic chemicals and chopping out body parts with surgery. This deeply flawed system is why medical intervention is the leading cause of death in America and why medical costs are out of control. Properly prescribed prescription drugs are our third leading cause of death. Think of how many millions of lives and how many hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved just by outlawing these toxic chemicals. That would be healthcare reform! True healthcare reform must be about replacing the conventional medical system that focuses on diagnosing and suppressing symptoms with a true health medicine system that creates health and focuses on preventing and reversing disease. ObamaCare does nothing to reform medicine, and as a result, costs will continue to increase, and our population will continue to get sicker. We need a revolution in healthcare, but that revolution is not going to happen because ObamaCare locks in the system that is a proven failure. The only way to control costs under this system will be massive rationing of care. Faceless bureaucrats will decide who gets what. Another reason why healthcare costs are out of control is how we finance it. The present system of third-party payment provides little incentive to save. People are more careful when they are spending their own money. The $40 hospital aspirin is a perfect example. As long as insurance is paying for it, who cares? If you were paying for it, you might bring your own aspirin. If you had to pay $100,000 for that bypass operation, you might consider changing your diet to cure your heart disease. We need to get back to a system of private expenditures. Money spent to buy personal health insurance needs to be tax exempt. Right now, employers pay for most health insurance, but this is at the cost of lower wages. Give the employee that money in wages and let it be tax exempt if they spend it on health insurance. This would bring more price control into the healthcare equation. There are excellent market-based approaches to paying for healthcare. There is no need for the government to be involved, other than to get out of the way by removing the legal impediments to these superior answers to our problems. Third party payment has ill effects. Historically, medical benefits were brought about by the placebo effect because of the personal relationship the patient had with their physician, often despite the poison the doctor was prescribing. Doctors used to make house calls. They knew the patient and the family. Today, medicine has been depersonalized, and the placebo effect has been replaced by toxic drugs and surgery. The doctor spends only minutes with the patient and does not feel responsible to the patient. Under ObamaCare, the doctor will become increasingly responsible to the government—moving in the wrong direction. You would get more time and attention from the doctor if you were paying the bill. Security will be compromised. Due to increased social-welfare spending, funding will have to be switched from defense to welfare. We live in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. There are people pledged to our destruction who are working to obtain the means to accomplish that pledge. The need for a strong defense is real, but there will be less money to pay for it. America is still a powerful country, but that is changing. The U.S. Navy is already down to the same number of ships it had in 1916. The Coast Guard is essential for homeland security, yet the average age of our Coast Guard ships is over 40 years. These aging ships suffer frequent breakdowns, require enormous amounts of maintenance, are frequently out of service and are a hazard to the men and women who serve on them. They are being scrapped faster than they are being replaced. The Air Force has an aging fleet that needs replacement. The Army needs to replace vehicles and equipment purchased three decades ago during the Reagan era. As ObamaCare chews up trillions of dollars, less will be available for our security. Costs will go up and jobs will be lost. AT&T is already taking a $1 billion write-down due to the new health law—the beginning of a wave of corporate losses at a time when the economy is in recession. Increasing the costs to our businesses makes them less competitive, and more jobs will be lost to foreign competitors. Corporations will have to raise prices to pay these costs, so be prepared to pay more for everything. Drug companies will raise prices to pay the additional taxes they will have to pay starting next year. With 30-to-40 million newly insured people under ObamaCare, the demand for healthcare will increase significantly, driving up prices and increasing the cost of health insurance. Then there is the growth of government. ObamaCare gives the IRS $10 billion to hire an estimated 16,500 new IRS agents who will enforce the new taxes and fees for small businesses—and that’s just the beginning. Businesses will have to spend more money to comply with all the regulations, driving up their costs and prices, not to mention driving them crazy with an army of IRS agents harassing them. Attorneys general from at least 20 states have already sued the federal government, claiming the healthcare law is unconstitutional. Their suits claim, “The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.” The federal government has no constitutional right to force citizens to buy healthcare insurance. It has no right to legislate how states conduct and regulate healthcare. The traditional sovereignty of the states over the practice of medicine has been usurped by the federal government. Playing a shell game about who pays for healthcare is not healthcare reform. There is no such thing as free healthcare. You pay for healthcare one way or another, and it is better if you have personal control over these expenditures—same as making any other purchase. Real healthcare reform will come when we start teaching and promoting health and stop arguing about who will pay for disease. Almost all disease is preventable and reversible, so let’s do that. Yet government actively suppresses effective alternative care. Vitamin supplements can cure disease; they kill no one. Prescription drugs cannot cure disease; they kill hundreds of thousands and hospitalize millions of victims every year. So which is the government trying to suppress? Vitamins! ObamaCare realigns the historical relationship between the government and the people. America is rapidly becoming a Fascist state, where ownership is private but the government controls. Fascism, like Communism, doesn’t work. All it does is increase costs, decrease competitiveness, reduce job opportunities, depress the economy, reduce freedom, impoverish the people and reduce your standard of living. Meanwhile, the government will be trying to convince you that you are getting something for free. With certainty, there are three things ObamaCare will do: 1) Increase costs. 2) Cause millions to lose their existing healthcare coverage. 3) Ration care, especially for the elderly. In a democracy people get the government they deserve. It is time for every American to think about what the role of government should be and what kind of healthcare system they want. It is more important than ever for every American to read Never Be Sick Again. Learning how to get well, stay well and not be sick is the only real solution to our excessive healthcare costs. Raymond Francis is an MIT-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again, Never Be Fat Again, Never Fear Cancer Again, and an internationally recognized leader in optimal health maintenance. Reprinted with permission from: Beyond Health® News email: mail@beyondhealth.com Copyright 2010, Beyond Health