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They
believed the promised moon and the stars and Nancy Pelosi who refused to give
details when asked - they had to “pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” Four
years and a trillion wasted dollars later there are more American citizens
without insurance, and with substandard and more expensive insurance that does
not meet their needs.
Americans young
and old found out what’s in Obamacare and did not like it. Elderly were kicked
out of their Medicare plans and moved into Humana. Patients lost their doctors,
lost their insurance plans they liked and were forced into exchanges. Premiums
were much higher, deductibles through the roof, and reimbursement varied from
60, 70, to 80 percent, depending on whether they had bought bronze, silver, or
gold plans. Congressmen and their staff were in a separate category, a “platinum and diamonds” plan for elitist lawmakers who promptly complained they could not afford the premiums and voted themselves a subsidy.
I suppose those who were uninsured thought Obamacare to be free since they touted health insurance as a right, not a service. Why reward and pay the “greedy” doctors for their expertise and years of expensive schooling and hard training? Everyone should be equally paid in the new, “fundamentally transformed” socialist America.
Things did
not work so well when it came time to fund this bonanza of good health. Young
people preferred to pay the lower penalty instead of enrolling. Medicare was
stripped of $719 billion over ten years to fund Obamacare at the expense of rationed
care for the elderly.
It is sad
when a patient over 70 becomes a “unit” whose worth to society is being
calculated and then services are curtailed based on their “utility.”
Who said
there are no death panels when patients in need of physical therapy or
expensive chemo are being told, sorry, we’ve done all we can for you, you are
just too old and you are never going to get better. A far away bureaucrat makes
life-altering decisions for patients they have never met who paid taxes and
premiums for years so that their golden years would be protected.
On the other
hand, if you are an illegal immigrant, fresh off the train or airplane,
Obamacare is free and readily available the very same day, no questions asked.
Scandal
after scandal revealed how badly veterans were treated in VA hospitals – many
died waiting to be seen by a physician. These were our heroes who put their
lives on the line for America and were promised first class care for the rest
of their lives and received the worst. Their worth to the new socialist bureaucracy
is less than that of illegal aliens. Veterans and military families experienced
first the ill-effects of socialized medicine.
You may not
like your premiums, you may not like your deductibles, you may not like the
loss of your doctor who is not “a preferred physician” under Obamacare and
perhaps practices “concierge” medicine or has retired, but socialized medicine
is here to stay.
You may have
to accept the care of a nurse practitioner or of someone trained in a third
world country who was hurriedly licensed in order to fill the void of doctors. No
bureaucracy, once ensconced with deep roots in Washington, can be uprooted and
nullified no matter how ill-conceived it was.
You may
think, how bad can socialized medicine and a single payer system be? Not bad if
you have the sniffles, pretty bad if you take into account what happened to
Maureen in Ireland and hundreds of thousands of patients just like her who are
subjected to nationalized health care in Western Europe, the model for the
Affordable Care Act.
Trying to
recover from surgery for a broken femur caused by multiple myeloma and blood
clots in her lungs, she had to share a room, a bathroom, and a shower with six
other co-ed patients. Her femur broke while waiting for a CT scan at one
hospital and was then transported to another hospital for surgery.
After a
three day wait, she was prepped for surgery but the ambulance did not arrive to
pick her up until the following morning. Kept in a semi-coma to alleviate the
pain, when she got to the other hospital, the surgery was postponed twice. If
that was not enough pain and suffering, Maureen was infected with the dreaded
MRSA staph bacterial infection in her nose.
What caused
her blood clots? After a 15 minute infusion to strengthen her bones, she was
told to wait for her surgeon who wanted to see her and give her biopsy results
and discuss treatment. She sat in the waiting room all day, from 7 a.m. to 5
p.m. By nightfall she was short of breath and very weak and had to be rushed to
the hospital by ambulance in order to save her life.
On discharge
day, she had to wait 12 hours until a fourth person was found to sign off the release
papers. Treatment can be good, but the patient can die waiting for it, and the
nurses, although very kind and well-trained, are grossly overworked and
underpaid, just like doctors.Maureen had the option to buy a private room for the price of 1,000 euros per day. Single payer insurance in Ireland does not prevent patients from buying additional private insurance if they can afford it. Unfortunately that may not be the case in this country eventually, as more insurers would be unable to underwrite policies profitably and in line with the Affordable Care Act’s dictates.
As Jonathan
Gruber said, the American voters were too stupid to understand the
ramifications of the passage of the so-unaffordable Affordable Care Act and did
not comprehend how their health care will be fundamentally and irreversibly altered.
Do we really
want socialized medical care for our American patients? Unfortunately, what
happened to Maureen is inevitably coming to the U.S. There will come a time
when doctors, proper medical care, treatment, surgery, and drugs will be so
scarce that patients will walk around with envelopes stuffed with cash in order
to be treated in a timely manner and will look to the black market to find the
drugs they need.Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014
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