Giant steps toward a government takeover of the health-care system?
- Feb 4, 2009 - 12 -
{REL[5788][photo]AgDZEtNsREL}The new SCHIP legislation is nothing less than a vehicle to advance “socialized medicine” by stealth. The program’s purpose, when it was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1997, was to assist in subsidizing health care for children in families whose incomes made them ineligible for Medicaid but who couldn’t afford private health insurance.
The public insurance program, which was crafted to provide insurance coverage for children of working-poor families, may soon grow dramatically, nearly tripling in size by 2013.
Under the SCHIP legislation, the program has experienced the kind of expansion-in-purpose only possible in Washington, D.C. Under the new legislation, families with incomes of up to $84,400 for a family of four will be eligible for government-subsidized health care for their children. Consequently, people with incomes higher than most American families will now have children eligible for health insurance subsidies originally intended for low-income families.
The new SCHIP legislation also will make it much easier for some states to increase eligibility for SCHIP-subsidized health care even for families who earn over $100,000 a year in family income. It is estimated that somewhere between a third and a half of the children signed up under the SCHIP expansion will be children who will have been taken off the private insurance rolls and put on government-subsidized health insurance.
A January 2007 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests SCHIP is “crowding out” private insurance, as their research revealed that for every ten children added to the public rolls, six had been covered by private insurance. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million individuals will forgo private insurance coverage and opt in to the public program (SCHIP).
Wouldn’t the nation’s children be better served by targeting the truly needy for expanded health assistance rather than encouraging some in the middle class to move their children off private insurance and onto government programs?
The only rational explanation for deliberately designing programs to take children out of private health insurance and put them on government-subsidized insurance when they come from families making sometimes from $84,400 to over $100,000 a year is to provide a foundation for an increasing government takeover of the health insurance system by using children as a “Trojan Horse” to introduce government takeover of healthcare, i.e., “socialized medicine.” That may well be what the Congress wants to do, but they shouldn’t think that we are so foolish as to not recognize what they are doing.
Efforts in Congress to fast-track passage of an economic “stimulus” package coupled with expansion of the children’s health-care program (SCHIP) seems to confirm suspicions that a government monopoly on health care is the congressional majority’s goal. Taken together, these two pieces of legislation would give liberals a sizable down payment on nationalizing health care, according to The Heritage Foundation.
The Heritage Foundation notes that while private spending on health care is declining as a percentage of total funds spent, the federal government’s share is rising.
Kimberley A. Strassel, in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, called the bill that was ostensibly crafted to revive our economy “a behemoth that has allowed Democrats to speed up the takeover of health care under cover of an economic crisis.”
Liberals are pursuing a new strategy, Strassel wrote, “to stealthily and incrementally expand government control.” According to the New York Times, the economic recovery legislation dedicates $127 billion in the near term to health care.
The House version of the bill (and the Senate version as it stands today) includes funding for a Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research that many believe will be the vehicle that oversees the not-so-subtle introduction of nationalized health care. The council, which will be made up of 15 individuals appointed by the president from the health-care fields, is labeled as “Healthcare Research and Quality” in the Senate version of the bill.
Also tucked into the stimulus bill adopted by the House is $600 million for the training of nurses and primary care physicians and dentists to provide care in communities that lack sufficient health-care outlets. While this sounds innocuous enough, a statement (104 KB PDF) from the office of David Obey (D-WI), chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, references this line item as:
“Training Primary Care Providers: $600 million to address shortages and prepare our country for universal healthcare by training primary healthcare providers including doctors, dentists, and nurses as well as helping pay medical school expenses for students who agree to practice in underserved communities through the National Health Service Corps.” [emphasis mine]
We can be thankful that Rep. Obey is at least candid enough to share that a great deal of what is in the bill is a down payment on “universal healthcare.”
Americans cannot say they were not warned about their government’s intentions when it comes to creating a government-run health-care monopoly.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to monitor issues of public policy in America, such as the SCHIP legislation. If you would like to help us continue our efforts, please click here.
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1 On Feb 4th, 2009, at 5:44pm, Bruce Landry wrote:
If this means my elderly parents will be able to have health care and eat, then I’d be willing to consider it. The current HMO system is broken and is so profitable for the Health Care concerns that it know longer is required to even consider any options other than the ones they move forward. The practicians, hospitals, and all med staff are the best subsidized union around. My dying niece had a cat scan overseas which cost me $200, the same cat scan cost my $3500 here. Same instruments, read by skilled personnel???
If they will not police themselves, someone must, and I understand at least one point in this…government has never self regulated either.
God bless and have a wonderful day, knowing God still sits upon the throne.
2 On Feb 4th, 2009, at 6:19pm, Bela C. Strickland wrote:
Many people voted for Obama because they want to feel more protected under the shadow of the government’s growing wingspan. They may get what they voted for, and we will all rue the election day that cut the chords binding the government’s wings.
3 On Feb 4th, 2009, at 10:59pm, Vince Eccles wrote:
I support nationalized health care. I lived in Germany and was provided health care under their national system. I was in an accident and my wife birthed a healthy baby under their system. Fabulous.
I would like to see us go to their system. By the way, they have a basic health care plan that is national, then companies offer additional benefits to their workers through private insurance companies. Both systems work side-by-side. The National insurance pays first, then the private insurance pays second.
The Germans pay about 1/2 of what we pay as a nation for our healthcare system and they insure everybody, while we insure only 82% of the non-elderly (non-medicare population.
