What is Obama's Health Care plan? What is Obamacare?

There's been so much misinformation spread about so-called 'Obamacare' that it's difficult to tell the facts from the lies - and there are a lot of lies and misinformation being spread around (largely by insiders from the insurance industry.)

The absolutely inexcusable failing of the Obama administration is their inability to clearly and concisely explain what 'Obamacare' actually entails - which is why lies about 'socialized medicine' and 'death panels' appeal to the populous so much.

So here, in my typically unqualified fashion, is my explanation of 'Obamacare.'

The current reform bill being debated is America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.

It proposes:

• All US residents with an income above poverty level will be mandated to purchase health insurance, or face penalties during tax season.
• Health insurance companies will be forbidden from refusing coverage on the basis of 'pre-existing conditions.'
• Health insurance companies won't be allowed to cancel coverage except in cases of proven medical fraud.
• Maximum out-of-pocket expenses will be limited to $5,000 annually for an individual, or $10,000 for a family.
• A tax credit will be provided for low-income families, so they can afford health insurance.
• All employers with payroll costs of over $250,000 will be required to provide medical coverage for their employees.
• Medicare payments to hospitals which discharge their patients too early, characterized by frequent re-admissions, will be punitively reduced.
• A Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research will be created, which will seek to discover why some medical treatments cost more in certain parts of the country.
• Medicare coverage will be expanded by requiring pharmaceutical companies to reduce or rebate the cost of qualifying drugs for eligible patients.
• A National Prevention and Wellness Strategy will be developed, which will aim to promote healthy living and preventative medicine to reduce the overall need for medical treatment.
• A Health Insurance Exchange would be created, which would mean small business could 'pool' together to participate in more cost effective insurance plans (currently, only larger businesses have the 'clout' to earn lower premiums through increased participation.)
• A 'public' health insurance option would be created, which would compete with insurance companies in an effort to reduce insurance premiums, while maintaining coverage.

What Obamacare does NOT propose is the following:

• There will be NO 'government takeover of the health care industry.' A 'public' option will exist alongside the current insurance industry, so this is NOT a socialized or nationalized health care plan. It's not even close.
  
• There will be NO 'health care rationing' beyond that which currently exists in the marketplace.
• 'Grandma' won't be unplugged or denied treatment. So-called 'death panels' are actually 'end of life' discussions - proposed by Republican Charles Boustany. These will offer patients the chance to discuss with their doctor under what circumstances they would want to refuse medical treatment (like in the case of complete, irreversible brain death.) The doctors themselves cannot elect to refuse treatment.

There are elements of the health insurance industry who are fighting tooth and nail to have America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 totally derailed. They are using the so-called 'grassroots' movement to disrupt Town Hall discussions - even though the protesters themselves will suffer if this bill isn't passed.

If conservatives successfully keep the status quo, the following will happen:

• Health insurance premiums will continue to rise - they've more than doubled since 1999, rising twice as fast as wages. They're projected to increase by a further 94% by 2020. Unless this is stopped, nobody in America will be able to afford health care!
• The percentage of out-of-pocket costs will continue to increase, too. This year, economists reported that medical debt was the leading cause of bankruptcies in the US. You should be able to be treated for cancer without losing your house - and currently, that's not how the American system works.
• As premiums rise, coverage drops - and more and more Americans find themselves refused coverage because of 'pre-existing conditions' or dropped altogether thanks to exclusions in the small print. If this continues, only healthy Americans will be 'privileged' to pay for health insurance (that they don't need.)

It's no wonder that pro-industry pressure groups like Conservatives for Patient's Rights are fighting so hard to combat health care reform. They'll continue making millions by preserving the current system - out of the pockets of hardworking Americans like you, me and the misguided protesters.

The 'heros' of Anti-Health Care Reform

The right-wing is trying to portray opposition to health care reform as emerging from the grassroots - the regular men and women of America who object to government interfering in how they get access to medical treatment

Protester picture borrowed from Looking at the Left

But it's becoming increasingly clear that the most effective anti-reform protests are being organized and orchestrated by political organizations - like Conservatives for Patients' Rights.

Conservatives for Patients' Rights is a health care pressure group which claims to lobby government to enact health care reform 'based on free-market principles.'

Their founder, Rick Scott, pushes the group's agenda through both high-cost advertising and organizing the group's supporters to attend and disrupt town hall meetings. They provide lists of local meetings for supporters to attend and provide video tutorials on how to most effectively push their agenda (largely by drowning out debate.)

