There goes the health care industry

A couple intereting developments in socialized medicine in the USA.

Last week or so, that Sibelius person who runs things in DC announced that the long-term health care provision in the socialized medicine act is more or less defunct. "Long-term health care" refers to an extended stay in someplace like a rehab center or nursing home, for instance, after a stroke or a serious car accident.

Under socialized medicine, the plan was to get a whole bunch of people to sign up (and we'd all just flock to it), and pay into the system for about 10 years before we were eligible for any benefits. Meanwhile, the money paid in would go toward funding socialized medicine in general. A Ponzi scheme that appears to use Social Security as a financial prototype.

Anyway, the only people who signed up for long-term care under socialized medicine apparently are people who NEED long-term right now. In other words, the system isn't financially sound (or actuarially sound, to use the insurance word). Not enough healthy people signing up. Not enough money collected to fund long-term care nor to help fund socialized medicine generally.

So Sibelius said something like the program was going to be canceled. Only the Comrade doesn't want that.

Well, then he can pay for it. How's that? Crack open your wallet, fat cat. Get your unions to buy into it. That might work. Oh, but the unions are exempt from socialized medicine. Sorry, I forgot.

In another area -- and this will surely go a long way toward killing off seniors -- health care providers' pay under Medicare is going to be reduced.

The so-called "Doc Fix" was not included in the socialized medicine bill. The Doc Fix was legislation that adjusts the amount that doctors and others are paid for the services they provide for seniors with Medicare. In the past, these payment amounts were reviewed every year or so and were adjusted for inflation or whatever. However, no Doc Fix has been passed since the socialized medicine bill went through. Most pundits believed this was because if doctors had to be paid, it would show that socialized medicine was financially unsustainable. So congress just ignored it.

The American Medical Assn., which really doesn't represent the majority of doctors in the US, wanted congress et. al., to scrap this system of annual reviews all together and replace it with something more stable. Well, careful what you wish for, dudes.

A group of bureaucrats known collectively as MedPac are now running the socialized medicine system in America. MedPac has decided to, yes, do away with the annual reviews for doctor pay and replace it -- with a 10-year program that will steadily but surely reduce Medican payments to doctors by about 30%.

General practitioners will get a 1% raise, but then their pay rate will be frozen for the next 10 years. Specialists are hardest hit. They get a 5.9% reduction in their pay each year for the next three years, then the rate is frozen for the next seven years.

The object is to get doctor pay aligned with pay for, like, hospital orderlies and the cleaning crew. You know, SEIU members.

You know what the impact of this is going to be. Right now, many doctors refuse to see Medicare patients because Medicare pays only about half of what doctors charge. Like $300.00 to do hip replacement surgery. Doctors -- and hospitals, by the way -- make up these losses by charging twice as much to insured patients. It's called "cost shifting," and it's the main reason why health insurance costs so much and why insurance premiums are skyrocketing.

This isn't going to get any better. And it strikes hardest at seniors on Medicare.

Doctors who work with Medicare patients will not be able to keep their offices open, hire staff, pay their own bills. Specialists won't be allowed to charge any more than GPs, even though many of them see far fewer patients.

The inevitable result will be rationing. Dr. Deathwish/Berwick and Sibelius are, I suppose, in the throes of orgasm right now. "We did it!" they shriek, jumping up and down and throwing confetti. "We've destroyed the health care industry in America!"

So, if you can't get the seniors in line behind your policies -- and a whole bunch of seniors actually voted for these policies, in hopes of increasing their freebies (see AARP) -- the simplest thing is to just kill them off. It's called attrition. Or maybe serves-you-right.

Nice, huh?

Save the Republic.