4 On Feb 5th, 2009, at 6:51pm, Charles Enlow wrote:
Politicians ‘shouldn’t think that we are so foolish as to not recognize what they are doing”? That is just what they do think, and they are correct in so thinking (except that many of our politicians do not themselves know what they are doing).
A majority of our citizenry neither knows nor cares about our Constitution and the role it gives to the federal government. They want to be taken care of, and will accept - yay demand - everything they can get, even though it means the end of the “Noble Experiment” begun by our founding fathers.
One of those fathers accurately observed that the government big enough to give you anything you want, is a government big enough to take everything you have…
5 On Feb 5th, 2009, at 7:11pm, Bruce wrote:
I have type 1 diabetes and only have coverage because Colorado has a group policy for people with preexisting conditions. I can’t think of anything better than nationalized health care. All my supplies come at about 50% off, which for 235 a month helps me a lot, my short acting insulin is somewhere in the 400 mark in a month before the kick in of my insurance which then goes down to 200. I guess since I’m on the side of I have to have medical help I see this as good and someone who is lucky (and it’s pure luck) that they don’t sees this as limiting their choices. Do you know without the nonprofit organization to provide me health care insurance that insurance carriers are allowed to tell me they won’t cover me, or to cover me at high premium like 900 a month for what a healthy person would pay very little for, and also that i have a waiting period if i lost coverage because of my condition. Usually it’s about 6 months, that’s 5400 I pay out before I get any help.
6 On Feb 7th, 2009, at 9:05pm, Bela C. Strickland wrote:
I do not want to downplay anyone’s medical and financial hardships, believing help should be available. However, we need to be very careful not to discern then determine the shape of the entire forest by what we see in a few gnarled trees (problems in our system).
When we compare the forest of our health-care system to the forests of nationalized health-care systems of other governments (such as the wreck of Europe’s health-care system and the worsening Canadian system), we are in far better shape. Yes, we can find a few good trees in their forests, but to hold their few good trees up against our few bad ones and say that our entire forest should be re-shaped to look like theirs is ridiculous. (By the way, we could have gone into the communist Soviet Union and found some people that Marxism benefited, but it collapsed because it was as an overall disaster.)
I believe we need to do some tree-trimming, while uprooting a few bad trees, but the answer is not a federal take-over.
7 On Feb 9th, 2009, at 9:16pm, Vince Eccles wrote:
Bela Strickland,
I have lived under the nationalized systems. They are excellent. We are not in far better shape. My sister has no health care insurance. She cannot go to the dentist or the doctor because she cannot afford it. I try to provide some money from time to time but generally she uses it to fix her car.
We insure the healthy and the wealthy in the U.S. You are merely restating ideological criticisms that are just not true about the Canadian or German health care systems, in particular. There may be several national health care systems that are not managed well, but for the most part their systems are better than ours and their national health is also generally better than ours.
8 On Feb 9th, 2009, at 11:39pm, Bela C. Strickland wrote:
Vince, with all due respect, saying our system is better than nationally-controlled systems is not “ideological” but a factual or non-factual statement—either true or false based on overarching, objective facts about the overall condition of the systems, not determined by individual experience.
I am sincerely glad that your experience was a good one. I would not wish on you the alternative, but you must realize that you are not describing a totally nationalized system in Germany. In a truly nationalized system, there are no private health insurance companies—what some of our elected officials want to see here. I will entertain the idea of government assistance (I grew up poor and benefited from some myself), but the fact stands that whatever the government has full control to give, it has full-control to deny (Germany’s history shows us that). That leaves no other alternatives. You can replace or compete against a company with another; you can’t do that with a government.
9 On Feb 9th, 2009, at 11:48pm, Don Reed wrote:
I agree with Bruce and Vince. Our healthcare system requires a overhaul.
10 On Feb 10th, 2009, at 12:29am, Vince Eccles wrote:
Very Good. I agree that the Germany system (a great model we might use) is not a completely nationalized system. It is a combination of a very basic national insurance program and an additional private insurance coverage. The company you work for would provide the private insurance as part of your benefit package (something that most companies are abandoning in the United States). The national insurance is the first provider. What is not paid for by the national insurance is then paid for by the private insurance.
The German system of national and private insurance worked very well.
The health care system could mirror a retirement program that is both national (Social Security) and private (IRA’s and Pensions). The national program would be a bare bones benefit. The private program would elevate the standard of living.
11 On Feb 10th, 2009, at 4:42am, James E Reeves wrote:
The Glass Stegall Act was constitutionally correct and if enforced would solve much of the instability of a free market system. The disease blinded the tree so the fruit soon died.
Jesus said woe to the blind guides of His day because they do know but will not lead.
A systemic risk continues as two branches of our government consider the fears of economic collapse as an opportunity to shape the contour of politics. The question I ask of the whole tree of government is â?o Do we the people of the United States expect any interpretation from the lifetime appointed Judiciary?â? These men know the perils that face our nation and should be more involved with solutions that are constitutional.
All the branches of the tree are directly responsible for letting lobbyist rule our economy and ideology so now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of this republic.
James
12 On Apr 6th, 2009, at 9:57am, Bonnie Jones wrote:
I agree with Bela. Canadian healthcare, has been described as working similar to a large HMO monopoly (meaning little and in some cases no choice). Unfortunately, this also means that many services are not covered. Quality can also suffer, but that’s another matter.