But who is Rick Scott? And what are Conservatives for Patients' Rights' real aims?

Well, Rick Scott's no activist, leading the charge to preserve America's freedoms. He's a health industry insider with a checkered history; who stands to make millions by derailing health care reform.

Scott was the founder of Columbia Hospital Corporation, which was at the center of the one of the biggest Medicaid and Medicare frauds in American history. His group fleeced the government out of billions by charging for services they didn't render, giving their own organization kickbacks and self-referrals and issuing fraudulent cost reports.

Rick Scott was eventually ousted from the board of directors and plead guilty to fraud, earning a record fine of $1.7 billion dollars.

So we've already established that he's a liar and a fraud.

But that didn't keep him out of the health care industry. In fact, Scott then co-founded Solantic, an organization that provides urgent care services, immunizations, physicals and drug screenings - a business that stands to reap huge rewards by preventing the cost-cutting measures and government-run competition proposed by Obama.

So instead of being a hero of the free-market health care system, Rick Scott is a stooge. He founded Conservatives for Patient's Rights not to help Americans get fair access to affordable health care, but to derail health care reform.

And why? Well, in the words of rival group Health Care for America Now:

"Scott and his insurance company friends stand to make millions by preserving the broken system we have now."

And how about Conservatives for Patient's Rights? The group Scott founded?

The group rally support amongst grassroots protesters and regular Americans through well-funded advertising campaigns - claiming that health care reform will 'squeeze' Americans and provide 'lousy public health coverage.'

"Obamacare could crush all your other choices, driving them out of existence, resulting in 119 million off their current insurance coverage."

However, their adverts have been accused of being misleading, or even incorporating outright lies. This isn't surprising since the PR firm behind the commercials - Creative Response Concepts - is best known for their previous work with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth - who ran a campaign of outright lies and slander intended to derail the election campaign of 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry.

'Swiftboating' is already in effect - a good example being how two British women were duped into recording for a fake 'documentary' on health care reform - only to find their words taken out of context and used in a Conservatives for Patient's Rights commercial slamming the NHS.

"I was told that they were a company in the United States who were doing a documentary on whether health care in the US should be nationalised," Katie Brickall, one of the duped women, told The Times. "I feel I was duped. The irony is that I campaign for exactly the people that socialised health care supports. I would never align myself with this group at all.”

FactCheck.org have a comprehensive list of lies Conservatives for Patient's Rights have told on their website, here and here.

To back up their campaign of misinformation, Rick Scott and the Conservatives for Patient's Rights list local Town Hall events across the country, and use email and social networking sights to orchestrate protests, demonstrations and disruptions to the political process.

"They have no plan for moving our country forward, so they've called out the mob."

The worst part of all this? The grassroots activists who are misguidedly working with Conservatives for Patient's Rights are actually shooting themselves in the foot.

Instead of defending their personal freedoms, fighting higher taxation and rebelling against unnecessary government interference, they're being used and manipulated into furthering the financial stranglehold the insurance companies have on the health care system.

If health care reform is derailed, these regular Americans will continue to feel the sting of higher insurance premiums, reduced coverage and shrinking services - while health industry stooges like Rick Scott will reap millions by milking the system for every penny he can squeeze out of it.

Brownshirts Bulldoze Health Care Reform

These days, a lot of people seem to forget that Adolf Hitler was democratically elected.

Not entirely voluntarily democratically elected - but voted into office by a majority of his peers nevertheless.

With the support of his thuggish supporters, the Sturmabteilung - better known to us as 'brownshirts' - he managed to bully and bulldoze his way into office through the use of propaganda, lies, political machinations and old-fashioned violence.

"All opposition must be stamped into the ground," was the Sturmabteilung's official motto - and they lived by it.

How exactly did the brownshirts forward Hitler's campaign? Well, let's examine some of their methods:

• Misinformation (distributing lies and false information to discredit opponents)
• Disruption (disorderly or violent interruption of the political process.)
• Intimidation (using the threat of violence to pressure politicians to capitulate.)

The climax of the 'brownshirts' campaign was the Enabling Act of 1933, Ermächtigungsgesetz, which saw the German parliament, the Reichstag, vote to give Adolf Hitler dictatorial rule over Germany.

Why would the politicians of Germany grant Hitler such extraordinary and unprecedented power? Because they were too terrified not to.

On the morning of the vote, hundreds of heavily armed Sturmabteilung swarmed the Reichstag, sending a very clear and intimidating message to Hitler's opponents that the penalty for resisting his rise to power would be very serious.

