Tuesday, December 04, 2012

ObamaCare’s Supply-Side, Trickle-Down Welfare In Action

Everyone should read the article in the attached link below.  Why?  Because this is the corporatized system that Obama and Dummycrats are forcing us to pay for.  This is the system of massive incompetence, corruption, overbilling, looting, inefficiency and bloat that rewards what is often absolutely horrible medicine.  This is what happens when monopoly develops.  Monopoly created in large part by an out of control banking and finance system as corporate political toadies turn a blind eye or even pass legislation to enable it.  And, then when political comingling with that monopoly, fascism, leads to subversion of working markets over decades.  That we are forced to pay for this massive mess as an American citizen simply shows how enslaved we are to a system gone amok.  A system where a choice few have granted themselves undue authority over our lives and loot us in the process.  It is noble and just to wish every American have access to the same healthcare.  There is no nobility and justice in slavery. 

This system is akin to a Soviet bureaucracy.  And, it was made that way because working markets were subverted in favor of pro-business political policies from both parties.  Policies paid for by corporations.  Political bureaucrats meddled with healthcare over and over and over until it turned into a system that often is so far removed from reality that doctors are arguably the number one cause of death in our nation as cited on here in a prior post.   This system is complicit in so much bad science and bad medicine that it often subverts healing and healthcare rather than encouraging it.  Not only that, but it literally preys upon the citizens of this country when they are outside of the system.  When they don’t have access to corporate or government-provided healthcare.  The only organizations that can generally afford this system of predation and looting are large corporations and government that are able to provide a bulwark against the healthcare monopoly’s power and have the money necessary to pay for it.  Mind you, other people’s money. 

As noted on here countless times, I am absolutely not pro-business as Obama and our corporate-bought political parties are.  I am pro-working markets.  Pro-business involves cronyism, corruption, payoffs and fascism.  Pro working-markets creates demand for American labor, embraces merit and superior solutions, rewards entrepreneurs with better mouse traps, seeks to enforce some level of economic fairness and justice and is much more pro-democracy.   Competition for goods and services is not a bad thing.   Conscripting workers into a system of hyper-competitiveness that results in working slavery is something else all together.  One can have working markets without enslaving our citizens into becoming working drones without a living wage or quality of life. 

As I have noted on here many times, this healthcare system is going to fail.  It’s just a matter of how badly.  Forget about all of the cheering of people who view politics as their favorite football team winning.  Those who danced in the street when their team won and ObamaCare was passed are generally uninformed about what is yet to come courtesy of their political masters.  The reality is politicians have absolutely no idea what they are doing and no one has won anything.  They are creating massive future crises because they have no idea about how an economy works or what exactly is in Obama’s 2500 page healthcare corporate welfare bill.   The state can mandate anything.  That includes tyranny as is the case with this healthcare bill.  But, good luck making a system work that is completely unworkable.  Good luck enforcing tyranny without further conscription and further injustices.  A complex system becomes destabilized after so many efforts at rigging it or subverting it and politicians are too incompetent and too ignorant to understand how they are destabilizing the economy and healthcare even further. 

This meddling by politicians, who have no clue as to what they are doing, has subverted working markets.  Because there are no working markets, there is absolutely no price discovery in the healthcare bureaucracy.  That is exactly what healthcare bureaucrats want.  They want to control pricing and the only way they can do that is if there is no discovery.  Welcome to the world of politically-inspired monopoly.  And that is what they achieved by endless bribery of politicians.  That is how health care costs rise 10, 20 and sometimes 30% in a single year.  So, instead of a highly liquid working market between a consumer of healthcare and a provider, prices are arbitrarily set by a handful of bureaucrats.  How are prices set?  By factoring in all of the looting that pharma, medical device and equipment makers, bureaucrats, insurance companies, hospitals and doctors wish to provide to themselves to keep living large off of society and to provide profit margins accepted by Wall Street needed to pay out their corporate bonuses.   Where is the consumer of medicine in this equation?  The consumer of our healthcare system is a slave.  They take what this corporatocracy-inspired monopoly gives them; eat your gruel and be happy. 

Because consumers aka demand aren’t determining what healthcare services should be offered/are needed and what they are worth, markets for price and services are almost totally rigged.  Prices and services are created not from demand but from supply.  That is why our society is so increasingly sick and unhealthy and the medical bureaucracy has seemingly been helpless to stop this trend.  They are seemingly helpless because what consumers of healthcare need isn’t being delivered.  And, it isn’t being delivered because supply or the healthcare system is unresponsive.  And, the healthcare system is unresponsive because supply and not society’s demand determines what healthcare services and prices are offered.  As a result, this healthcare system is actually making us sicker. 

You must understand this simple concept of the last paragraph to understand why you feel like you have no power in this healthcare system, the banking system, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the industrial food monopoly and the like.  You feel like you have no power because you are a slave to a system of supply-side, trickle-down economic policies that benefit the corporate state and in the process terrorize people around the world.  Yes, that good ole fashioned Ronald Reagan supply-side economics at work in our healthcare system.  Bureaucrats in the system determine prices and services.  Not the American citizen or healthcare consumer aka demand.  How’s that working out for you?  Reagan’s legacy is everywhere in our economy.  We are a slave to it.   

