The goal was always single payer, Medicare for all. The architect himself, Hans Gruber is on multiple videos saying as much. That agenda wasn't hidden then and it's not hidden now. SCOTUS ruled ACA constitutional in that it was a tax scheme which is the pervue of the legislative branch and the democrats admitted to in court. It was tailored to the free shit lobby and other such blood sucking scum that now make up almost half our population. Once in place it turned out to be ironclad and will likely be impossible to repeal or even change in any significant manner. Too many people are affected at this point.

In short the whole ACA and just about every aspect of the U.S. Healthcare system is now, or will soon be (domino affect) so fucked up that unfucking it is unlikely.

The whole system will either collapse or we will end up with some form of Medicare for all. Either way everybody, and I mean everybody with insurance, regardless of source, is going to feel the pain.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

If people have affordable access available to them, I see that as a system for all.

Insurance was much more affordable when it wasn't mandated that it cover an "essential package" of benefits that many people don't need or want. Obamacare has made insurance much LESS affordable. But that's not the same as "access" because some people choose not to buy health insurance.

quote:

I do not like the idea of government forcing anyone to buy health insurance.

OK, but if they are in a car wreck, and they don't have insurance, they don't have "affordable access".

quote:

I don't think we will ever accept that if someone is in mortal danger, a hospital will turn that person away.

Right, but...
When they get taken by ambulance to the closest hospital they will be treated, but it may not be "affordable". You don't get "affordable access" after the fact if you don't have insurance. Fire insurance may be "affordable"... before your house is on fire, but not after the fact.

Then, after treatment, when they get a bill for more than they can pay, what are their options?

quote:

Whether someone participates or not is another story.

Is it? If someone chooses not to participate, how do you get "healthcare for all"?

Access for all who want it. I am not talking of universal coverage in the same way for every one. I have heard and read a lot of ideas about proposals for high risk pools, catastrophic care, indigent people issues and a social net. We have had a social net and I suspect it will continue in some form.

If someone chooses to use an HSA, for instance, they make a choice of skipping what is otherwise available in favor of how they wish to provide for their healthcare costs.

If they get billed more than they can pay, then they lose everything or go bankrupt or a number of other things. But, they had access to healthcare and made a choice. It was a choice the consumer made. Right now, there are few choices. A straight Obamacare repeal would not give everyone an affordable choice.

If a system is put in place that provides affordable options for everyone, then choosing to not participate in one thing or another leaves consumers subject to what they may have chosen.

Catastrophic care coverage, I suspect, would be an interesting issue to tackle. Regular care by even cash payments would probably satisfy most situations. But, some concierge, cooperative or prepay service that leave insurance companies out would probably be prevalent. Many people use urgent care facilities as it is.

There are a lot of ideas floating around. I would hope that such things are considered during a transition from government centered health care.

I can't quite see the dilemma here for the republicans

there are far more republicans that want to see ZippyCare repealed than there are democraP leaches that are trying to get it for free

it boils down to 'who is the larger constituent group' I think

quote:

If they get billed more than they can pay, then they lose everything or go bankrupt or a number of other things. But, they had access to healthcare and made a choice. It was a choice the consumer made.

So you can acknowledge that if some don't participate, they have made a choice, and that it's not up to government to always make up for people making poor choices, or gambling and losing?

quote:

Right now, there are few choices. A straight Obamacare repeal would not give everyone an affordable choice.

No... markets create choice. Mandates do not create choice.

quote:

If a system is put in place that provides affordable options for everyone, then choosing to not participate in one thing or another leaves consumers subject to what they may have chosen.

What is this "system" that you want to "put in place"? If it's "affordable access" you only get there through competition, by removing the mandates, the taxes and the subsidies.

Do you see what I'm saying?
In order to get "affordable access for all" it takes force. In order to get "affordable access" you have to drop the "for all" notion and stop trying to tell people what they must have, which impedes the markets ability to give people what they want and can afford. Freedom gives the most people the most choices. But if people are free, not everyone exercises their freedom the same way or makes the best choices.

