Without Daschle to rapidly move universal healthcare through Congress, a legislative tool called "fast tracking" was just approved by the House last week, so that there will be only 20 hours of debate allotted to socialized medicine before it can be voted upon by the Democrat majority. In addition, a supplemental tactic of incrementalization is being used by Democrat politicians to advance their agenda. As an example, the SCHIP program - which pays for the healthcare of children who do not meet Medicaid criteria - has been broadened to cover 11-million lives.
In the "Stimulus Bill", legislation was inserted to begin forming government mechanisms to make decisions regarding healthcare rationing. The language is vague enough to allow Congress to make broad changes in the way that healthcare will ultimately be rationed under government programs. Under any nationalized healthcare system, such as the Canadian and English systems, there must be someone appointed to ration expensive drugs, procedures and "unnecessary prolongations of life." As our national debt reaches incomprehensible levels, the available money for a national healthcare program will shrink. Everyone cannot be allowed to have the most expensive cancer drugs, heart transplants, bone marrow transplants or dialysis. Just like in an HMO, care will have to be rationed by some ultimate authority. In a nationalized system, rationing will be done by those who brought you the U.S. Postal Service and the D.M.V. as opposed to the henchman of an HMO. This is not a political swipe. It is a statement of fact.
As I mentioned in my first healthcare letter, we do not have the money to pay for our current nationalized healthcare experiments, which we call Medicare and Medicaid. To open yet another financial wound, we do not have the money to fund Social Security over the next 30 years. So before you buy something expensive, it would seem wise to ask if you can afford to maintain it. The unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Medicaid alone have been estimated at $47-trillion dollars. This is the cost of insuring 30-million Americans. We do not have enough money for these existing programs, much less to expand these services to cover the lives of 304 million Americans.
What I am telling you is that Medicare and Medicaid will run out of money. The system will go bankrupt. It will be like AIG, which was "too big to fail", but which has failed despite pouring billions into it. People in my generation, and those younger, are "investing" in a Medicare system which promises to pay big dividends in healthcare dollars during our retirement. However, the politicians running the plan understand that this is a fiscal impossibility. It is dishonest. That money will not be there for us. It will be all used up by the time we reach age 65. The reason is that there will not be enough young workers to fund the Medicare system and keep it going for the aging baby boomers. Does this scenario sound familiar to you? Have you recently read about other people who have set up scams like this? You guessed it. Medicare is a Ponzi scheme.
Definition: A Ponzi scheme is a scam in which a gullible public is enticed with the promise of very high returns, which is based upon paying off early "investors" from the cash from (hopefully ever increasing numbers) of new "investors." The whole structure collapses when the cash outflow exceeds cash inflow. The key in running a successful Ponzi scheme is to keep it going as long as you possibly can. For this reason, I suggest that President Obama nominate Bernie Madoff for the new White House Health Czar. Though Madoff broke the law, so did Timothy Geithner, who now runs the Treasury Department. Using the same logic that "Geithner was the only man smart enough to run the Treasury" (and therefore we needed to overlook his white collar crime of tax fraud), the same argument should be made for Madoff. Only Madoff has the experience and expertise in complicated Ponzi schemes to convince Americans to ignore the pending bankruptcy of Medicare as we embark on a nationalized healthcare program, which would be 10-times larger than Medicare.
Let's keep things in perspective: Madoff absconded with only $50 billion dollars. This is chump change compared to the unfunded Ponzi scheme of Medicare, which has an unfunded debt of almost $50 trillion. $50 billion is insignificant when compared to Mr. Obama's plans to "reserve over $700 billion dollars as a down payment for nationalized healthcare" in this country. The unique skills of Madoff will be needed to convince Americans that this nationalized system will provide the needed care for all Americans. Understand that I am not being partisan here. I am skeptical of all politicians. President Bush started this irrational ball rolling by funding the Medicare drug program under the guise of "compassionate conservatism." There was no money for this drug program, just as there will be no money for Obama's nationalized healthcare program. The numbers don't lie; politicians lie - no matter what side of the isle they hail from.
So why is a doctor like me engaging in "politics" or going on a rant about the healthcare dollar? Because money is a necessary part of the discussion! When you try to buy something on a credit plan that you can't afford, it is only a matter of time before that something is repossessed. Before we scrap private healthcare and open another credit card for nationalized healthcare, we should think about what we will do when we can't afford the payments. The answer is that people won't get the medical care they need, which is what happens in Canada. In all seriousness, I'd start putting away some extra cash in the bank for the day when Bernie Madoff or his sons reject your request for an MRI of the brain. You'll need that extra money to travel to Dubai for your MRI or your knee replacement - to purchase quality healthcare in a free-market system that is not dominated by a government rationing panel.

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