Enabling Act of 1933: Democracy at the point of a gun...

In the end, all but one political party voted to grant Hitler control of Germany - and the 26 dissenters from the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands party were promptly arrested for failing to capitulate.

Thus, through intimidation and the threat of violence, tyranny was born.

The truly scary thing?

We're witnessing those very same tactics being employed in America's health care debate - and they're working.

Modern-day brownshirts.

I identified the three main tactics of Hitler's Sturmabteilung earlier - misinformation, disruption and intimidation.

Pictures of misguided protesters taken from Looking at the Left

They're very effective tactics - as we can see demonstrated today.

Misinformation: From Sarah Palin creating the fantasy of 'death panels' to House Republican Leader John Boehner warning about 'government encouraged euthanasia,' it seems the only commodity that's off limits in the conservative assault on 'Obamacare' is the truth.

Yet, watching protesters wave placards reading 'Obamacare is Arsenic for Seniors' and 'Obamacare is a Death Sentence' prove that this campaign of lies and misinformation is working.

Disruption: All it takes is a few angry voices to turn a Town Hall style political event into a madhouse, but like the Sturmabteilung before them, Conservatives are actively organising campaigns to maximise the disruption.

Leading health-care industry lobbyists - like disgraced hospital owner Rick Scott - have teamed up with grassroots conservative movements to coordinate disruptions specifically intended to stifle debate and 'rattle' Democratic politicians.

Whether it's forty people chanting anti-Obama slogans (and drowning out all other voices) or single showboaters holding up Obama posters defaced with a Hitler moustache, the effect is the same.

[Tom posted a link suggesting that the Obama/Hitler posters were staged by the Democrats - Editorial Bear]

Rational debate is slaughtered, politicians are silenced and the Conservative movement hobbles democracy still further.

Intimidation: But perhaps the most terrifying demonstration of Nazi tactics is the increasingly common sight of heavily armed Conservatives at health care debates. Carrying assault rifles, or pistols strapped to their hips, these right-wing activists are sending the same message that the Sturmabteilung did when they set up machine-gun posts outside the Reichstag. 'Defy us, and pay the penalty.'

There are 'gun rights' and then there's open intimidation of their political opponents - and increasingly, the intentions of the gun-carrying protestors are becoming very clear: If democracy doesn't provide them with the results they seek, they have other methods at their disposal.

Although comparisons between modern politics and the Nazi movement are generally discredited by Godwin's Law and the principle of Reductio ad Hitlerum - perhaps they shouldn't be in this case.

[Is the 'Hitler' comparison overused by both liberals and conservatives? - Editorial Bear]

Conservatives want to paint an image of themselves as 'tea partiers' embodying the rebellious spirit which founded America - but have they crossed the line from 'rebellious spirit' into fascist thugdom? If not - how long will it take until they do?

One thing's for sure - if we don't do something about it, American health care reform will be decided by liars, angry mobs and gun-toting thugs - and that will benefit nobody.

Ideas on how to fix the American Health Care system

At the moment, all talk is about 'Obamacare' and how President Obama's much-touted plans to reform the American health care system are either 'great' or 'gruesome.'

I don't care much for his proposed spending plans, but I'll tell you this for free - the sniping, bitching and whining from Conservatives about this issue is both counter-productive and, frankly, rather pathetic. They're spending so much time trying to scuttle Obama's proposals that they've totally failed to come up with any viable alternatives themselves.

Even the Republican's own 'great brown hope,' the Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, was lack-luster in his much-touted 'bipartisan solution' to the health care crisis. In a column in the Wall Street Journal, he boasted about having all the answers -but wasted his column inches attacking Obama's proposals rather than outlining his own.

The fact is, the right-wing is universally useless because they simply refuse to acknowledge the failures of the current system. When Democrats like Obama make proposals to improve, they're normally shot out the water by the GOP simply because they're not perfect.

Perfect? Perhaps not - but they're still more streamlined, cheaper, efficient or just plain better than the current system. However, because they don't match up to some hypothetical Conservative fairy-tale of what health care should be (even though it isn't), they're not willing to back any change.

But my ire isn't limited to the Republicans. Democrats are equally useless in tackling the crisis. Most of them have their heads in the clouds - with no idea about how much heath care really costs or how it could be realistically delivered.

A perfect example of how out-of-touch Democrats can be found within the pages of Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean's new book: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer.