Chellim1,

You are arguing with a ghost. You ascribe so much that I never said and don't believe.

I do not believe in mandates.

In your mind it seems coercion, mandates, taxes, force, and illegitimate subsidies must be used. Not so.

I wrote of incentives. I suspect that block granting to states may be used. I also suspect that some subsidies will be used.

But, I do that with an eye to past uses of money to help markets. To end the Great Depression one idea was to give every tax payer, if memory serves, $3,000.00 to have them just spend it to jump start the economy. Former Soviet countries used this idea too.

Anyway, subsidies do not have to go to insurance companies - something I suspect you fear.

These are all things to be worked out in Congress. I just do not believe in the repeal and walk away approach that I see sometimes in this thread as if that would be a panacea and get the Republicans off the hook for actually pursuing something better.

quote:

You are arguing with a ghost.

I'm done.

I'm still not sure what your "practical approach" entails, or how you think we get there, but I think we can agree on a goal of "affordable access".

I think that can only be accomplished without Obamacare... which is a series of mandates, taxes and subsidies. I think that the poorly named Affordable Care Act needs to be fully repealed before we talk about other ideas to further increase competition, thereby increasing "affordable access" even more than just repeal.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
-Milton Friedman

CRUZ: We Need to Work on Obamacare Repeal Instead of Take August Recess

Senator Ted Cruz appeared on Sean Hannity’s show Monday evening, and urged GOP leadership to forego the scheduled August recess. Instead of taking the upcoming break, Senator Cruz urged Congress to get the job of repealing and replacing Obamacare done.

FOX News reports:

“It’s crazy that we would be taking a recess,” Cruz told Fox News’ “Hannity” Monday night. “There are a bunch of us, myself included, that have been urging leadership back from January [to] not take any recesses.

“Let’s work every day, let’s work weekends, let’s work until we get the job done,” Cruz added. “We have a job to do and a short window of time, and so we ought to stop taking recesses, stop taking time off and just keep going until we get it done.”

Senator Cruz is not accepting any excuses from leadership, and he shouldn’t.

It’s more than admirable that Cruz is calling for members of Congress to work nonstop in an effort to repeal the monstrosity known as Obamacare. After all, our elected officials were sent to D.C. to work, not take time off.

With deadlines fast approaching and little accomplished, other members should join in with Cruz and encourage leadership to forget the recess and work on repeal until the job is done.

http://www.redstate.com/kimber...l-instead-of-recess/

If This is the "Right to Healthcare," We Must Resist

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
With deadlines fast approaching and little accomplished, other members should join in with Cruz and encourage leadership to forget the recess and work on repeal until the job is done.

http://www.redstate.com/kimber...l-instead-of-recess/

Redstate, God love em’, is consistent in seeing things through the lens of ideology. Voters do not want legislators to stay until “repeal” is done as Redstate wants. Ideologues do. Cruz said, "repeal and replace."

Voters want legislators to stay until they pass something of an improvement. Voters want Obamacare out because it is failing to deliver for them.

That is why more and more in the polls say that keeping Obamacare is preferred to what the Republicans are proposing. Voters want something better than Obamacare in terms of lowered costs and better access.

That’s what legislators better stay around to do.

Sure, repeal will dump freeloaders from getting a transfer of wealth but the middle class wants coverage and many of them have preexisting conditions. Repeal alone will make things worse than what was available before Obamacare. The middle class will not be able to buy back the position they had prior to Obamacare's destruction of the private market.

Satisfying an ideological itch won’t scratch what’s bugging most voters.

Republicans must pass something that lowers costs and expands access to healthcare - and explain how their legislation does those things.

quote:

more and more in the polls say that keeping Obamacare is preferred to what the Republicans are proposing

Well... there you go with the polls...
Americans like the Republican's bill so much less than both Obamacare and single-payer we'd might as well go straight to single-payer: full-bore socialism.

