On the Backs of Babes

No, I'm not talking about hot chics. I'm talking about your kids and mine and the Obama, Pelosi, Reid plan to fund health care by forcing them to buy crappy government health insurance then jacking the price of it through the roof. 

What is that you're saying?

Well, it's like this: The commie libs have to have people who are less likely to have to use their crappy health insurance -- 18-35-year-olds -- to 1) to be required by law to buy their crappy health insurance and 2) to  pay more for it than they would ordinarily have to pay for GOOD private health insurance so they can fund "insurance" for the old and the sick.

I put "insurance" in quotation marks because we're not really talking about health insurance in the true sense of the word. What it actually is is a ponzi scheme whereby the sick person or senior pays a nominal fee to have the cost of their treatment paid for by someone else. This is, of course, the very essence of what liberals are implying when they say they will require insurance companies to cover "pre-existing conditions". As far as covering "pre-existing conditions" goes, anyone with a second-grade education can understand, you can't accept a nominal fee for payment of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in medical bills for very long without going broke, even if you have kids funding this scam for grandma and grandpa. Eventually, the insurance company goes broke and in steps the only entity that can operate on Bernie Madoff accounting rules (x100) and not have its leaders thrown in prison for fraud -- the federal government.

Throughout this debate, Pelosi, Reid, Obama and the other Marxists have tried to draw an analogy between requiring kids and others without health insurance to purchase it and the requirement that every driver have car insurance. This argument is absurd on its face and, again, the absurdity ought to be evident to anyone with a second-grade education. First of all, the primary purpose of car insurance is to mitigate your liability to the other drivers on the road should you run into them. Secondly, you don't have to have car insurance if you don't own a car. The Marxists running wild in Washington want to make buying health insurance your "birthright". For the distinct privilege of being an American, you will be required to buy health insurance or be fined or jailed or both. As far as the requirements that health insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions goes, here's a car analogy that does work: It's exactly like the government requiring an insurance company to cover me AFTER I crashed my car into a tree without having car insurance.


Right now, many young people choose not to buy health insurance due to the fact that they have other things to spend their money on like movies and gas and beer and they don't want to pay for health insurance when they are healthy and don't usually go to a doctor. If they do want to by health insurance, there are still many affordable options in the quasi-capitalist American society of 2009. I happen to know that a 21-year-old healthy female can get a very good private health insurance policy through an insurance agent for far less than $200 a month. Under the Obama, Reid, Pelosi Marxist health plan, these plans will be phased out as soon as one little detail of the policy changes and the young adult will be forced on to the government health care plantation for three times the price for inferior care. All so they can pay "their fair share" to help equalize the cost of paying for the care of someone who is paying a nominal fee for having their pre-existing condition covered. Although is sounds positively absurd, the explanation of this ridiculous Marxist scheme isn't nearly as bad as it is in actual practice.

What does this mean in actual practice? What it means is that we are hog-tying young folks who are just starting to make their way in the world -- starting families, establishing homes, making lives together. Off they go into the cold cruel world with knowledge that not only are they not going to be able to provide for their families the quality health care they had grown accustomed to as kids, they're going to be paying two to three times as much for access to the crappy care and they'll have to start getting used to doing as the Brits and Canadians do: Getting in line and waiting for months for the basic services most of us have grown accustomed to immediate access to in our quasi-market-driven system. When you're paying three times as much for crappy health care, it's a hell of a lot harder to save up for that down payment on a house or make a car payment for a dependable car. In short, it means that the Marxists in Congress are dooming our kids to a standard of living that will necessarily be lowered by looming double-digit inflation coupled with a crushing new tax burden to fund the Marxist's bloated "stimulus" spending. And the cherry on top is three times the premium for crappy health care.

This is an issue that hits kids in the pocket book right now -- it's easy for them to understand. Talking about this to your young adults is a perfect opportunity to make inroads with your conservative message on a demographic that leans heavily Democrat or liberal simply because so much of the pop culture and fake news they consume has a decidedly leftist bent. Do you think their buddy John Liebowitz of the Daily Show is going to talk about the fact  that Obama, Pelosi and Reid plan on hosing them to fund their health insurance scheme? Hell no! Once the message starts to sink in, you're liable to get a reaction such as "What? You mean they're going to force ME to buy health insurance? .... But, I thought it was going to be free if you couldn't afford it." Then the light really starts to go on as you explain that, no it's not going to be free and whatever meager income they make will be good enough for the health insurance sickos to take away from them to fund their scheme. Then you can explain to them that's not all. Talk to them about how the Marxists claim that this plan will cost $1.5 trillion over ten years but that's likely vastly underestimated because the federal government has a habit of vastly under-projecting the cost of the medical programs it funds. If you want to use the amount they under-estimated the cost of Medicare as a rule of thumb, for example, you can increase the ten-year amount by three to four times or $4.5 to $6 trillion over ten years. Then if you take into account the fact that because of numerous schemes and scams and set-asides and "fixes" that aren't included in the cost, you're looking at closer to $2.5 trillion over ten years x3 is $7.5 trillion to $10 trillion over ten years. Then you can hit them between the eyes with the fact that this plan is front-loaded for three years -- the taxes are paid for three years before the plan even kicks in which means that should this pass, they start paying higher health insurance premiums NOW and don't receive ANY "benefits" until three years from now. Then you can tell them that if they happen to be lucky enough to attain a family income of $96,000 a year in the lousy Obama economy, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that they will spend 19% of this gross income on government health insurance premiums and co-pays.

Finally, if you happen to get the question about how you know that this bloated bureaucracy that we are going to fund on the backs of our kids and their kids is going to necessarily produce crappy health care, tell them that for this little fact we have actual experience: The crappy socialized health care systems that exist in other countries. Take Canada's for example, where waiting lists for routine surgeries are the norm and people are routinely denied life-saving drugs and treatments. 

Another example that the government health care commies point to consistently: Great Britain, where women give birth in hospital corridors and ambulances triage patients outside of emergency rooms to avoid the requirement that British citizens be served within four hours of entering the emergency room. And do you want to talk about rationing? Tell them about NICE -- the Natonal Institutes for Health and Clinical Excellece -- the deceptively named body that is charged with rationing care to Britons. If you go to the NICE website you can find all kinds of "guidelines, contained in spreadsheets, PDFs, Word documents, etc., all couched under the heading "NICE guidance" that prescribe ways to "cut costs" at various stages of treatment -- most of which involve denying care or holding back on care depending on age and progression and severity of illness. If you dig far enough, you can actually find the "Quality Rated Years" calculation that assigns an arbitrary value to your life based on your age and medical condition which is exactly like the one the commie libs deny they will have in place here via their medical standards board.

It is only by getting the word out and letting people know how this monstrosity the Obama, Reid and Pelosi want to foist upon us will affect them, their kids and grandkids that we will be able to keep our health care system from being traformed from the best in the world (albeit, with its own problems) to a five-times larger version of the inept, failed government bureacracy Great Britain has.