Ben Smith at POLITICO reports that Democrats are switching their messaging strategy when it comes to the ObamaCare legislation (and I’d guess one of the strategies is not to call it “ObamaCare”). Seems they’ve conceded the argument that it will lower the deficit and cost less. Facts are stubborn things and few have bought into the claims given the justification for them given by Democratic leaders.
So now they’ll go more nebulous instead. Call it the medical care “hope and change” approach. Now instead of lower deficits and less cost, they’re going to tout the law as a way to “improve” health care.
As one slide in the presentation – available here – says, “Many don’t believe health care reform will help the economy.” That’s absolutely correct. And, unlike Washington DC, most in flyover country passed their "Common Sense 101” course years ago while holding a job or running a business, raising a family and managing a household. Most of them can spot a scam fairly easily and this was always in that category given the machinations necessary to make it “bend the cost curve down”. Immediate taxes and delayed benefits were the first sign some game was afoot. “Doc fixes” and half a trillion Medicare cuts that would never happen plus some double counting used to claim deficit reduction were the second. And a new and extensive bureaucracy promised health care would be much more complicated and expensive. Of course everyone loved the new individual mandate as well, not to mention the billions of dollars in mandates shifted to the states.
So this is the pig they’re trying to sell as “improved” as in “this law improves health care”.
How?
One slide says, “Tap into individual responsibility to blunt opposition to the mandate to have individual insurance.” It then says, “Those who choose not to have insurance and use the emergency room for routine care are increasing the cost for the rest of us who have insurance.”
Interesting slide for the group most singularly responsible for attempting to make more and more people dependent on government throughout it’s history. Suddenly it’s about “individual responsibility” while defending one of the biggest government takeovers of an industry in our history.
Oh, and, as pointed out with MassCare – ObamaCare’s little brother – the use of emergency room facilities went up with their mandated insurance law:
When the Bay State passed its health-reform law in 2006, 9 percent of non-elderly adults lacked insurance; that’s now down to 5 percent. The law didn’t reduce expensive emergency-room use as predicted. Instead, emergency-room visits have climbed by 9 percent, or about 3 million visits, from 2004 to 2008.
And, of course, so have costs with health care now consuming 35% of the state’s budget as compared to 22% before the law’s passage. All predicted (back to Common Sense 101) and all coming true as expected.
Last, but certainly not least, Democrats will use a little class warfare to "please” voters, one assumes:
Obviously anyone with the cognitive ability to open a box of crayons knows that the rich can’t pay for all of this by any stretch. Another in a long line of lies about “paying for” this monstrosity. The second part of the slide is just a flat out lie. Remember, ObamaCare is based on the primary care physician. And that’s a medical care area that has a shortage now and that shortage is going to get worse:
The number of U.S. medical school students going into primary care has dropped 51.8% since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).
That’s right, dropped 51.8% since 1997. So tell me again about that “unprecedented number of new healthcare providers” being trained? Because I don’t know who they are, but they aren’t the supposed foundational specialty on which ObamaCare is based according to the AAFP.
And those doctors who are in primary care are cutting their hours. Why?
Payment issues may have played more of a role. The overall decrease in hours coincided with a 25% decline in pay for doctors’ services, adjusted for inflation. And when the researchers looked closely at U.S. cities with the lowest and highest doctor fees, they found doctors working shorter hours in the low-fee cities and longer hours in the high-fee cities.
Yup, no pending crisis at all – aided and abetted by a government that has decided it will “lower costs” even though it is no longer going to emphasize that point to the proles.
And what about nurses?
In the July/August 2009 Health Affairs, Dr. Peter Buerhaus and coauthors found that despite the current easing of the nursing shortage due to the recession, the U.S. nursing shortage is projected to grow to 260,000 registered nurses by 2025. A shortage of this magnitude would be twice as large as any nursing shortage experienced in this country since the mid-1960s.
Amazing what they try to put past you, isn’t it? Which brings us to the irony of the day:
Yup – keep those claims “small and credible” like the lies about more health care providers – and for heaven sake “don’t over promise or ‘spin’ what the law delivers’ – like lower cost, the ability to keep your plan and your doctor and, of course, control over your own health care.
Because we wouldn’t want to see this new and “improved” law repealed or neutered, would we?
~McQ
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