Obamacare and single-payer ranked better than GOP health care plans
https://today.yougov.com/news/...ed-better-gop-healt/

Mmmmmm, polls. The only reason why it's OK that Kellyann Conway cited polls to Chris Cuomo is because Cuomo is of that species - journalists - that insists on treating polls as if they were real and infallible. IOW, she was hoisting him with his own petard rather than trying to say that she believes in polls.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

more and more in the polls say that keeping Obamacare is preferred to what the Republicans are proposing

Well... there you go with the polls...
Americans like the Republican's bill so much less than both Obamacare and single-payer we'd might as well go straight to full-bore socialism.

Obamacare and single-payer ranked better than GOP health care plans
https://today.yougov.com/news/...ed-better-gop-healt/

That's ideological bullying and single-payer scare tactics.

Earlier in this thread I argued against those who say, the only ones who love freedom will see it one way. It is just not so.

Why rush to the socialism slur anyway? Isn't there something more substantive available to you? I ask in seriousness. In your thoughts do you only have a Richter scale of ideas on this subject?

Honestly, you seem to be short-changing yourself by not conceptualizing how there are more options than simply repeal versus socialism, freedom-hating, single-payer and the like.

I sense your passion but you slippery-slope yourself right to slurs.

It seems Senator Cruz is seeking to make some progress while even many purists are finding a path to what they see as improvement.

Whatever they pass now, it better not be the end of the process.

I don't trust polls either but the polls seem to be matching what I am hearing legislators say they are hearing from their constituents. Do you hear something different across the spectrum? If so, how are you verifying that?

If the polls/reports are correct, it seems to be that voters are apprehensive. Right now Obamacare is a raft and allows everyone to participate if they choose. If that raft is sunk without voters feeling as though another raft is along side, they may be nervous about what will happen to them.

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:
Mmmmmm, polls. The only reason why it's OK that Kellyann Conway cited polls to Chris Cuomo is because Cuomo is of that species - journalists - that insists on treating polls as if they were real and infallible. IOW, she was hoisting him with his own petard rather than trying to say that she believes in polls.

Do you have any information to contravene the latest Fox poll on the matter? (7-3-17 reported)

It seems that the poll matches what legislators are saying about their constituents.

What would you trust to discern what the voters think of the Republican proposals vis-a-vis Obamacare right now?

That's partly why Senator Cruz' proposal to let Obamacare go on to collapse while opening free markets again seemed like an interesting approach.

Pilot projects and so many things could occur during a transition period.

Sen. Rand Paul: Senate GOP Decides to Keep Obamacare

I miss the old days, when Republicans stood for repealing Obamacare. Republicans across the country and every member of my caucus campaigned on repeal – often declaring they would tear out Obamacare “root and branch!”
What happened?

Now too many Republicans are falling all over themselves to stuff hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars into a bill that doesn’t repeal Obamacare and feeds Big Insurance a huge bailout.

Obamacare regulations? Still here. Taxes? Many still in place, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars.

Insurance company bailouts? Those, too. Remember when Republicans complained about Obamacare’s risk corridors? Remember when we called the corridors nothing more than insurance company bailouts? I remember when one prominent GOP candidate during a presidential debate explicitly called out the Obamacare risk corridors as a bailout to insurance companies. Does anyone else?

Now, the Senate GOP plan being put forward is chock full of insurance bailout money – to the tune of nearly $200 billion. Republicans, present company excluded, now support the idea of lowering your insurance premium by giving a subsidy to the insurance company.

Remarkable. If the GOP now supports an insurance stabilization fund to lower insurance prices, maybe they now support a New Car stabilization fund to lower the price of cars. Or maybe the GOP would support an iPhone stabilization fund to lower the price of phones.

The possibilities are limitless once you accept that the federal government should subsidize prices. I remember when Republicans favored the free choice of the marketplace.

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. I want to repeat that so everyone realizes why I’ll vote “no” as it stands now:

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. Not even close.

In fact, the Senate GOP bill codifies and likely expands many aspects of Obamacare.

