Patriotranter's Weblog

This is a continuation of my previous post Health Care Reform Part 1. In this post I will discuss some of the absurdities of the current health care system and possible solutions to improve the program.

Okay, in Part 1 we have agreed there is a problem with health care and we have demonstrated that the Obama plan will be a very costly failure, so let’s talk of a genuine solution.

Here it is !

Are you ready for it ?

I bet not !

100% Socialized Health Care

Yep, you read it right. All health care costs must be paid for via the government by taxes applied to the populace. But before you flame me, back away from the keyboard and read why this doesn’t have to be executed as badly or as costly as so many people are afraid it might.

The current process goes something like this:

Scenario 1

You become sick, you weigh the probability of what illness you have being covered by your insurance policy, you decide that you are too sick to ignore the problem and try to make an appointment with your doctor, they can’t fit you in right away so you have to wait another day or two before an appointment can be made. You show up at the doctors office twenty minutes before your scheduled appointment in dire hope that there has been a cancellation, but there have been no cancellations, instead there have been several walk-ins so the doctor is running an hour late. If you cancel now you will be billed a cancellation fee so you decide to stay. Even though you have insurance you still have to give them money to cover your co-pay (who knows what the logic behind this is but someone somewhere has gotten rich off it) you then wait for two hours as the original one hour behind schedule was really a pipe dream all the while being infected with whatever everyone else in the waiting room is hacking up.  You finally get in to see the doctor who spends five minutes in consult writes a prescription for the drug that he gets the best commission from the drug company to sell and sends you on your way. If you are lucky you have a prescription drug card that covers 100% of the costs of your prescription drugs, but you are a hard working, law abiding US citizen which means you are not lucky and the particular drug your doctor wrote the ‘script for is not available in a generic form manufactured in Asia, it is only available in the genuine copy write formula so you have to pay 50% of the very high cost. It is expensive because the manufacturer has to make as much money as possible before their patent runs out and generic varieties produced overseas start being shipped in by the megaton undercutting their production and development costs.

Some may think I’m joking but anyone familiar with health care knows that the sad sorry above is all too common of an occurrence.

Now let’s examine the process in a properly run socialized system. You are sick, you go to the doctors, you wait (Yes, the waiting will still be there until massive numbers of new medical professionals are educated and inserted into the system, this will take YEARS so get used to the wait.) You see the doctor, you are handed the necessary prescription, you go home. No money changes hands, no forms to fill out, no claims to make. No being hassled by the insurance company that they are refusing your coverage, no being hassled by the doctors office that you are responsible for the costs as the insurance company is refusing to cover you. Most importantly no getting turned away at the doctors office because they no longer accept your particular insurance due to repeated non payment.

“How can this happen?” you ask. By taxes. Everyone who lives in a particular county will pay a percentage of the total cost of health care administered in said county.  I encourage it to be done on a county by county basis as the average county already has the necessary medical infrastructure in place and compiling a budget for all the various health care providers should not be too difficult. You then simply divide that sum by the number of people residing in the county and you have the base amount that needs to be charged to each individual.

First let us discuss actual operating costs vs. the cost of insurance premiums. If you don’t have health insurance and you go to the hospital you can figure that a visit with any type of surgery as well as diagnostic procedures are going to cost you about $150,000.00 assuming you are only in the hospital for a week or two. If you do have insurance the company will typically negotiate the cost down to less than $100,000.00. Still very expensive but it does reveal the true cost of medical care compared to what the medical profession would like to charge. There is a distinct lack of ethics on both sides of the business. So now that we now the actual operating costs of the health care industry are far below what their billing practices would have us believe. We also know that a significant portion of our insurance premiums go towards fuelling the operational costs and towards profit margins to boost stock prices of the insurance companies. We can now get an honest quote from the health care industry for total operational maintenance and eliminate the middle man bureaucracy of insurance companies.

So for the sake of argument let’s assume that the cost for operating every hospital, doctors office, clinic, and medical practitioner in our fictitious county is $1 Billion dollars (yes this is a seriously inflated figure but whatever the TRUE cost of operations is you can pretty much be sure that it is more than 30% less than what insurance companies are bringing in now, as they have to cover their exorbitantly paid chief executives as well as an entire staff of tens of thousands of claims processors)  . Now let us consider that the population of the county is 500,000 people. We divide the billion dollar costs by the total population and we get $2,000.00 per year per person. If we eliminate the insurance company profit from this figure it falls to $1400.00 per person. Still a very large amount of money, but remember the basis is $1 billion it is very likely that number is extremely high and the final cost may be as little as $200 million which would further reduce that per person cost to $400.00 per person.

What I am basically trying to say is that no one currently has any idea what the true cost of health care is, they just know the current system is very expensive and poorly managed.

