Healthcare: Let The States Decide

by: warner todd huston | published: 06 10, 2011

The debate about healthcare coming from the Democrats is steeped in purposeful misdirection on one hand and a complete lack of any real knowledge about what Obamacare will even do on the other. It is also a major overreach on a federalism level which is why it is hard to understand why more people aren't talking about the Healthcare Compact plan (healthcarecompact.org).14 states have already signed onto it and has even been signed into law in two of them, Georgia and Oklahoma.

Of course, the problem is that we are expected to believe that Obamacare -- which is essentially a nationalized healthcare policy -- will work just fine on a national level. Despite that history has proven over and over again that centralized planning simply does not work, most especially with something as unwieldy and complicated as healthcare.

It doesn't help that we are not being told the truth by those pushing Obama’s plan, either. Many times the president has claimed that with Obamacare you can "keep your health care plan” if you like it, you can keep your doctor if you like him. This, however, has been generously called a "questionable" promise. And that isn’t the only untruth coming from Obamacare supporters.

Just this week it was revealed that as much as 30% of the businesses in America that offer their employees healthcare plans will stop that practice once Obamacare kicks in. This number is likely low, too, as once bigger businesses start to jettison their healthcare plans it will start a snowball rolling down hill that will gather up nearly every other business with it.

Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is compromised at this on in the debate. The CBO has just hired an Obamacare pusher straight from the White House to become the CBO's deputy assistant director in its Health and Human Resources (HHR) Office. This woman, Melinda Beeuwkes, has been an advocate of Obamacare, worked to push Obamacare in Obama's administration, and has been a large donor to Democrats and Obama both.

Yet the CBO thinks this woman can provide, "objective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget." This does not fill one with confidence that even the CBO can be unbiased.

It seems fairly clear at this point that America has been sold a bill of goods with Obamacare and no holds are barred to push its unpopular and ineffective policies. So, what is to be done?

The Health Care Compact could be that answer.

As the website says:

The Health Care Compact is an interstate compact – which is simply an agreement between two or more states that is consented to by Congress – that restores authority and responsibility for health care regulation to the member states (except for military health care, which will remain federal), and provides the funds to the states to fulfill that responsibility.

The idea here is that the states will band together and share resources. They will cooperate with regulatory efforts, share demographic data, and insurance information to assist their own legislatures to better respond to the healthcare needs of their own citizens.

Importantly, the compact will assist states to make healthcare decisions locally as opposed to having healthcare decisions made in far away Washington D.C. In fact, this limited government, local control concept is exactly the sort of idea that fits perfectly with the ideas of our founders. It is the perfect 10th Amendment-style idea.

As I said, two governors have already signed the compact into law. When he signed the bill in his state Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia said, "a large majority of Georgians believe that we here are better equipped to manage our state’s health care needs than a one-size-fits-all plan under Obamacare."

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin also signed onto the compact. She did so because she felt Obamacare did not meet the needs of her state. She felt that Obamacare failed because it did not "give states more flexibility to design and implement health care programs to fit the specific needs of their citizens."

Texas Governor Rick Perry has also spoken in favor of The Health Care Compact.

This Health Care Compact idea is intriguing and is well worth a try before we are inundated with the travesty that is Obamaare built of socialist ideas that have been proven to fail over and over again.

I urge you to contact your state senators and state representatives and encourage them to get on board with The Health Care Compact immediately. Providing states with the authority for their own federal health care dollars is a clear solution to Obamacare.

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  K. russo

  ObamaCare Prototype Already Exists
  ©By Karen Russo 2010
  The Wrongful Death & Injury Institute, Inc.

  Those who are curious as to how health care delivery under ObamaCare might work need look no further than their state penitentiary.

  Prison HMOs have been in existence for more than twenty years. There are now as many as 75 prison HMOs or hybrids that deliver medical, mental and dental healthcare to the jail and prison population in the U.S.

  These HMOs represent what happens to health care when the government assumes progressively more control over expenses, diagnoses, and treatment regimens. And the picture is not pretty.
  Myriad news articles have been written about prison health care in all parts the country. They inevitably highlight the botched delivery of medical or mental healthcare to an inmate that reporters have cherry-picked out of the masses.

  Rarely, however, do these articles explain the mechanics of how the prison HMO works, how it feeds off the state and the taxpayers for a service inadequately delivered, if delivered at all, and why all such state-dominated systems function so badly.

  News reporters fail to connect the dots, either out of laziness or ideological complicity. They should have been more thorough. The current proposed health care legislation will ensure prison health care for everybody.

  The state control of a closed system, even with private ownership involved, inevitably results in the omission of key information from medical records and the silencing of dissent. Given the economic shortfalls within state budgets nationwide, quality assurance and risk management personnel will ensure that access to adequate health care will be more and more difficult to obtain. That's a prison HMO. That is what the American public does not see.

  In a prison HMO, medical decisions and approvals are often made by non-medical personnel, unqualified medical personnel, or contract vendors who are encouraged to buy into the prison HMO cost containment measures.

  To be sure, some contract vendors-specifically medical doctors and hospitals--are not willing to put their reputations on the line for the sake of the prison HMO. As a result, when an inmate is actually taken to an outside appointment, usually as a result of family pressure, those outside doctors are not shy about sharing their recommendations with the prison HMO medical personnel.

  But here's the rub. The inmate's "attending physician" is the prison doctor. As the attending physician he is not required to follow recommendations from an outside doctor. And even if he wanted to, he often cannot because he is not calling the shots.

  The prison doctor has to get approval from his superiors within the prison HMO to prescribe recommended medications, treatments or surgeries. Inmates do not understand this hierarchy-neither do their families-and most often neither do lawyers.

  If the inmate dies, cause and manner of death is determined by a contracted medical examiner who has a vested interest in doing exactly what the Department of Correction expects him to do. Death reporting is often skewed and inaccurate.

  In a private health care system it is the government that referees and insists on fair play. When the government controls the system, and the media are complicit with the government, there is no one left to lobby for the unconnected individual.

  And in the game of ObamaCare there are no "get out of jail free" cards.

  KRusso is a Healthcare, Forensic Death Analyst and Director of The Wrongful Death & Injury Institute, Inc.
  www.wrongfuldeathinstitute.com

  
  

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