The Public Option, Not Dead, but Definitely an Unhealthy Choice for America

As pressure mounts for President Obama to move forward with more of the administration's legislative agenda, his principle legacy-program of health care reform faces bipartisan opposition.

Earlier this year President Barack Obama undertook the daunting task of implementing health care reform to answer concerns of ballooning health care costs in America. He challenged the Senate and the House of Representatives to pen plans acceptable to the general public that addressed problems of uninsured citizens, spiraling costs for care, growing Medicare and Medicaid losses and what he viewed as a lack of competition between insurance companies.

The plans proposed by lawmakers were generally the same, including; a public health insurance option, and strongly enforced measures to introduce equality of care and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in the current system.

The American people are deeply and disproportionately divided and have not as a majority embraced the President's health care reform plan, most significantly due to the very unpopular feature; the Public Option. The Public Option offers tax-payer sponsored, government managed, zero cost health care insurance coverage for millions unable to afford health care on their own.

Voter support for health care reform with a Public Option included shows profound division, evidencing that the majority of Americans do not want the current health care as proposed. Supporters are Democratic, while opposition is evidenced as being Republican and Independent.

A new Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll reports that, "Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands [45 percent] would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted."

A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that 57 percent of Americans felt that the economy was the most important item needing government attention, while 19 percent believed that health care reform should take precedence.

According to Rasmussen; as of September 18th, 56 percent of voters nationwide oppose health care reform with the Public Option as proposed by the President and congressional Democrats. It is the highest level of opposition measured to date and includes 44 percent who are Strongly Opposed. Just 43 percent now favor the proposal, including 24 percent who strongly favor the program.

An Opinion Dynamics poll released September 17th, says that if respondents were sick, they would prefer privately run health insurance over the Public Option, government-run health insurance, by a 62 percent to 22 percent margin (margin of error +/- 3 percent).

An addition, support for the President's proposed plan is being undermined by declining trust in government and strong beliefs that government wastes tax payer dollars. Gallup reported Thursday that the public believes that 50 cents of every dollar is wasted.

Proponents of the Public Option argue that insuring the uninsured will save money and reduce the rampant growth of healthcare costs in the United States. Public Option supporters and Democrats in Washington believe that a Public Option would take Medicare, Medicaid recipients and the uninsured, pool them into one group and then recreate a Medicare like system to cover that newly formed group. It is believed by the left that reformation of Medicare and Medicaid would allow for elimination of waste fraud and abuse and allow for cost saving measures already implemented in socialized health care systems.

Opponents of the Public Option are clear in their belief that a Public Option cannot be designed or operated efficiently or in a sustainable manner, most significantly due to the fact that it will be government designed and managed. They also have valid concerns that a limited Public Option will give way to a "single-payer" or nationalized healthcare system and further believe, with credible reason, that the Whitehouse and Capitol hill Democrats evade facts, logic, common sense and of the truth of past and present government performance to the voters.

Creating a Public Option creates a new entitlement such as Medicare or Medicaid and just as previously seen with welfare, reform to institute abuse deterrence will by needed in a short amount of time so that the program doesn't break the bank. Further, it will create a system that promotes the belief that for a significant portion of American's, the only route to financial solvency lies in subsidies from the federal government.

Healthcare costs in the US amount to 17.6 percent of GDP and the National Coalition on Healthcare reports that, "the average increase in national health expenditures is expected to be 6.2 percent per year, while the GDP is expected to increase only 4.1 percent per year." They continue," In just three years, the Medicare and Medicaid programs will account for 50 percent of all national health spending."

In addition the number of uninsured is at an all-time high corresponding to still growing unemployment figures. Although uninsured have access to emergency room care, no options are available for basic, life sustaining or preventative medicine. There is a growing argument that we as a people have a social responsibility to those less fortunate or unable and when added to the infectious growth of social entitlements support is slowly but steadily building inertia.

The first thing to understand is that the result or outcome being espoused by the Whitehouse is illogical. To believe that America can add 30 million uninsured patients [47 million including illegals], cut current health care costs by over $500 billion, have the level of care increase, providing Americans healthier, longer lives at the same time as the government itself estimates that the country will have 150,000 fewer doctors by 2025. Very faulty reasoning, some might even say fanciful or deceptive.

The Public's distrust in government is indeed warranted. The Competitive Enterprise Institute sued the Obama administration under the Freedom of Information Act to acquire a March 09, Department of Treasury report that estimates Cap-and-Trade costs annually per family at $1,761. The administration hid the Treasury study, releasing instead CBO estimates of $171.55 dollars annually per family.