The goals are now to discern the bottom line cost of health care. To find ways to reduce that amount even further. To increase the quality of the care you receive.  To make sure no one is getting a free ride from honest tax paying citizens.

Many of you are concerned that once government inserts itself into the health care industry quality will plummet. Normally I would say you are correct that is why my plan prohibits government from being involved with the decision making process. You pay your taxes. You get health care. All decisions on your care will fall onto the shoulders of you and your doctors regardless of the costs involved. Also anyone who receives medical care will be required to fill out feedback on their caregivers. This feedback will be used to assess wage evaluations and future budget predictions for the particular facility from which you received care. This would be handled by an independent association of unpaid citizens.  

How can we reduce the cost of health care ?

Scholarship programs ! Any prospective student interested in a career in the health care industry should be given 100% free college tuition. Caveats that apply would be the requirement to being a US born citizen. No foreign students would be allowed to participate in the program. There would have to be a certain level of ethical behavior by the student. No arrests. No controversial activities. Obviously a minimum level of grades would have to be maintained. Finally they would have to commit to 15 years of service at wages defined by the local standard of living, no more exorbitant salaries, but yes they would be compensated very well indeed.

By reducing the salaries of medical practitioners you will rapidly drive down the costs of healthcare and as such be able to hire far more doctors, nurses, physician aides and what not. This will rapidly increase the quality of care whilst not inflating the cost of said care.

Further driving down the cost of healthcare will be how illegal aliens treatment is handled. Currently they are treated, at the cost of the taxpayers due to chronic lack of insurance amongst this demographic, they are then allowed to return to society. From now on when an illegal enters a hospital for care they will be given the most basic care to sustain life and then turned over to the INS for immediate deportation. It is assumed that illegal immigrants cost honest citizens more than  $250 BILLION in health care costs although this number is questionable due to the fact no one is entirely sure how many illegal aliens are in the country.

There are dozens of other things the country can do to revitalize the health care industry. One thing for certain is that sweeping change is a necessity and that.

There are also hundreds of potential questions I left unanswered for the sake of brevity (too late I know!) an example of which is regarding care whilst travelling on vacation or for business and they are easy enough questions to answer. Hopefully I will receive some excellent feedback on this concept and if so will launch a Part 3 that will handle any questions posed. Thank you for your time

patriotranter 

I apologize in advance to my readers. This is going to be a long post. It will easily exceed 2000 words so I will try to break it into separate parts to make it more digestible. I’ll try to keep each part organized and relevant although there is a lot of ground to be covered and I do enjoy a good ramble.

Wednesday June 24th, 2009 Barack Obama hosted ABC and a group of health care professionals at the White House. When the meeting was first announced many professional journalists cried foul. Claiming that ABC had become the puppet of the administration and was now taking the same position that Fox News allegedly held for President Bush. Essentially being nothing more than a tool to disseminate the propaganda spewing out of the Obamachine.

I will not rehash the entire conference but I will focus on a few key weak points and also offer arguments, explanations, and a solution of my own. If you did not see the broadcast I suggest you do so, the entire conference can be viewed HERE.

The main focus of the conference is to address the 46 million US citizens who have no health care coverage either due to inability to afford it or due to being denied health coverage as a result of preexisting conditions.

I’ll not argue with Obama on this one, as a US citizen with no health care coverage I absolutely agree something must be done and it is going to take government involvement to get it done. There is absolutely no incentive for insurance companies to improve the health care industry as long as they are making a profit. With the current system being run by private health care insurance companies that are traded publicly on the stock market ensures only that their number one concern is profit. The only way for them to make a profit is by raking in billions of dollars from premiums paid on policies they hold and then not paying out if and when a claim is made. Any time an insurance company pays out on a claim it reduces their profit margin and cuts into shareholder value. Not a good thing for any business.

So the first item on the agenda is to remove insurance companies from the stock market. Yes the stock was originally issued to raise capital and expand their market share but based on the gross wages paid to insurance company executives operating capital is no longer an issue. Now that we have removed these companies from being publicly traded the only profits needed are those to cover salaries. Is this an absolute solution that will reduce the cost of health care ? Absolutely NOT ! All it will do is make it more probably that any medical procedure you require will be covered by your insurer rather than being negotiated endlessly whilst you slowly die only to have the final solution being you are sent to a foreign country for a lower cost of treatment. Perform a search for health care outsourcing and you will see this is already being done to further lower the costs of insurers all the while increasing the ever important bottom line.

Now to discuss some points Obama made and then poke holes in them. DISCLAIMER: Before you get your panties in a bunch these are not exact quotes of what Obama said. I am merely paraphrasing to include specifics that he neglected to mention and to maintain the context of which he spoke. As I stated earlier I agree something must be done and it will take the government to do it.