He touts a universal, government-funded medical care system like Medicare, or the British National Health Service, seemingly unaware that neither of them work. Medicare is bankrupt and the British NHS is a crumbling, ineffective dinosaur.

No, the solution to America's health care woes lies with neither the right or the left. Politics aside, we have to tackle not only the problems inherent in the current health care system - but also embrace its strengths.

Because if you can afford it, and have access to it, American health care is still very, very good.

You might remember my wife raising money for brainstrust.org.uk a couple of years ago. That charity helped send a young woman with a brain tumor to America for treatment, because the British NHS simply couldn't tackle her deeply-embedded malignant tumor. The British health care system had given her a death sentence - but the American system gave her a new lease on life.

As far as I'm concerned, witnessing that forever won me over to the strength of the privately-funded health care system. It saved a life that socialised medicine had already written off - and for that reason alone, I'm utterly convinced that the future of medical care - including much needed, groundbreaking advancements in treatment, pharmaceuticals, care and surgery - is best left in the hands of private industry.

But saying that, let's address two real issues that have broken America's current system. These are the problems I've experience and I'm simply astonished that nobody's discussing them in all the hours of debate about 'Obamacare.'

The medical billing system is disgraceful. I challenge you to find a more inaccurate, poorly managed, bureaucratic and ineffective system than what passes for 'medical billing' in America.

The system is so convoluted and complicated, it's a wonder it operates at all. Considering that the health care system is supposedly 'private' and patients are actually 'customers,' it's disgraceful how the billing system treats them.

Where else in the 'free market' would anybody put up with a business that bills you in dribs and drabs, months after the due date - and regularly (at least 1 out of 3 occasions that I've experienced) f**ks up your invoice?

Personally, I think the whole co-pay system is ridiculously over-complicated and adds reams of expensive bureaucracy to an otherwise fairly straightforward system. It alone adds up to over 5% of current health-care costs - and still can't get the job done even then.

I think the government needs to regulate medical billing so the following is guaranteed:

1. Medical bills will reach the consumer no more than 30 days after treatment. If they do not, the consumer is not required to pay.
2. All bills should be consolidated - one hospital visit equals one invoice. Currently, a single hospital visit can lead to a dozen or more separate invoices from various 'providers' all located in the same hospital!
3. Health care providers should be fined - heavily - for incorrect invoices. This is simply unacceptable in the 21st century.
4. If a medical care invoice is incorrect and undercharges, the health care provider should not be allowed to send a later invoice to 'make up the difference.'

Sounds severe? Think about it - these restrictions would mean that medical billing finally finds itself required to deliver the same standards as regular businesses.

If you had somebody come to spray your backyard for bugs, you'd never put up with receiving six invoices, four months after they'd visited, all requiring payment for a single service you've received. Why should the medical industry be any different?

Medical billing isn't just a customer service issue - it's obvious failings mean it's an expensive liability to both insurers and suppliers. Medical billing issues result in bills not getting paid - which leads to an increase in insurance premiums and care itself. That's why this is a crucial area that needs to be addressed immediately!

But, secondly:

Covered procedures must be finalized in advance. My European friends are always astonished when I explain this to them - but in the American system, you're health care provider can pick and choose which treatments they'll cover as part of your insurance after the fact.

This leads to situations like this - in which a young woman undergoes a double mastectomy, described as a 'medical necessity' by her doctor (because she has a 99% change of developing breast cancer later in life) and then discovered that her insurance company refused to cover the cost.

Considering that medical expenses can run into the hundreds of thousands - and 60% of all bankruptcies are as a direct result of medical expenses individuals can't pay - I am simply astonished that nobody has ever thought to question the practice of agreeing to cover procedures after they've been performed.

Just like with medical billing, it's a situation that you just don't see in the 'real' free market. It basically means that the consumer has no idea exactly how much their treatment is really going to cost them before they agree to it. It's like going into a family restaurant and ordering off a menu with no prices!

My solution? Make it law that all medical insurers have to decide, within three days of a doctor or clinic recommending a treatment, whether or not it's covered by their insurance - in advance.

And if those insurers say 'no', they have to provide a quantified medical reason why they disagree with the patient's referring doctor. After all, like in the case of the woman with the double mastectomy, receiving one expensive medical treatment upfront will probably prevent years of even more costly treatment in the future.

As far as I'm concerned, until these two issues get addressed, America's health care system could be the cheapest or most expensive in the world - it will still be irreparably broken.