To support the Whitehouse, Media Matters detailed that the Treasury estimate is "months old" and as such does not reflect current CBO figures, nor was it written about the Cap-and-Trade bill. What they fail to cite is that the Treasury Department's study occurred two weeks prior to the CBO's and used dynamic examples from countries participating in Kyoto such as Spain, that have already instituted many of the "Caps" in Waxman-Markey. This exchange further undermines trust in government and mainstream media and ultimately undermines support for a Public Option.

Distrust is affirmed as warranted in many instances; it is now common knowledge that immediately prior to launch of the health care debate, the Whitehouse secretly agreed with pharmaceutical companies not to include negotiation of drug prices in the bill. The big question is why - could this be a quid-pro-quo for their silence during the debate.

Also, the President himself lied to both houses of Congress and to the American people on national television, when he said that illegal aliens would not be covered by his health care reform and voters know this. Many supporters argue that language has been introduced into the bill to prevent this and while this is true, the plain fact is that Constitutional law supersedes Congressional mandate.

In 1994, 59 percent of California voters passed Proposition 187, a ballot measure that outlawed education, health care and social services to illegal immigrants and their children. The measure was struck down as unconstitutional in two Superior court rulings and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case as they believed the two lower court rulings would have withstood legal challenge. This precedent as to o with unilateral coverage; as soon as "everyone" is covered in the United States, by the rights afforded in our constitution, illegals must also be. As a Yale educated law student, who specialized in contract, social and constitutional law, President Obama certainly knows this.

The President's wife even strengthens the trust-gap by using the fact that women are "disproportionately affected by this issue because of the roles we play in our families," to launch into, ""Women are affected because in many states, insurance companies can still discriminate because of gender," implying that opposition to the plan is somehow discriminatory, finishing, that her husband's plan would help "achieve true equality for women." The implication is insincere and attempts to capitulate opponents by painting them as genderist.

A Public Option will structurally necessitate a lower standard of care. To begin with, a lower standard of care will be unavoidable with the introduction of 30 million patients into he system and rather than the addition of thousands of additional primary physicians, surgeons and specialists necessary to treat the new patients, the government predicts a mass exodus of physicians over the next 15 years.

Also, rationing will happen for Medicare and Medicaid. It will happen because it must - Medicare and Medicaid are hemorrhaging cash, cost over 1,500 percent more than projected and any language by the President or lawmakers dispelling the necessity of cut are lies. In addition, it is what the President is planning on anyway. The Obama's stimulus package, authored by the Apollo Alliance, shoveled over $1.1 billion into "medical comparative effectiveness research."

This is creates a system to justify rationing. After "best practices" for procedures and testing are delineated, definitions of what costs government deems valid for elderly care, pre-birth fetal care, diabetic care, cancer treatments, and thousands of other designations of people and classifications of procedures. The only logical reason for such spending is to gather and assess information and define acceptable acquisition costs for treatment - to be utilized by the unfinished health care reform architecture being developed today. So we are right now, establishing justification to pay health care costs for some people, and deny it to others and health care reform hasn't even passed yet.

Continued obfuscation, incongruent and unrealistic cost projections, secret backroom deals, accusations of racism and simple misrepresentation of facts have galvanized distrust in the minds of the American people - beginning at the beginning.

The administration's first publicly expressed reason for health care reform, based firmly upon a Public Option, was that the current financial crisis was due to trichotomous collapses in energy, education and health care sectors. This attempt was viewed as incoherent and worse as an apparent application of Emmanuel's law . The next basis for Public Option dependent health care espoused by the Whitehouse was that the deficit could be cured through health care reform surrounding a robust Public Option. When this idea was rebuked by the democratically led CBO as adding billions and potentially trillions to the deficit, the President needed to shift tactics again and now offers the same plan, but PR-wise has repositioned it as deficit neutral, insurance reform.

Government has exampled continued fiscal irresponsibility and arguably no administration's in US history deserve the title of overspending and waste more than the Obama and G. W. Bush administrations.

But all administrations have, without exception, shown that lawmakers cannot effectively design or efficiently run entitlement programs or GSEs [Government Sponsored Enterprises]; ranging from Social Security to Fannie Mae, to Medicare to the Post Office. No GSE or entitlement ever created by government has at any point in their existence been a self sufficient or sustainable entity. Medicare is a prime example of this, as government either cannot or will not eliminate Medicare fraud; they haven't even attempted to - Medicare fraud this year to date is over $43 billion.

Along with elimination of fraud, if there is enough savings in Medicare and Medicaid that might be captured and used to pay for a large percentage of health care reform [the Whitehouse claims half a trillion dollars], why would any sane person wait for health care reform?

The President repeatedly inveighs that Medicare overspending is breaking the budget, why then, don't we start there; test the governments' pledge. Let them eliminate the "waste, fraud and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid and if that works on to Social Security and if they can handle that... who knows?