Obama said: Now some of those 46 million Americans will not be able to afford the policy even at the rates the government would charge and these policies would have to be subsidized

The Hole: Our questions is how many of these 46 million wouldn’t be able to afford it ? Our guess is approximately 45,998,956 can not afford insurance at any price. So your tax burden will rise to compensate for those who can not afford the program. Oh yes, one other detail that was revealed. These 46 million uninsured currently consume 33% of hospital visits.

Obama said: With government involvement we can work with health care professional to improve efficiencies and lower the cost of providing health care. This will also benefit private insurers as their costs will be brought down as well.

The Hole: This is a big one. Obama is obviously viewing things through beautifully rose colored spectacles. Since when has the government EVER done ANYTHING efficiently. Also, the health care industry can just as easily refuse to accept or treat anyone carrying the government insurance card. They can simply refuse to acknowledge the whole program and continue operating as is. The end result is that costs will rise because insurance companies knowing that the government program will not be accepted will realize they truly do have a stranglehold on the industry and will be more likely to raise premiums. Meanwhile it will be tax dollars being used to cover all the uninsured in the way of federal grant money for hospitals who treat uninsured individuals.

Obama said: Any company that does not currently provide insurance to it’s employees would be charged a certain amount to compensate for their not doing so and the employees would be then eligible to enroll in the government health insurance program.

The Hole: If the program truly is cheaper as Obama claims it will be, then what company in their right mind would not go this route, eliminate their current policies and pay a token fee to the government and let employees find their own way through the “governsurance” program ? If it costs less, that increases profitability and improves the bottom line it’s a win-win for any company NOT in the insurance industry. CEO’s just may be able to add a few more million onto their salary packages.

Obama said: Any American who wishes to remain with their current insurance provider is free to do so.

The Hole: See above, if your company chooses to end its contracts with your current provider do you think anyone as an individual could afford the new premiums they would be required to pay ? Simple answer. NO ! You know this to be true if you ever had the pleasure of paying COBRA premiums. No insurance company has ever been more appropriately named. Venomous to say the very least.

Obama said: That the whole cost of the program would be absorbed by taxes only on those earning more than $250,000.00 per year

The Hole: Sunday June 28th it was revealed that Obama is “open” to taxing some employee benefits of those earning less than $250,000.00. Based on the fountain of lies spewing form the Obamachine you can pretty much expect that this will mean the bulk of the cost will be absorbed by people earning between $20,000.00 and $30,000.00. This will guarantee that those tax payers will not be able to afford the independent/corporate insurance plans and will be forced to use the government policies. Imagine that ! Democrats trying to control the health care of independent US citizens. Democrats do not like independent free thinking intellectual individuals.

One of the key hurdles to the program will be establishing the entire infrastructure of a company to handle the newly created policies. It normally takes many years for any insurer to be in a position to handle the traffic of 45-50 million customers let alone to create an entity that could handle that much business on opening day. Interestingly enough, it was reported HERE that AIG (unquestionably one of the worst scofflaws that benefited from government bailouts) announced just 12 hours after the Obama health care summit that they would “spin off”  their profitable insurance subsidiaries into Special Purpose Vehicles by turning controlling interest over to the Federal Reserve whilst reducing their debt to the government (ie- the taxpayers, ie YOU) by $25 Billion dollars. This conveniently puts the necessary infrastructure into the hands of the Obama administration while conveniently saving said administration from having to raise capital (read – taxes) to do so because taxes have already gone up to compensate for the original bailout. In an nutshell honest hardworking taxpaying US citizens are already being screwed by the Obamachine Free Healthcare program to the tune of $25 Billion and it hasn’t even been approved yet. But you can bet that if it goes forward in the manner Obama intends things will only get worse and much more expensive. Don’t believe me ? Just check out the VA health system and you will quickly see that government administered health care is not a good thing. But you know what ? It could be. Read how in Part 2.

One of the current Hot Topics is how Barack Obama wants to regulate executive pay at private companies as stated here in the Chicago Tribune.

The whole concept has capitalists up in arms. Now the Obama administration claims it is only for companies that take federal bailout money during hard times we have to ask ourselves this. Once the government claims a toe hold on some aspect of public life do they ever let it go or do they try to take more ? Democrats for sure are the worst culprits in this type of a scenario, they would love to have every one in the U.S. sucking off the government teat so they can control us as the sheep they believe us to be.

I almost want to agree with the Obama regency that this would be a good policy but you have to wonder just how far could the government push the law. Here’s a fallacious and intentionally hyperbolic possibility. A professional sports team wants to locate in your area, they will not do this unless they get tax incentives and financial assistance to build a new billion dollar stadium. So the government issues a bond and maybe tacks on a half percent to the local sales tax to raise the money. Now officially the sports team has accepted government money so does that mean the government can set all the salaries for the highest paid team associates ? I believe the law would say YES !

