Why Obama Care will become law....the right failed to act

I know this is Liberal Public Radio, but it’s worth hearing. Ira Glass’s program has succeeded in explaining the unexplainable often.

He puts into perspective pretty well why the health care crisis will take us into oblivion if we don’t get it right.

I know most won’t listen to this. If you just listen to the first five minutes it will help you. The interview with David Frumm is worth while.

The whole thing is worth listening to.

The truth is: Facts are tough things. Our country's wealth and competitiveness is being consumed by an out of control monopoly of symbiotic forces.

Just the simple calculation this starts with should help clarify the issue. In 2000 as GWB won the election, the cost to insure with a good policy supplied by your employer or purchased by anyone else was $6500. By the end of the Bush Presidency it had ballooned to $13,000. Employers kept trimming and increasing the amount of participation but the real cost of insurance was spiralling out of control. With simple extrapolation the cost will be $38,000 (half of all average incomes) by 2016.

It's due to a complex set of issues that have created this situation. Lawyers, big Pharma, the Medical Community (and greed along with protection medicine), Insurance companies that create difficult situations for an ignorant clientele of the cost and excessive government controls to offset this.

There is no quick answer to fix this. There is no competition. There is no incentive to reform or repair.

The status quo must be dismantled by the only entity able to do so. I hate it but this is a supreme failure of a free market.

The blame of course goes to employer paid health care. IF tomorrow it was illegal for all employers everywhere to buy health-care for their employees and if all insurance companies could deal across state lines and if there were a safety net for the uninsured (my brother died of the Complications of Diabetes some years ago and there is none now) then maybe.

But the political will to do this isn't there.

So, it's leave the mess alone and let it kill us, or kill the beast by government incompetence and then like Britain is doing slowly, Like Germany is already doing, maybe we have a chance to return to sanity in an insane world.

Don't worry about me. I'll be on the government dole in a few months. Big Medicare.

Then I'll be like the guy who's employer furnishes him Grocery Insurance. I'll just go to the store every week, buy Lobsters, high priced meats and wines, Organic veggies and happily go to the till, pay my twenty dollar copay and walk out the door with a thousand bucks worth of groceries most of which I'll never eat and never have a clue as to what they all cost.

That's the system we have now. Someone needs to say NO. There's no incentive now.

I wish we could come up with a free market solution, but there isn't one because there is no free market. It's a monopoly conglomerate combine.

I don't support the health care reform bills of 1500 pages on the table right now. It's a catastrophe. I do support the efforts to reform the Health-care mess. Doing nothing is not an option. And the resistance from the people who have something to lose will be phenomenal. People with Cadillac union insurance plans, People in the insurance biz, in the medical field. They don't want reform. And when Bush signed the big pharma bailout bill in 2006 they became resisters of change.

Solutions? MSA's, Tort Reform and National competition are solutions like killing three fleas on a German shepherd. Helps but unnoticeable. Nearly irrelevant.

I am more and more convinced that the blindness generated by the interests who don't want change are informing the debate. We have been duped.

It sounds sooooo good. Free enterprise, the American flag and all... Except its a scam, a lie.

There is no free market in health care.

And there is no political will to truly fix the health-care mess to return it to the free enterprise model.

So....We will have an Obamacare, it will be horrible, but it might just take the monkey off our backs long enough for real reforms to take place in the Palin administration.

I want you to consider six years from now. President Palin is in office. She has a conservative house and senate. The economy is recovering well. Terrorism is at bay because of her strong arm. The health care mess has morphed into an unmanageable pile of crap. She has the political capital to undo the mess but do so in such a way that the mess we have now is not recreated. She looses the medical establishment. She creates the whipping boys of tort reform. She makes Medical insurance an option but provides for a way indigent and uninsurable to access healthcare without bankruptcy or a lack of service, she removes the benefits of employers supplying health insurance and in fact as McCain wanted to, taxes them at exceptional rates. This goes for all. Unions and government alike. Big Pharm is cut off from the pipe and advertising is prohibited.

Now we are getting somewhere. She will have to have the guts and the capital to get it done. I think she will have it. But the nuts have to be cut off from the predators that control us all first.