Friday, December 26, 2014

When Harry met Obamacare

Harry Lewis writes: “After signing up for ObamaCare on Christmas Eve (ObamaCare forced the cancellation of my private health insurance), I now realize that people on public assistance waive virtually all of their privacy and autonomy rights as a condition of being eligible for public assistance. And ObamaCare treats you like you're on public assistance, forcing you to waive your privacy and autonomy rights to get health insurance. That's because of the "tax credits", really government subsidies, paid for by other taxpayers, that the poor are getting. That's the high price of the ObamaCare entitlement: millions of Americans surrendering their privacy and autonomy against their wills, whether they're poor or not. ObamaCare defines the deviancy of government intrusions down in a profound and shocking way, as millions more Americans are about to discover.”


When I was being interrogated by the ObamaCare representative over the telephone about my background as part of my application for new health insurance through the federal exchange, she asked me a series of intrusive and demeaning questions, i.e., are you an ex-con; are you an illegal alien, etc. (after she knew I was a lawyer) without ever asking me a key question: have you had health insurance before? That's an important omission. The Obama Administration doesn't want to collect that information, because it exposes how many Americans (like me) were stripped of their insurance as part of the ObamaCare debacle. Democrats then proclaim ObamaCare a success as part of a propaganda campaign that discloses only the number of people signed up, without disclosing how many sign-ups are casualties of ObamaCare's first phase: the forced cancellation of millions of private policies like mine. Even the Nazis kept scrupulous records of the number of concentration camp inmates they executed. Not so the Obama Administration with ObamaCare.


The omission also highlights the moral depravity of ObamaCare in two other important respects: Obamacare deliberately destroyed continuity of care, while lying about that destruction to those of the American people who already had health insurance and doctors. The Democratic Party lie: "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" and "if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan", which they thought politically expedient, was a lie about continuity of care to those who already had a health plan and a doctor. As every health care professional knows, continuity of care is about keeping records of medical histories. Without a medical history, a physician is practicing medicine in the dark. That greatly increases the risk of medical malpractice, and of injury or death to the patient. The Democratic lie about continuity of care hugely increased the risk to patients of being injured or killed in the medical system because of the catastrophic destruction of continuity of care on a system-wide basis. The previously uninsured, of course, without a health plan or a doctor, bear no such risk.

Finally, health insurers know that people who have been insured before tend to be more responsible in their personal lives, and that there's a previously existing database of patient information that can be drawn upon to adjust risk in their actuarial calculations. ObamaCare's failure to ask about previous insurance makes a final, damning point: responsible behavior by patients doesn't matter in the veterinary health care system that ObamaCare has created. In veterinary medicine, the degree of health care the pet receives is determined by the budget of the owner, not by the pet itself.

No comments: