Tuesday, September 18, 2012

What Good is Health Insurance Without a Doctor!

Nearly 70 percent of doctors believe that long wait times will plague emergency rooms. A full 83 percent of physicians foresee increased wait times for primary care appointments.  It has already started, and this is just the beginning. 

My Facebook friend was recently diagnosed with cancer on August 13, 2012.  She was poor, over fifty and had been living in her car off and on since March of this year. Occasionally someone would have mercy upon her and would allow her to stay with them for approximately 3 weeks at a time.  You can imagine her stress level was extremely high due to the uncertainty.  

On August 12, she called me to say that she had a doctor’s appointment.  After sitting in the waiting room for six hours, she was finally seen for approximately 10 minutes and was told to go to the hospital the following morning where she was diagnosed with cancer and three weeks later she was dead. 

Did she die due to a lack of access to healthcare?  No.  The few doctors and nurses available bent over backwards to help her and to make her as comfortable as humanly possible. 

The problem was the shortage of doctors and nurses available for the number of patients needing care.   The fact of the matter is, physicians foresee in their future  a decrease in income coupled with an increased work load, a toxic combination of new regulations and taxes plus millions of newly insured individuals swelling their patient rosters.



The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000. Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.  

For the next generation of senior citizens, finding a doctor will be more difficult and waiting times for doctor appointments are likely to be longer. The American Association of Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 124,000 doctors by 2025.”  Obamacare does nothing to reverse this worrisome trend, instead making it worse.

The Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA)! 

On June 28, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision.  Call it Hillarycare or Obamacare, either way; it is the law of the land and many portions of the PPACA have already been quietly enacted.  Could that account for the longer than normal waits to see a doctor? 

In a move that stunned the nation, the vote was 5-4 to uphold the insurance mandate and the rest of the Affordable Care Act.  The vote had come down to a 4-4 vote, giving Chief Justice John Roberts the deciding vote.  Although known as a conservative, Roberts voted that the insurance mandate was illegal ONLY because it was tied to a tax.  He ruled that since the penalty for not being insured was to be collected by the I.R.S., that it amounted to a tax and that Congress has the legal right to levy taxes.  

In his ruling, Robert’s also stated that the requirement to force someone to purchase a product or pay a penalty does violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.  Because he also ruled that the insurance mandate was a tax and not a penalty, that it no longer violated the Commerce Clause and as such was legal. 

However, by Roberts’ very ruling, he actually made the insurance mandate illegal and subject to further litigation and possibly still being thrown out. 

According to the Origination Clause of the U.S. Constitution, all tax or revenue generating legislation must begin in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The Affordable Care Act was first introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate and not the House.  Therefore, the insurance mandate tax violates the Origination Clause of the U.S. Constitution and must be struck down. 

The second issue is that since the U.S. Senate cannot initiate any tax or revenue generating legislation, the penalty for not purchasing health insurance cannot be a tax according to the Origination Clause.  If it cannot be a tax, then it has to be a penalty and thus we go back to a violation of the Commerce Clause which Chief Justice Roberts said the insurance mandate would be. 

It Ain't over, yet!

1 comment:

  1. Liberalism really Is a mental disease. Rather it's a manifestation of real mental flaws that impact something we used to call morality. These flaws called cowardice, people-pleasing, appeasement. Roberts wanted to have it both ways, and in doing so he stepped into the ugly slime of both illogic and immorality. In my opinion, these are two character flaws joined at the hip.

    Roberts' decision was a demonstration of how that disease has wrecked havoc in a once solidly moral country through all the characteristics I mention above for the past century, beginning with the Progressive era.
    Common sense is a basic form of logic and the Progressives have worked feverishly to destroy that instinct born in us and basic to our own self-preservation. Take away a man's belief in his own common sense and you have eroded his confidence in his own morality.

    The elites who have been pushing the socialist/fascist/Marxist agendas thoughout history Know what they are doing. It is the same playbook thoughout history--under a different name in the Roman Empire, the same techniques were there. Elites care nothing for the people and never have. They use people ( and I cite Roberts as an example here) to tear down the core common sense we are all born with and make us believe that some sort of wizardry can trump classical logic. This is why lawyers are one of the most despised group of people since the dawn of time. Reason is not tied to either common sense or morality and law school teaches you to put all that "nonsense" aside for the greater game of outsmarting your opponent through diversion and trickery. In Roberts' case the opponent was his own conscience and the U.S. Constitution.
    My brother has been a doctor for over 45 years and he told me yesterday he would NEVER be in that profession if he had it to do all over again.

    So yes, Charlotte, right on. Liberalism is a labrynth of distortion, confusion, and mental anguish, producing nothing but misery and spiritual agony. The sad thing is that the flaws of Liberalism also bring down entire nations and has throughout thousands of years of history, though called by different names. We have seen an entire population of young people and people of color seduced by the illogic and immorality of Liberalism, even at their own expense! Entire populations have been made Lemmings by the desire to be a part of the "elite" crowd in power and a pathetic desire to accomodate irrational reasoning into our natural instincts against it. Roberts, sadly, demonstrated as much in his convoluted and irrational decision.
    That is why his decision made me so abysmally sad. And also made me so clear on the damage being done to us all by the cowardice, lies, and destructiveness of this Administration. The only way to keep my sanity and peace is just to do what I do. Fight with words, with clarity, and with determination against this assault on us all as free people.

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