Fraud And Abuse-a-care
Our president is changing his tune -- but unfortunately, not from the soundtrack to his presidential Titanic, Obamacare, to fixing the economy. The president, writes Cheri Jacobus, on The Hill, is now busy, busy, busy spinning his "unpopular, extraordinarily expensive, colossal healthcare reform bill" as being all about waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid:
The president has already schooled us in creative budgeting and claims the projected savings from eliminating waste, fraud and abuse will pay for the bulk of his healthcare plan, providing roughly $900 billion in savings. There is legitimate reason for skepticism, not the least of which is the big question,"If these two government-run healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are eating up $900 billion in waste, fraud and abuse, how will adding even more government-run healthcare programs make things better?"
I am all for President Obama trying to prove his projections and achieving those savings first, making his plans to cut waste, fraud and abuse a reality and a success. He will find out soon enough that $900 billion is too ambitious and cannot be reached without cutting services in those programs.
However, cleaning up Medicare and Medicaid will give Washington an idea of what we can actually afford, and perhaps then we can stop with the creative budgeting and loopy cost guesstimates. Both Democrats and Republicans can demand this without actually changing their positions on healthcare reform one way or the other.
Personally, my dream is that Obama will do on health care what he did in the Senate -- where his voting record often (or more often than not) read, not Yay or Nay, but "Not Voting."
And here, Obama's doctor-cousin writes about what a colossal mistake Obamacare would be:
Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process. But why stop there? Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day?America has the finest health care delivery system in the world. Let's not forget that and put it at risk in the name of reform. Desperate souls across the globe flock to our shores and cross our borders every day to seek our care. Why? Our system provides cures while the government-run systems from which they flee do not. Compare Europe's common cancer mortality rates to America's: breast cancer - 52 percent higher in Germany and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom; prostate cancer - a staggering 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway; colon cancer - 40 percent higher in the United Kingdom.
Look closer at the United Kingdom. Britain's higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom's, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes. Whatever we do, let us not surrender the great gains we have made. First, do no harm. Lives are at stake.
He gets into the cost fallacies, too.
Consider the implications of Obamacare's financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently - no matter how valid the reasons - he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother's shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they've been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives - for me, 13 years of school and training - to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.
I'm going to spend a TRILLION and a half dollars on this and were going to SAVE money!
Yeah! Pull my finger!
David M. at March 12, 2010 6:41 AM
That's an excellent (and frightening) article. We should have elected his cousin as president.
kishke at March 12, 2010 6:42 AM
Can you imagine if George Bush had a cousin who was in the military but was against the Iraq war?
We'd all have picked up broadcasts of that guy on our fillings he would have been on TV so much.
And he would have probably replaced Paula on American Idol and been nominated for a Nobel prize.
Obama's Dr. Cousin????
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
sean at March 12, 2010 11:48 AM
You know at this point, even my parents are glad I gave up on my pre-med degree to pursue graphic arts.
Elle at March 12, 2010 10:27 PM
"the projected savings from eliminating waste, fraud and abuse will pay for the bulk of his healthcare plan"
Not that I believe this for one second, but how about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse and giving the money back to the people who earned it. You're *supposed to* eliminate waste, fraud and abuse *anyway*. If they aren't even capable of getting rid of those things under the current system, how the hell are they supposed to get rid of those things under another far bigger, more bloated system involving far more money moving about run by the same crooks.
Lobster at March 14, 2010 10:04 AM
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