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill codifies a federal entitlement to insurance. With the Senate GOP bill, Republicans, for the first time, will signal that they favor a key aspect of Obamacare – federal taxpayer funding of private insurance purchases.

The bill will transfer billions of dollars to people who will then transfer billions of dollars to insurance companies. What a great business model – encourage the federal government to use taxpayer money to buy a private company’s product. Great business model, that is, if you are Big Insurance. Remarkable.

The Senate Obamacare-lite bill does what the Democrats forgot to do – appropriate billions for Obamacare’s cost-sharing reductions, aka subsidies. Really? Republicans are going to fund Obamacare subsidies that the Democrats forgot to fund?

Doesn’t sound much like repeal to me. One might even argue it’s worse than Obamacare-lite because it actually creates a giant superfund to bail out the insurance companies – something even the Democrats feared to do.

I was first elected in the heady days of the Tea Party Tidal Wave, when tens of thousands of citizens gathered on the central city lawn to protest Big Government, Big Debt, and a government takeover of health care.

This citizenry won in four elections. Each time, the GOP establishment told conservatives, “We can’t repeal Obamacare until we have all three branches of government.” Finally, in 2016, that came to pass. Republicans now control all three branches of government.

And . . . the best that is offered is Obamacare-lite: keeping the Obamacare subsidies, keeping some of the Obamacare taxes, creating a giant insurance bailout superfund, and keeping most of the Obamacare regulations.

Shame. Shame on many in the GOP for promising repeal and instead affirming, keeping, and, in some cases, expanding Obamacare. What a shame.


Link

quote:

What happened?

Now too many Republicans are falling all over themselves to stuff hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars into a bill that doesn’t repeal Obamacare and feeds Big Insurance a huge bailout.

The Senate Obamacare bill does not repeal Obamacare. Not even close.
In fact, the Senate GOP bill codifies and likely expands many aspects of Obamacare.

Shame. Shame on many in the GOP for promising repeal and instead affirming, keeping, and, in some cases, expanding Obamacare. What a shame.

Thank you, Sen. Rand Paul.
Thank you, ChicagoSigMan. We need more patriots like you to stand up to tyranny, whether it comes with a D label or an R label.

If Rand Paul is right, the acquiescence of the Republican controlled Congress to Obamacare, and the increasing popularity of a single-payer system, suggest that socialized medicine cannot be kept at bay for much longer.

July 11, 2017
Single-Payer Socialized Health Care: What Would It Mean for Innovative and Alternative Medicine?
By Peter Barry Chowka

In the midst of the myriad destructive elements that are plaguing modern society or quickly coming into play, the looming transformation of the medical system in the United States into a single-payer socialist nightmare is one of the most alarming developments facing us.

The inability of the Republican controlled Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the increasing popularity of a single-payer system, suggest that socialized medicine cannot be kept at bay for much longer. Leaders of the Democratic Party, including prominent contenders for the party’s 2020 nomination for President, now support the concept of single-payer. The current debate in the media and political circles -- dominated by disagreements over costs, how many people might “lose coverage,” the issue of preexisting conditions, and cuts to Medicaid -- overlooks a key point: the fact that government-run socialized medicine at its core is evil. Once enacted, it will be one of the final nails in the coffin of Americans’ increasingly tenuous hold on individual liberty and freedom.

The threats to freedom of choice that single-payer represents will impact not only the availability and quality of life-saving drugs, surgery, end of life care, and other mainstays of the American health care system. It will also adversely impact the growing field of alternative medicine that -- largely under the radar of official attention -- has gained the interest and support of about one-half of the adult population.

It’s All About Control -- and Making Money

On March 21, 2009 Obamacare was rammed through an overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled Congress on a straight party line vote. Obamacare represented a major step forward in the long march toward socialized medicine -- helping as it did to establish widespread public acceptance of the concept of “health care as a right.”