Prices are rigged because of political meddling in the economy and reflect absolutely no modicum of reality for consumers aka demand of  healthcare’s ability to pay.  So, if prices were to reflect reality, most medical procedures would drop by 50-95% in price.  And, many more would simply disappear as they would be found to be unnecessary, redundant or even detrimental to healthcare in a working market.  These efforts at overbilling, faulty procedures and the like are not there to serve society aka demand but instead to serve supply aka the corporate healthcare bureaucracy and our political masters.

We see this clearly in the examples cited in the story link below where a procedure performed at the bloated, dystopian corporatocracy’s medical facility costs five to ten times and sometimes even more versus comparable care in the consumer-driven surgery center cited in the story.  Everyone in this system has their finger in the pie and has to get their fair share; the reason why healthcare costs go up so much annually as all of the players continue to loot society courtesy of the government protection racket that keeps this Humpty Dumpty going.   

Who is this healthcare system helping and who is it hurting?  It is helping know-nothing, dumbed-down healthcare bureaucrats who pay themselves handsomely for creating their own personal fiefdoms. (Think bureaucrats like Jamie Dimon, Janet Napolitano, Lloyd Blankfein, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Republican Party leaders, Democratic Party leaders, etc)  It is helping corporations, lawyers and doctors who have figured out how to manipulate and game a rigged system for personal gain and profit at society’s expense.  And, some doctors often make millions for having little unique qualifications in this system because they have learned to rig it in their favor.   

Who is this system hurting?  Many doctors and nurses who actually wish to practice medicine and help people; the vast majority of medical professionals.  But most importantly it is hurting you, the consumer of this supply-side based, Soviet-style, forced medicine.  It is hurting you, the American citizen.  Medicine taught in college programs that are often providing antiquated curriculum that doesn’t even promote health care but instead sick care.  As I noted before, if you are in need of cutting, radiating or medicating, this system does a fine job of treating people.  In other words, when you are almost dead.  And, often almost dead because of the medical establishment’s incompetence at preventative care.  It is hurting consumers of healthcare, our citizens, because not only is there no price discovery and therefore, you are enslaved to a a massive, for-profit, corporatocracy looting system of bloated corruption, but it is also hurting you because this bureaucracy recommends many health care, pharma and treatment options that simply don’t work or are unnecessary.   And, many doctors and researchers in the system know they don’t work or are unnecessary yet they can do nothing to stop it.    Just like the Soviet Union and its nonsensical and often paradoxical, bureaucratic central planning.

This system is rigged by the corporate state for the benefit of the corporate state.   And, now you are being forced to pay for it with ObamaCare.  The flip side of this is that you cannot bleed a turnip.  The money simply isn’t there, nor is it going to ever be there, to keep this rigged system from either outright collapse or from reversion to some degree of sustainability.   That is going to be a very painful process for those benefiting the most from this system.  For those who have rigged it and manipulate it.

Obama and Democrats never considered all of the research done by medical professionals on how to help cure the sickness of this medical system.  And, he never once considered any type of benchmarking on what systems around the world worked and why.  We could have easily created the best healthcare system in the world because we were the last to do so.  We had the benefit of hindsight in all of the other systems.  And, because we had decades of data on what worked in Medicare and what didn’t and countless competent ideas on how to fix those shortcomings.  Instead, a system was put in place to reward the looters, bureaucrats, our corporate masters and their political marionettes.  

That companies and employers cannot refuse paying for health care to Americans because it is a directive from the central planners now means what?  The money needed to pay a system of massive bloat and looting has to come from somewhere.  Who is going to pay for this?  No one.  As more comes out about this new healthcare system, more and more investigative stories are recently surfacing that show consumers simply cannot afford to pay for it.  It’s a system that is impossible to pay for. 

There are many market-based systems that could have been backstopped by a single payer government catchall for those who needed it or for procedures too expensive to be paid out of pocket.  Or we simply could have had an efficient single payer system.  And, instead of spending all of this effort trying to put a square peg in a round hole as is happening with ObamaCare, we could have spent time fixing the shortcomings of Medicare for all and making it better.  We could have done away with private, for-profit, inefficient health insurance.  And, while some may argue there is no price discovery or working markets in a single payer system, that is patently false.   Working, transparent government is the will of the people.  A single payer system that is transparent and market-based can easily determine what procedures can be performed at what cost and what healthcare is actually necessary through inputs from industry and healthcare experts.  This can then be used to transparently create fair pricing and fair procedures in the healthcare system.  And to do so for the betterment of society including those who choose healthcare as a profession.  

There is never going to be any system that is perfect but there are countless methods better than ObamaCare’s corporate slavery model.   And, if discovery and truth were the intent of ObamaCare, we would have transparently, in a public forum, found out many creative ideas and solutions provided by business process experts, healthcare experts, mathematicians on how to strengthen working markets and price discovery and ordinary citizens who are the actual consumers of healthcare and have to live with any system that is put into place.  But none of this was considered because our corporate masters didn’t want any of that.   And the Democrats did exactly what their corporate masters wanted.  They enslaved us into a trickle down form of supply-side economics that benefited the very few at the expense of the rest of us.

Story link here.

posted by TimingLogic at 11:14 AM