A Pyrrhic Political Victory

THE CENTURION CHRONICLE
Special Issue – Mar 2010

A PYRRHIC POLITICAL VICTORY
(with unknown negative consequences)

After a year of effort President Obama has scored a political victory by steamrolling his health care reform plans through Congress. Legislation that he and his cohorts in Congress barely managed to squeak through the process.

He now has bragging rights for being the only president in modern history to have managed to do that. Nevertheless, it may turn out to be a Pyrrhic political victory, whose unknown negative consequences may yet come back to bite him and all his party cohorts in their collective asses. We’ll just have to wait and see if that’s how it will actually play out next November.

The real question, however, is this: Is there any evidence in any of those 2700 pages of legislation indicating a serious effort to create a system that will control costs for the millions of American either with or without insurance? Not that we can find at this moment. If that is true, then this so-called historic legislation is anything but that, and, hasn’t really “changed” anything from what we have now.

From what can be gleaned from all that 2700 page verbiage is a few nominal beneficial tweaks to the existing system. The kind that makes for great political campaign sound bites, and keeps the electorate focused on the wrong end of the stick. That is:

a)It prevents insurers from arbitrarily cutting health coverage for anyone.
b) It prevents insurers from denying anyone coverage because of previous existing conditions.
c) It prevents insurers from applying dollar cap limits on hospitalization costs, either for catastrophic or other serious illnesses.

While these provisions were initially strongly opposed by the health care industry cartel, that controls anything to do with health care in this country, that opposition soon evaporated, and quietly dropped. Mainly because of an apparent “deal” made through its lobbyists to offset those provisions by mandating that everyone have health insurance by 2014….or face fines, and possible jail time besides. And, voila, the health care industry gained 32 million new customers, along with a whole slew of large and small businesses besides, creating for it a captive market guaranteed by government subsidies and tax credits, to make their bottom lines even porkier than ever before.

Simply put, that “deal” transfers the costs of creating that increased market from the government directly to the taxpayers, by a combination of increased taxes and reduced benefits (the so-called savings in the plan). All of it neatly camouflaged as a –deficit reduction – effort.

Well, as we may recall, at the start of this exercise the President proclaimed that his reform plan would, quote: “….not cost the taxpayers one thin dime…” unquote. Presumably what he meant by that was that the $940 billion bill for it would be paid for with fully depreciated, discounted, dollars barely worth….one thin dime!

Meanwhile, let’s shift our view about it for a moment, and take a look at the probable unknown negative consequences of this legislation. First, if Medicare will be reducing what it covers as benefits, and raising both the rate at which it taxes workers, and deducts from retirees’ Social Security, that will impact on all current members of any HMO or similar medical insurance plan, especially for retirees. Second, since most retiree members use Medicare to offset the cost of their HMO plans, these will undoubtedly compensate for that by raising their premium and co-pay costs.

Thus, instead of creating a mechanism for controlling costs by the users of health insurance, it appears this legislation will increase those costs instead. And so will it do for many businesses, both great and small. Their premiums will also jump up as well. All of which creating a negative environment for overall economic activity. Even with so-called tax-credits, businesses, especially small businesses, will be reluctant to expand employment or otherwise. Combined with the current credit squeeze with banks, any outlook for any kind of a strong economic resurgence will be delayed, perhaps for a decade or more.

These are but a few of the unknown negative consequences of this “historic” legislation. Which leads us to only one conclusion. What we have here, folks, is just one more example of a typical three-card-Monte-fast- shuffle deal from Congress. But, hey, all of that is going to reduce our deficits, see, so let’s just suck it up for now….and cry in our beers later. After all, didn’t we vote for “change”?

Like the saying goes….be careful what you wish for….you may just get it!

CENTURION