H.R. 3590 The Affordable Care Act or Obamacare (2009-2010) Photo credit

The day after the Obamacare vote, the senior member of the House of Representatives, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), a strong supporter of government-run health care since he first got elected to the Congress in the mid-1950s, appeared as a guest on a local Detroit radio program. I learned about the Dingell interview courtesy of someone in Detroit who heard the broadcast and posted a comment about it at a blog that I stumbled upon. After some research, I was able to identify the Detroit talk show -- it was the Paul W. Smith program on radio station WJR -- and locate an audio file of the Dingell segment on WJR’s Web site before it scrolled offline.

Sure enough, as he gleefully celebrated the passage of Obamacare on Smith’s program, Dingell blurted out that the Democrats had finally learned how “to control the people:”

The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

When news of Dingell’s interview and his telling comment was published in American Thinker in an article by this author, and was picked up by the mainstream media including Fox News, Dingell’s office issued a statement claiming that the aging Congressman’s comments had been “taken out of context.” The unedited recording of the interview, however, speaks for itself.

That one comment by Dingell on March 22, 2009 exposed the truth in the situation: The purpose of government-run health care is to control the people.

This is no surprise to anyone who has studied the history of socialism and communism. Nationalized mandated health care has always been a goal of the collectivist, statist, communist model of governance.

Writing in 2007 in National Review Online, Mark Steyn put it succinctly:

Socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state.

That transformation entails an army of bureaucrats, PR specialists, enforcers, lobbyists, and hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of individuals functioning at various levels of the medical Establishment -- which it might surprise many readers to learn is the biggest business in the United States, dwarfing annual spending on the military by a factor of more than five to one. According to government figures, in 2015 U.S. military spending was about $600 billion, while spending on all U.S. medical care that year reached $3.2 trillion. About 64% of the total health care bill was directly paid for by the government.

Not only is conventional medical care expensive, its costs have exploded during the past half century. According to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, “Adjusted for inflation, annual medical spending per person [in the United States] has increased from approximately $700 in 1960 to more than $6,000 today [2006], tripling as a share of the gross domestic product (GDP).” Between 2006 and 2015, medical spending per person increased even more, to $10,000 annually.

The shocking rise in the costs of medical care since the 1960s has been exacerbated if not largely caused by the government’s increasing involvement and meddling in the field.

As usual, the figures -- the bottom line -- tell us a lot. With $10,000 per person (2015 figures) in play, multiplied by a population of 330 million consumers, the market for medical care and the potential profits are unprecedented in the history of the world.

Alternative Medicine: More Popular than Conventional Medicine?

The purpose of this article is not to explore the obscene costs or other obnoxious elements inherent in the conventional medical system. Rather, it is to examine how this system -- as it is now transforming itself into a classic socialist model -- has affected and will continue to influence medical innovation and the availability of alternative medicine options. Since its inception, alternative medicine has relied on the American climate of freedom and choice -- a context that is rapidly receding in the face of socialism’s advance.

A frequently cited study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993, a quarter century ago now, was a turning point in establishing the prevalence, popularity, and utilization of alternative -- or “unconventional” -- medical practices in the United States. The lead author of the study was David M. Eisenberg, M.D., a physician and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Unconventional or alternative medicine generally refers to things like nutritional medicine (including vitamin supplements), homeopathy, chiropratic care, herbal medicine, naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, alternative cancer therapies, prayer, and a number of other practices

Excerpts from the 1993 New England Journal of Medicine article, the full text of which is available here:

We found that unconventional medicine has an enormous presence in the U.S. health care system. An estimated one in three persons in the U.S. adult population used unconventional therapy in 1990. The estimated number of visits made in 1990 to providers of unconventional therapy was greater than the number of visits to all primary care medical doctors nationwide, and the amount spent out of pocket on unconventional therapy was comparable to the amount spent out of pocket by Americans for all hospitalizations.

The use of unconventional therapy was not confined to any narrow segment of U.S. society. The rates of use ranged from 23 to 53 percent in all sociodemographic groups we considered.

Extrapolation to the total U.S. household population suggests that in 1990 an estimated 61 million Americans used at least 1 of the 16 unconventional therapies we studied and approximately 22 million Americans saw providers of unconventional therapy for a principal medical condition.

