I have been hearing lately about people having terrible experiences with medical emergencies as well as less critical medical situations. Stories about loved ones being staged in ER hallways with other acute care patients for eight or nine hours before being seen and other, previously infrequent, horror stories. America was the one place in the world where “world class” medical care was the standard and universally accessible (with or without health insurance). If you care to debate this, I can tell you of several cases of multi-million-dollar medical services which were provided to patients with no money and without health insurance.
Indeed, the world of health insurance has never been the same and will never be the same since the Obamacare law was passed (at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning, as I recall) and signed into law on March 23, 2010. That was the law about which Nancy Pelosi stated, “Pass the bill and you will find out what is in it”. I bet you didn’t know there were twenty-plus tax provisions included in the bill with several of them having nothing to do with healthcare. Funny how that works.
We are certainly finding out what was in and what was not in the bill since it passed. It was nicknamed the Affordable Care Act. That should have told you something. It should have been called the Government Centralization of Healthcare Act (the GCHA or Gotcha Act!). The law was never intended to create a better health insurance system. It was intended to redistribute wealth and power away from the medical professionals to the Federal Administration, Federal agencies, and other select beneficiaries. One of the “preferred” Obamacare insurance companies, I learned, was headed up by a former governor. I wonder how that happened?
Among other negative effects, a significant one is the accelerated retirement of those doctors who had been in practice for twenty years or more. This has led to a shortage of qualified physicians resulting in extended wait times to see a doctor. All-in-all, this bill was among the greatest frauds perpetrated on an unwitting and gullible population. At the time this was all being debated, I ran the numbers and proposed (to my friends and clients) that a 1% increase in the income tax rate across the board ($250 billion per year) would have paid for “insurance” for all uninsured individuals in the United States without changing the structure or quality of healthcare delivery. Certainly, a 1% increase in taxes would have been an acceptable price to pay to keep the best healthcare system in the world.
Advancements in medical therapies and care had put life expectancies on a steady climb suggesting that the American population was living increasingly longer lives. Shortly after Obamacare was passed the trend line started to flatten out and then turn down (Source: Peterson-KFF Health System TrackerCredit: Ashley Ahn/NPR).
This was fairly easy to predict since the introduction of a healthcare bill which focused primarily on who was going to get healthcare (and who was going to pay for who’s) insurance and not the continued advancement of science could certainly not be expected to improve it. Indeed, by 2019 (prior to the start of Covid-19) mortality rates began to fall (people not living as long). Since the introduction of the Covid-19 pandemic it has, as you can imagine, fallen much faster and has erased all of the life expectancy gains generated by advancements in science going back to the 1995 mortality level.
The key takeaway here is this. You had better be taking care of your own health. The ability to find good doctors who are accepting new patients is dwindling. Additionally, with the CDC now a branch (fifth branch after Wall Street) of the Federal Government, your healthcare options are not getting any better. We all have to rethink our medical options as we navigate a rapidly declining health care system.