Health Care Lies From The Obama White House

It's no secret that Barack Obama is getting desperate to pass a nationalized health care bill. With many Blue-Dog Democrats lining up against the measure, time is clearly running out for Obama, Pelosi and Reid. But what time-frame are we talking about?

We are talking about the time-frame in which Congress and the President can pass this disastrous bill before too many more Americans read what is in it and discover what it is really all about.

Writing for Town Hall, David Limbaugh notes several inaccuracies and outright lies in the arguments made for this socialized medicine package:

--Despite White House-generated hysteria about the urgency of reform, the only urgency is in preventing this fiasco because it would destroy America's economy and liberty. Doing nothing -- even given the many problems that exist under the present system -- is far preferable to adopting this monster. --Proponents claim the present system leaves 47 million people without insurance and unable to get it. Bull. Almost half of these uninsured could afford coverage but choose not to obtain it; almost half only remain uninsured for four months; and millions are noncitizens. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 17 million would remain uninsured after the plan is implemented. --Obama says his plan is not socialized medicine because he's just providing a "public option" to make the private insurers more competitive. Well, he's stacking the deck with mandated coverage -- which, by definition, reduces competition -- and subsidizing the public option. He would provide incentives to businesses to move employees to the public plan. Also, once you lose your insurance, your coverage choices would no longer be grandfathered, and you'd be forced to buy a plan that includes Big Brother's mandates -- meaning most would gravitate toward the government plan. A single-payer system is virtually inevitable. --The plan is being sold as a necessary element of reviving the economy. No one, including the Congressional Budget Office, believes this bill would improve our economy, and most believe it would exacerbate our problems. The bill, with its taxes on successful small businesses and its Draconian regulations, would destroy job creation, as would increases to the deficit and debt the bill would cause. --Health care costs would not be reduced, but increased -- and shifted. Studies show that preventive care measures would not reduce costs. More importantly, the CBO says that even with the planned confiscatory taxes on higher-income earners (which no one can deny constitute real costs to them) and the penalties on employers who don't provide coverage, the plan would fall $239 billion short of covering its initial cost estimates of $1 trillion. And that's assuming everything goes well. But cost estimates for government programs are always understated. The actual costs for Medicare Part A were $67 billion, seven times higher than the government's 1965 projections of $9 billion. Even worse, the Medicaid special hospitals subsidy was $11 billion, more than 100 times the government's projection of $100 million in 1987, just years earlier. The only efforts at cost containment would come from artificial price controls, which would result in rationing -- most likely for the elderly. --The quality of socialized health care would not be improved as promised, but would necessarily deteriorate, as it has in all countries that have tried it and in our own government-run experiments of veterans care, Medicaid and Medicare. It's inescapably true -- as noted by Dr. Thomas Sowell -- that price controls would reduce quality care because they would reduce the incentive to provide quality. --Health care choices would not be expanded, but essentially eliminated, by government mandate. The White House isn't even denying it would force taxpayer-subsidized abortions.

The longer it takes to get this abomination through Congress, the more time people have to study it and learn about the points Limbaugh made in the above excerpt.

Socialized health care has been a disaster in every single country it has ever been tried in. So much so that countries like Great Britain and Switzerland had to bring back privatized care in order to achieve the universal coverage that was so woefully missing from their nationalized systems.

You can access the complete column on-line here:

More Health Care Lies
David Limbaugh
TownHall.com
July 21, 2009