Do a quick internet search under Obama Limits Executive Pay and you will get a few hundred thousand hits. Unfortunately many are only discussing the issue and protesting the audacity of Obama to even consider this a viable solution. Although I don’t read anywhere of anyone offering any kind of actual solution. So me being me, here is my solution to the executive pay conundrum.

CEO compensation packages are disgusting, not in the amount of pay but based on pay for performance. Being paid a few hundred million over the course of two or three months whilst driving a companies stock into the toilet is unacceptable.

First of all CEOs and all corporate executives should be prohibited from owning or trading the company stock in any way. I know the concept behind this is that the CEO will perform well increasing stock value and reaping a reward for their actions and in an ethical world this would work. The reality is that execs manipulate the financial reports artificially elevate stock prices and cash in on a bogus wind fall. So the solution is to bar them from being shareholders, they now have no incentive for creative financing.

Next give them a base pay just like any other salaried worker. Say $20,000.00 to $40,000.00 per month. This is something they will earn no matter what and if they turn out to be idiots and can’t perform there is no big payout when they get canned.

Finally, they get the end of the year bonus based on a percentage of taxes paid on claimed profits. This could be any amount theoretically and even vary from 1% to 100%. Example: A company claims $1 Billion in profits of which they pay $300 Million in taxes (combined state and federal) the CEO is then eligible for a bonus equal to a percent of that $300 Million be it the 1% $3 million or the 100% $300 Million.

With this scenario the CEO gets a tidy sum, the shareholders realize growth and the government gets a nice chunk of change as well. Another benefit is that creative accounting practices, devised to claim losses instead of profits to avoid taxes, will go away as the execs will want to pay the highest amount of taxes they can so their own pay packages improve.

This is a very simple solution to a very complex problem and although my figures are purely theoretical, they would work.

thanks for reading and please leave a comment

patriotranter

In the United States property taxes are currently calculated based on how much a home is worth. This is probably the most asinine system that could ever have been put together.

Assessed value of a home is based on an arbitrary number derived from calculations on the size of the home, the size of the lot, upgrades made to the home and lastly how much the home was purchased for. The key problem with this is that just because someone is willing to pay a certain amount for the home does not mean the home is worth anywhere near that amount of money. People willing to pay way more than a home is worth is one of the key reasons the real estate market imploded. Second only to avaricious unethical lending institutions.

If you pay any attention to the news, or if you are a homeowner, something that will crop up fairly often is people suing for unfairly assessed property. Rightly so too because technically property only has value to the people who live on it and those who wish to buy it. But if the government deems that your property would serve the greater good being used in a manner different than which you use it. They (the government) can come in and take your property from you by using the so called eminent domain clause. Now under this clause the government is supposed to buy your home from you at a fair market value, although it must purely be coincidence that what the government decides is fair value when trying to buy your house in no way matches what they decide is fair value when assessing the taxes on your property.

The only fair way for government to collect property taxes should be based on

• The square footage of the lot
• The square footage of structures used for actual residence
• The square footage of structures used for storage

Each of these criteria would be calculated at a different rate. For example you may be charged $.10 for each square foot the lot requires, $1.00 for each square foot of residential structures and another $.50 for each square foot of storage structure (ie. barns, sheds, carports, unfinished garages or basements and such)

Obviously the actual rate schedule would vary per geographical region and actual usage of the property. Although the taxing agency should be responsible for including an itemized report on how your tax dollars were being spent. Including all the necessary municipal functions, Police, Fire, Road Maintenance, etc. Any time the particular government wanted to increase budgets for these agencies they should be required to enclose a prospectus explaining how it would benefit the tax payer, how much it would raise the particular taxes for them and a ballot so the tax payer could vote directly on whether they approved of the new budget or not.

School taxes would be calculated in the same manner but be collected separately for the purpose of a more accurate budget and the ability to keep a more focused eye on how the school district was performing financially and academically.

With a socialized health program the hospital and medical maintenance costs could also be absorbed this way thus freeing the average family of the hardship of dealing with insurance companies and the bureaucrat filth that work with them. I discuss Socialized Medicine elsewhere in this blog

Now if you think that this program is allowing renters to evade taxes you are wrong. Rented properties would be taxed at a higher rate than regular owned properties to compensate for excessive enforcement required at these properties. Every home must meet certain building and livability codes and rented properties are more likely to violate these codes than properties lived in by the home owner. These code violations require more housing inspectors and police and fire enforcement to handle and as such they would be billed appropriately. Higher taxes on rented properties would make it possible to inspect these properties on a yearly basis to ensure they meet codes for health and safety.

Now I know this mini-festo does not cover all aspects of the property tax problem, it is just a simple guideline pointing out that things could be done better than they are now.

If you agree with the idea stated here there is no need to contact me – Contact your local politicians instead and tell them to do something right for a change.

Thank you for your time

PatriotRanter