SHTF Plan – by Mac SlavoIt was just a couple of months ago that President Obama declared a victory in the battle for affordable health care.
“Many of the tall tales that have been told about this law have been debunked. There are still no death panels. (Laughter.) Armageddon has not arrived. Instead, this law is helping millions of Americans, and in the coming years it will help millions more.”
Perhaps Armageddon hasn’t arrived for those who have been allowed to keep their platinum health insurance because of exemptions granted by the administration. But for the rest of us, a Healthcare Armageddon is a foregone conclusion.
Economically and financially, the new law will bankrupt an already struggling middle class who has, in many cases, seen a four-fold increase in their monthly premiums. By all accounts, life for those people is going to change dramatically in coming years because as much as 15% of their income will now be taken from them by force in the form of what the U.S. Supreme Court has classified as a mandated tax.
For those with the ability to make those outrageous payments and deductibles each year, they have now entered a system run by the very same bureaucrats in charge of our country’s other government run health care programs.
To understand the future of socialized health care in America we need to look no further than the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
As noted in the transcript of Obama’s speech above, the audience laughed when the President mentioned the conspiracy theory surrounding death panels. While the law itself makes no mention of “death panels,” they certainly exist and this fact can’t just be “debunked” as the President would like us to believe.
You could ask the scores of Veterans who were pencil-pushed to the back of the line by the VA in Phoenix and Houston, except for the fact that they died while awaiting the medical assistance they were promised.
And while the deaths of these service members is tragic and almost unbelievable, it is just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of our veterans are shuffled around within the system, often times for budgetary reasons or because their physician is just is simply too apathetic to care. If you need real medical care, for example, which often starts with a diagnosis that may include testing like an X-ray or an MRI, it’s common for VA physicians to simply ignore the patient’s need and jump right into prescribing pain medication. There are countless stories like this, where patients literally waited years to receive a real diagnosis, only to see their condition worsen and become inoperable by the time testing was completed because it was ignored for so long.
That very system which has ignored those men and women who have put their lives on the line for this country and has promised to care for them is now the same system that’s in charge of medical care under the Patient Affordable Care Act. In fact, if recent history is any guide, the mandates under Obamacare are going to be much, much worse:
One conclusion we can draw is an old, familiar one: No matter what the issue or activity, bureaucracy’s first and strongest instinct is to protect itself in the face of a perceived threat.
Another conclusion is probably just dawning on those Americans with the wit to see it, because so very few of us have had a brush with a medical system of which government is the sole proprietor: Putting a government bureaucracy in charge of one’s health is a gamble likely to end badly.
And yet, if Obamacare stands, that is precisely the gamble each and every American eventually will take.
There is no better predictor of the course of a single-payer medical system in the United States than the VA system, because it is a single-payer system.
If an enrolled patient needs something done, he or she applies to the government-run system for approval; waits until the government-run system is ready to act; accepts the government-run system’s solution or, if dissatisfied, appeals to that same government-run system for relief. Because the bureaucracy pays the bill, the bureaucracy makes the decisions — when or if treatment will be given, and whether or not the patient has been well enough served.
In the VA system, it has recently come to light, scores of patients somehow got stuck on the second step of the bureaucratic flow chart: waiting. Their medical problems apparently were not deemed pressing enough to get them into a doctor’s examining room.
The death panels may not exist by name, but they most assuredly exist within the bureaucracy managed by the U.S. government.
We’re not making this up, it’s no conspiracy, and it cannot be debunked, as evidenced by the experiences of actual people currently enrolled in the Obamacare system:
Obamacare is denied at most cancer hospitals according to a recent Associated Press survey. Only four out of 19 of the nation’s best cancer hospitals who replied to the survey said they will accept patient’s insurance from all of the healthcare exchanges within their state, in effect excluding most people who are signing up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.
In simple terms: If you get cancer you will not get medical care.
This is, by every possible definition, nothing short of a death panel. With the Patient Affordable Care Act, we have no other choice but the health insurance prescribed by the government. And cancer treatment is not covered according to the hospitals that are supposed to provide it!
Just wait until you see what happens when these bureaucrats realize that the medical system is underfunded because healthy people, especially young adults, refuse to sign up. You see, Obamacare is, in essence, a Ponzi scheme that requires one group to continually provide funding in order to pay off the needs of another group.
Despite that claimed number of 7.1 million Americans having signed up since the program’s inception, a recent report indicates that as many as half of the enrolleesmissed their first insurance payment. One reason for this might be the exorbitant costs associated with the coverage (not counting the deductibles!).
As these liabilities begin to pile up and not enough people sign up to make up the difference, guess what happens.
Again, in simple terms, An Instantaneous Collapse of Obamacare Services:
First, if you’re “27″, the average premium is $266.20/month or $3,194.40 per year. How many 27 year olds have an extra $3,200 to spend on this? Remember, this is the price that virtually every uninsured 27 year old must be willing — and able — to cough up in order to prevent the model this system is predicated on from collapsing.
If those 27 year olds don’t show up, and they won’t, then the system collapses instantly. If they do show up because the government threatens them with fines the economy collapses as $3,200 a year exceeds the average 27 year old’s disposable personal income after mandatory expenses (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) Remember, there are always exceptions but these premiums are averages and over large pools of people the statistical averages are what matters — not the ends of the barbell.
While the law may never be repealed and everybody who signed up thinks they still have health insurance, when it matters most there won’t be a doctor on the list who’ll be willing to help you. Why? Because the government will outright deny the medical services because it is broke and they’ll simply refuse to pay the doctor to provide it.
That’s what we can call a De Facto death panel.
They had them back in the old Communist days of the East Bloc. It wasn’t by name, of course, but rather, by action.
People used to stand in hours-long lines just to be seen for an ear infection or to receive antibiotics, unless of course you could throw the doc a little summin-summin under the table. Then you were prioritized.
Eastern Europeans and Soviet Russians who lived under the red banner prior to 1989 will tell you, “You don’t go to the hospital to live longer, you go there to die.”
This is the same system we now have in place in America, despite the fact that ear wax eating Congressman Joe Garcia claimed just this week that democrats haveproven Communism works.
It works great for people like the Congressman who suck off the tax payer teat, enjoy free platinum health care coverage, and dine at premier ear wax eateries around D.C.
For the rest of us, however, Communism works about as well as it did for the millions of slaves who eventually tore down the Berlin Wall to escape its stranglehold.