The estimated number of ambulatory visits to providers of unconventional therapy in 1990 was 425 million (95 percent confidence interval, 302 million to 548 million). This number exceeds the estimated 388 million visits in 1990 to all primary care physicians (general and family practitioners, pediatricians, and specialists in internal medicine) combined

The surprisingly widespread acceptance and use of alternative or unconventional medical practices documented in the mainstream New England Journal of Medicine in 1993 occurred despite decades of denigration by the American Medical Establishment -- working hand in glove with the federal government and its agencies, including the FDA, FTC, DOJ, etc.

This condemnation of alternatives relied on a variety of tactics including surveillance, harassment, prosecutions, bans of alternative treatments, dirty tricks, and an ongoing collusion with the mainstream media to dismiss and blacklist unconventional medical options. The history of this censure is long, dark, and convoluted, but it is available to anyone who wishes to delve into it.

Since the 1993 study by Eisenberg et al, the popularity of alternative medicine has continued to grow -- a decade ago 4 in 10 American adults were using some form of complementary alternative medicine, according to a 2008 government study, the most recent one that could be found. This growth in popularity has been aided by a limited degree of Establishment cooperation as the name of the field was changed from alternative to complementary and then to integrative medicine. In 1992, the federal government climbed on the bandwagon with a new, Congressionally-mandated Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The office’s name was later changed to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and then to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. The name changes are not insignificant: “Alternative” connotes a truly alternative treatment option that might be offered as a primary therapy, while “complementary” and “integrative” suggest that the alternative method is at best a complement, and therefore secondary, to the dominant conventional medical model that remains the gold standard in health care. Something that is “integrative” is ultimately less threatening -- less of a challenge -- than an outright alternative to the hegemony of orthodox medicine.

Leading practitioner of Alternative Medicine Linda L. Isaacs, M.D.

One way of looking at all of this is that a primary alternative therapy for cancer -- for example, a regimen involving a special diet, nutritional supplements, and detoxification, like the one practiced by Linda L. Isaacs, M.D. in New York City -- might treat the patient without using any of the standard conventional therapies for cancer like surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. In contrast, a complementary/integrative approach provides a gentle “alternative light” modality like herbs or massage to help the patient avoid unpleasant side effects and feel more comfortable while she undergoes surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. The integrative approach, while not without value, does not challenge the primacy of the conventional medical model.

Alternative medicine: Once again squarely in the cross-hairs

It needs to be kept in mind that alternative medicine -- whatever name it is going by -- has thrived in the context of the mixed climate of the for-profit private sector and government-endorsed, -supported, and -influenced medical care that has been in effect in the United States since the end of World War II. Over time, starting in the 1960s, the public at the grassroots level began to explore and then demand access to medical alternatives, and the private sector -- with minor and grudging government support -- responded. The underlying philosophy of freedom including the somewhat laissez-faire free market environment in this country made the ascent of alternative medical approaches possible.

But that is now changing. The first blow came in 2009 with the passage of Obamacare, which fully went into effect in 2013. Otherwise absurdly known as the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare added thousands of pages of new regulations to the practice of medicine, increased government spending on (and control of) medical care, discouraged smaller primary medical practices while encouraging consolidation and centralization, hired thousands of new IRS employees or agents to enforce Obamacare’s mandates on individual citizens, and required the implementation of onerous and Orwellian electronic medical records (EMRs) and something called evidence based medicine at every level of medical practice. Today, the hands of the individual physician are being tied tighter than ever as the government increasingly is coming between the physician and his patient.

Many if not most alternative therapies -- especially the ones that are still employed as primary treatments -- are not approved by the government, state medical licensing boards, Medicare and Medicaid bureaucrats, etc. Even under the heel of Obamacare, however, these interlocked players were unable to exert total control over the practice of medicine at the grassroots level, where true medical innovation and alternatives are thriving. But under the looming single payer socialized medicine scheme, this is all about to change.

