The majority of the initiatives that would pay for reform will come from cutting waste, fraud, and abuse within existing government health programs; ending big subsidies to insurance companies; and increasing efficiency with such steps as coordinating care and streamlining paperwork. We want to take money that is already being spent on health care and re-allocate it toward reforms that lower costs and assure quality affordable health care for all Americans.

Ending big subsidies to insurance companies?  Is that a code word for profits?  They tell the truth when they say “We want to re-allocate.’  The problem we have is they then want to control what the money is spent on and ration your access to care as I reported two weeks ago in The Health Care Chart that Will Scare YOU to DEATH.

The cuts we are talking about involve spending that currently does not improve care for Americans. For example, we would save $177 billion in unwarranted subsidies to the insurance industry in the next ten years and put that money into actual care for people. These and other reforms will strengthen and stabilize Medicare.

Again with the “subsidies to insurance companies” - they must have poll tested people and learned that no one likes their insurance company. so they’re sticking it to them.  Even though the insurance lobby has publicly been on board with health reform for months!  They need to let the market work and the excess profits will be wrung out of the system!  The manage to avoid making mention of Medicare cuts to doctors, which intuitively will lead to reduced care for patients by docs who are less motivated to care for Medicare patients. 

But it’s not enough to stop there. Health insurance reform must also encourage the kinds of reforms we know will save money in the long run: preventive care; computerized record-keeping; and comparative effectiveness studies to expose wasteful procedures and hospitalizations and give doctors the tools to make the right treatments for you.

Again with the code words “Wasteful Procedures” = Rationing/Controlling Access to your health care.  Make no Mistake about it!

We currently spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care. Health insurance reform will make a short-term investment of roughly $100 billion a year to lower costs and relieve the crushing financial burden that is eating into family budgets, forcing families into bankruptcy, making it hard for businesses to expand and grow, and preventing the government from using your tax dollars to create jobs, improve education, rebuild our infrastructure. Health insurance reform would be fully paid for over 10 years, and it would not add one penny to the deficit.

how does a “short term investment” work when you are using it to pay for peoples insurance?  Sounds like a permanent , long term program to me!  Got to love how he manages to ties it back to creating jobs and educating the children……1

And the big lie….It will not add one penny to the deficit.   That because the government doesn’t bother counting penny costs anymore It will add over one trillion of dollars! (Congressional Budget Office)

Let’s also remember that we can’t afford not to reform health care. The cost of inaction is too high. Health care spending has grown in recent years three times faster than average wages. Premiums have doubled in this decade. Out of pocket costs for people with insurance have gone up by 32 percent. Businesses are buckling under health care costs. One out of every six dollars in this country is spent on health care. Soon it will be one in five. If we do nothing, in 30 years, one third of this country’s economic output will be tied up in the health care system. Health care is the fastest-growing item in the federal budget. It is absolutely unsustainable. These costs are crushing families and businesses, keeping wages flat, stunting our economic growth, strangling our government. We have to bring costs under control now.

I love how Obama counts on the fact that most Americans do not understand the power of compounding and the Rule of 72, and the fallacy of expecting current trends to continue in a straight line in perpetuity.  He does acknowledge a truth – that health care expenses are a Federal Budget problem.  Guess who controls that budget?   Congress.  So why do we all need to suffer because they can’t do their job in managing their program costs?  Furthermore, why on earth would we expect them to be better stewards of our health care expenses than ourselves?

Cassandra Effect