Why Government Can’t Run Health Care
Nov 20, 2009 Political
The government is working on passing a health care takeover package that will cost upwards of $2.5 trillion over the actual first ten years of its life. They claim it will cost less than a trillion over ten years but they do that by counting ten from the passage and taxing people from the passage but only providing care four or five years after passage. They will get a four or five year head start on the money in order to pay for it. You cannot sustain a program where you have to tax for ten years to provide for five. The first ten years where actual health care is provided will cost at least 2.5 trillion dollars. They are using budget voodoo to fool the public.
The government claims it will save money by eliminating fraud in Medicare. If they could eliminate the fraud why have they not done it up to this point? How about they take a few years and eliminate the fraud and let us see the results before they try to get us on board with their health plan? The government has 98 billion dollars of fraud this year (and it is not over) with most of it being in Medicare.
Shouldn’t we expect them to have concern for this and to be addressing it with or without the reform they want?
Regardless of the costs, government cannot run the health care program because it will be a disaster. We already know that they cannot run Medicare and that it is rife with fraud. They have admitted that the fraud is there but they have done nothing to end it in the entire time it has existed. This is because government is wasteful and is not very good at oversight.
Case in point, Recovery.gov, the website that was designed solely to track the stimulus. It was supposed to be a transparent way for Americans to see how the money was being spent and how many jobs are being created. I know they claim to report jobs saved but that is a nonsensical item that cannot be tracked or quantified. There is no way to determine a “saved” job. I discount any saved job as a lie.
The government website is full of inaccuracies and probably lies. I say lies because all of the errors that have been caught were errors of over reporting. If there were mistakes one would expect that some of them would be under reporting. After the initial issues with the site the government spent 18 million dollars to revamp it. For 18 million dollars they should be able to buy a server farm with enough bandwidth to stream a concert to 1000 people and still have money left over to pay someone who knows how to be accurate when reporting. That seems like an awful lot of money for a website. Do they have the entire graduating class of MIT working on it?
The government could not get the website to work (which might mean they could not hide the lies well enough) so they spent 18 million to make it better. It still is not working because they are reporting jobs created in districts that do not exist. The reports of jobs created are being shot down time and again by the likes of ABC news and the entire project has done nothing to instill confidence in the government’s ability. One would think that with the kind of money they spent and the talent they can hire they would get it right.
But they did not. So they did what government always does when a plan fails. They threw more money at it and it still failed.
If the government is unable to spend 787 billion dollars on a stimulus and track that money as well as the jobs created then how are they going to run health care? The stimulus program has fraud that has been reported, fraud they acknowledge is inherent in a program of this size. The size pales in comparison to the health care takeover so how much ineptitude and fraud will that have? I know that Obama and his party claim they will end the fraud but they have failed to do so thus far with Medicare and they could not stop it in the stimulus. I have read they are considering another stimulus. Like with the website, they will throw more money at a failed program.
Imagine the amount of fraud that will accompany their health care reform. The reform will be much larger than Medicare and it has billions in fraud. The reform is much larger than the stimulus and it has billions in fraud. How many billions of dollars in fraud will result from their health care takeover plan?
Government is not able to run a simple website that it spent a whopping $18 million on and it is unable to stop the fraud in Medicare. It is also unable to track recovery money accurately or to prevent fraud in that program.
What moron believes that government will do better with health care?
Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.
Those three words more accurately describe nearly all government programs. Why would any sane person put one sixth of our economy in their hands?
I encourage you to visit Recovery.Gov. You paid over 18 million for it, you own it, so you might as well use it.
But don’t believe anything you read there.
**I incorrectly stated that the website cost 18 Billion dollars when it was Million. Each occurrence was changed. Thanks to commenter Mike for pointing out the mistake.
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Tags: abuse, fraud, health care takeover, jobs, lies, Obama, recovery.gov, waste