WND Exclusive: Erik Rush sees a long road to the health care ‘crisis’ beginning in the 1960s
By Erik RushTaking into account the criminal deportment of congressional Democrats over the last four years (one could reasonably argue for more) and the disgraceful confirmation process attendant to President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, it was a foregone conclusion that these Democrats would vigorously oppose anyone the president nominated to fill the seat vacated by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Evidently, this goes double for someone with the bona fides of Amy Coney Barrett, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the 7th Circuit, who was nominated by President Trump and is currently undergoing the confirmation process. Obviously, the confirmation of any conservative to the Supreme Court is viewed by Democrats as a threat not only to all the political left has accomplished with regard to its agenda, but to all that it seeks to accomplish in the future.
It’s also apparent that hyperbole is the order of the day, as far as liberal rhetoric goes, with projection and schoolyard invective running as close seconds. Whether it’s blaming President Trump for COVID-19 deaths (or even the pandemic itself), conspiracies that have arisen as a result of the overreach of elected Democrats or claims that Trump is raising a white nationalist army, their contentions might elicit uproarious laughter were our situation less grave.
In remarks about President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently claimed that a Supreme Court nominee has never been “nominated and installed while a presidential election is already underway.” This was an outright lie, and Biden knew it; many justices have been nominated and installed in election years by presidents running for reelection. This is par for the course, I imagine, given the magnitude of the lies being proffered by leftists these days.
Since there were apparently no parties willing to level decades-old rape allegations against Judge Barrett, and since she cannot be accused of racism (unless she and her husband are covertly engaging their adopted black children as slaves), Democrats have elected to characterize a Barrett confirmation as the death knell for the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare).
Well, considering that congressional Democrats’ cases for pretty much everything have been pitifully weak in every quantifiable area for quite a while (President Trump’s impeachment proceedings spring to mind), this is also par for the course, and might also elicit uproarious laughter were our situation less grave.
Since Barrett was nominated, Democrats have driven the narrative that if she is confirmed she could be the deciding vote in California v. Texas, a constitutional challenge to Obamacare which contends that the individual mandate in the law is unconstitutional. In their wild-eyed entreaties, however, Democrats are representing the prospect of Obamacare’s reversal as though President Trump and congressional Republicans were poised to repeal the entire Bill of Rights.
I don’t have to tell regular readers of this column that Obamacare is the legislative equivalent of a botched coat-hanger abortion and a dumpster fire having conceived offspring. From losing the doctors and plans Americans were told they’d be able to keep, to the onerous cost increases, to the innumerable poison pills contained within the law that had to be passed before we could see what was in it, Obamacare has lived up to all of the “fear mongering” its detractors put forth prior to its passage.
What’s far more significant than the prospect of Obamacare’s repeal or the histrionics of Democrats related to same is how it came to be in the first place, and this is an issue I’ve yet to hear another commentator address with sufficient force.
The fact is that the circumstances which made conditions ripe for the passage of the Affordable Care Act came about as the result of nothing less than a Deep State conspiracy.
Beginning in the 1960s, progressive trial attorneys, elected officials and federal regulators drove policies that led to steadily rising costs for health care and medical insurance. The objective was to make these costs so unbearable for most consumers that socialized health care would begin to look like a good idea, particularly to a population that didn’t grasp the fundamentals of economics.
Trial attorneys drove up the costs of malpractice insurance for health care providers and hospitals, as well as fostering a culture of litigiousness within the industry. Federal regulators drove up the price of every piece of medical technology through onerous approval processes. Legislators’ refusal to repeal outmoded laws such as the McCarran-Ferguson Act (which disallows interstate competition between insurance firms) guaranteed that health insurance premiums would remain artificially high.
Despite the incestuous relationship between pharmaceutical companies and federal regulators that often leads to the approval of harmful drugs, regulators nevertheless supported measures that allowed developed nations outside the U.S. to exploit American innovation by negotiating drug prices to artificially low levels. The upshot of this is that American drug companies have not been allowed to recoup their research and development costs from these markets, resulting in far higher drug costs for U.S. consumers.
The rising costs and increasing difficulty to obtain medical insurance from the 1970s through 2010 were not, as many Americans surmised, due to the fecklessness of politicians. They were insidious machinations intended to engender fear, frustration and disgust on the part of American consumers – and it worked. By 2008, Americans had been clamoring for health care reform for many years.
Finally, the Washington establishment was able to pass the Affordable Care Act, a horrible piece of legislation on its face, during the administration of a president whose levels of melanin served as political Teflon.
The irony lies in the fact that Obamacare was only intended as a stepping stone to a single-payer system (socialized medicine) from the start. The significant economic pain caused by this law – far worse than consumers endured prior to its passage – is intended to set the stage for the next landmark health care legislation package to be passed under the next far-left Democratic president when the time is right.
Almost nothing in the U.S. healthcare system is as the public understands it. The entire system (including healthcare financing) is run entirely by the American Medical Association (an organization which really only has three constituents, pharmaceutical industrialists, hospital conglomerates, and medical schools… NOTE: NOT doctors or small local hospitals).
There has been NO free market in health care since insurers entered the arena 70 or so years ago. In the early years, there was some contention between insurers and medical service providers, but that has been the case at least since the end of the 80s.
The situation now is that the U.S really does not have a healthcare system. What the U.S. has is best described as a MEDICAL MAFIA, whereby the AMA is the mob boss and its constituents the crime families.
Through its racketeering, the AMA (BTW – an organization CONVICTED of committing both racketeering and anti-trust acts at least three times over the years) has, using its coding in conjunction with PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) contracts virtually monopolized every facet of the health care and health care finance industries throughout the U.S. so that the entire arrangement now operates as a system of regional monopolies with the ultimate goal of creating a single monopoly.
PPO contracts are riddled with all sorts of non-disclosure and confidentiality clauses, not only to cloak medical fees and charges from the public, but more importantly, between insurers. In analyzing claims, many have observed that in their State one insurer gets at least a 30% discount over their ‘competitors’ on all hospital based expenses. (Although physician expenses are on par, independent physicians are systematically being starved out of business via PPO contract reimbursement rates over which they have NO say whatsoever.)
Insurance companies (which SHOULD be our advocates since we pay the premiums) have cut a deal with the AMA syndicate such that they agree to bear being publicly vilified, but in exchange are guaranteed that their actual profits will move upward in lockstep with increasing medical costs.
Under this arrangement, insurers no longer function as insurers, but rather, as ‘bag men’ for the Medical Mafia, collecting the money and taking their ‘cut’. Basically, insurers are allowed publicly a 2% profit margin. However, with medical costs DOUBLING every four or five years (as they have for the past 25 years) insurance company profits ALSO double! (No what company would not be please with profits doubling every four or five years.)
Once a Single Payer (Universal Healthcare) system (the ultimate monopoly) is established and whatever ‘free enterprise’ market forces which may still exists are completely annihiliated, the current trends of declining care quality and availability with stratospheric costs increases will continue with even greater acceleration. The only change that will become a reality is the party serving the Medical Mafia’s position of ‘bag man’. It will indeed become the Federal government and no longer so-called ‘insurers’, and since the Medical Mafia already has Congress bought and paid for, it will then be able to keep the current ‘bag mans’ cut for itself.
Under any monopoly there are no competitive forces requiring that anything be done better, cheaper, or faster. So the only means of ‘cost reduction’ becomes solely ‘care rationing’.