Thursday, July 23, 2009

What Obama didn't say last night

He didn't say that the United States spends 18% of Gross National Product (GNP) on health care, twice as much as any other country in the world. The price of all our exports is jacked up 18% just to pay the workers health care. Imports are cheaper than domestic manufactured by 9 to 18%, just because of sky high US health care expenditures. One reason everything for sale in Walmarts is made in China is that health care is cheaper in China.
Insuring everyone in the country is not the health care problem, the health care problem is excessive health care spending. We ought to be cutting our health care costs in half, Obama wants to increase them by another trillion dollars. We can't afford what we have now, and Obama wants to make it more expensive.
Obama didn't talk about parasitic lawyers sucking up god awful amounts of money thru malpractice suits. That the malpractice award money goes to the lawyers, not the "injured" patients. Could he be currying favor with the trial lawyers?
He didn't talk about outrageous drug prices. The drug companies claim the money goes to research and development of new drugs. Actually it largely goes to marketing. The drug companies pay full time salesmen to call on every doctor in the country twice a month peddling drugs. Nor did he talk about allowing importation of drugs from Canada, or any other first world country.
He didn't talk about cherry picking insurance companies who give low premiums to company paid plans and charge individuals four and five times as much. He didn't talk about the unfairness of denying the self employed an income tax deduction for health insurance expenditures.
He didn't talk about wearysome FDA approval procedures for new drugs that add millions of dollars to the cost of a drug.
He didn't mention that 30% of health care costs are incurred in the last year of the patient's life. This money does little good to the patient but does lots of harm to medicare.
He didn't talk about fancy technology that does little to improve quality of care but makes a lot of money for the device makers. For instance fetal heart rate monitors, a $10,000 electronic box now universal in delivery rooms, have not improved the infant mortality rate.
Obama's health care plan is to throw another trillion dollars into the black hole. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, and lawyers think this is just fine.
We should attempt to cut the amount we currently spend by half rather than dumping more money into it.

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