Charlie Gard

Addenda: As this article is being written, an emotionally wrenching medical case is playing out in the UK that has direct relevance to some of the issues being discussed here. Charlie Gard is an 11-month old baby who has mitochondrial depletion syndrome, a “rare genetic disorder that causes brain damage and prevents muscles from developing.” He is hospitalized in London in what National Health Service (NHS) physicians say is a terminal and hopeless condition. His case has gained worldwide attention with the Pope and President Donald Trump weighing in.

Charlie’s parents have been fighting the British medical and legal Establishments in an effort to regain custody of their son so he can be taken to the United States or another country where innovative treatments exist that, they say, might offer the possibility of Charlie’s survival and clinical improvement. The London hospital took the case to a court, which agreed with the government doctors and NHS bureaucrats that Charlie needs to have his life support removed so that he can die in hospital, the parents’ wishes be damned.

It remains to be seen if a new effort by the parents to appeal the court’s decision will prevail. In the meantime, the case illustrates several points. In a socialized, single-payer medical system like the one that has been in place in the UK since the NHS was mandated in 1948, the patient -- or in this case, his parents -- is not in control; the medical bureaucrats under the color of law have the final say over one’s life and death.



It is also noteworthy that innovative options that might help a patient like Charlie are emanating not from Britain -- where socialism and the NHS have hindered medical innovation and impaired successful treatment outcomes -- but from the United States, where the practice of medicine has yet to fall under the complete and suffocating yoke of socialism.

To be continued.


Peter Barry Chowka has reported on health care, with an emphasis on alternative medicine, since 1972. Between 1992-’94 he was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health.

http://www.americanthinker.com...native_medicine.html

Buying down costs by guaranteeing money to insurance companies will only drive costs higher while choking the competitive life out of a market.

Money needs to go into innovative approaches to cost improvement, not funding failed past approaches.

It seems to me that labeling legislators as tyrants is not productive. They are elected by us and we thought we voted in those who would eliminate Obamacare, and they may not.

Legislators may be dense, short-sighted or wrong, subjecting them to being removed at the next election. But, to call them unpatriotic or tyrants just exhibits name calling.

That kind of approach has often left so many conservative legislators from being able to interact to build a coalition.

Once things turn into an epithet, like unpatriotic, the interaction is pretty much locked down.

If legislators form some transition to something better, we will have a chance. It remains to be seen what will become of things. But, this is not the time to cut off interaction by name calling - or so it seems to me.

One philosophical problem for GOP legislators was expressed in one interview I saw where the Senator said that he needed to significantly confer with his key stakeholder, the insurance lobby.

If legislators ask the insurance lobby about whether they want increasing competition and competing notions of the way in which we deliver healthcare, they will probably always favor subsidies and feeding at the trough.

I hope legislators find some way to rise above the old ways. As much as some say that freeloaders are the problem, the money trail seems to lead to insurance companies as a driving force.

Why can't money be given to consumers, if subsidized, and force companies to compete for those dollars from CONSUMERS instead of just giving a transfer to insurance companies?

Again, I think Senator Cruz was on to something . . . a phase out repeal with a transition to replace makes sense.

quote:

I think Senator Cruz was on to something . . . a phase out repeal with a transition to replace makes sense.

Yes, Senator Cruz and Senator Paul are trying to bring the GOP, kicking and screaming, in that direction.

Cruz and Paul represent less than 1/2 of 1% of the 535 Congress critters, and (obviously) a whopping 2% of their fellow Senators.

They've a long row to hoe, uphill, both ways, snow all year long.

I appreciate their efforts, but have very little confidence in their ability to pull it off.

I wish this weren't the case.

McConnell has scheduled (or is scheduling?) a vote in the Senate next week on the current proposed "repair and scaling-down" of ObamaCare. Trump has said that if Congress can't pass the bill then it's time to repeal and talk about replacement afterward. Various reports out there are saying that at least ten Republicans currently expect to vote 'no' on the current bill.

IOW, you may see Trump shifting to push for an outright repeal by the end of next week.