The Health Care bill and Santa Claus
-- Commentary by Jim Dean 12/27/2009

"Santa Claus is bankrupt." --parody headline from The Spoof

Dear Folks,

It is a long held general assumption that grown ups do not believe there is a real Santa Claus who comes down the chimney to deliver a whole bunch of free stuff, simply for the asking.

I can think of no single event in American history to prove the above statement as wholly untrue than the Senate’s Christmas passage of their health bill. Those calling into C-Span this morning were beside themselves with joy that everyone will be covered and pre-existing conditions exclusions are now history. They think young people are going to buy medical insurance so they can subsidize older folks rates. And you can still abuse yourself with drugs, alcohol, smoking and obesity, and pass all your future health costs onto some rich dude who is a vegetarian, and runs marathons...or his kids.

But the biggest proof that these zombies believe in Santa is that they actually think health care costs will go down. They won't, of course, because there really is no Santa.

Young people are not about to be chained to the old folks wagon to 'keep their costs down.' They will pay the fine as it is much cheaper. When they get sick they can then buy insurance under the 'no preexisting exclusion' loophole. It does not take a genius to figure this out. Older folks not on company insurance or Medicare will do the same.

Before this health care bill was passed sixty percent (60%) of Americans were under government controlled health care. After this bill eighty percent (80%) will be. Yet, the insurance companies are still in the bogeyman crosshairs.

There are not enough doctors and facilities to physically handle the influx. Medicare and Medicaid payments are being reduced so more and more medical practices will stop taking them. Those that do will be delivering a low quality of care. They must. It's just simple arithmetic.

Many of these doctors have protected themselves from being financially ruined by these underpayments by engaging in soft Medicare and Medicaid fraud...over testing, over billing, to recover what they should have been paid in the first place. But we are to believe that a government who has never been able to police health care wastage is somehow going to find the motivation and skills to do so, by asking Santa to take care of it.

The adverse selection of taking in people with pre-existing conditions, added to the people who wait to 'buy' insurance until they are sick are going to skyrocket the expenses of the insurance companies. And mark my words...you are going to see premium increases worse than ever.

I think the Dems are sand-bagging us on this one. They KNOW this is going to happen and are using it to herd us into the corral where we will all be screaming for a total single payer national healthcare system. It's the left-hook and right-jab combination, two step plan.

The illegal-immigration-loving media never touched on how the coming amnesty plan will devastate health care costs. When all those illegals become legal, they are going to use the Ted Kennedy/Anti-Defamation League 1980’s immigration 'reform' bill family reunification provision to bring all their sick elderly parents and grand parents to the good old USA where they will immediately throw them on Medicaid which will bury it deeper than it already is.

There will be no money to pay for this, obviously, so the game then will be to rob whoever they can with additional taxes OR you are going to see a lower quality of health care beyond anything you can imagine. We will end up with a two tier health system like they have in Canada. Up there those who don't want to wait two or three years for a procedure, or one they cannot even get if you are above a certain age, they just come to the US to pay for it out-of-pocket. The same will happen here.

We have an increasingly unhealthy country. Medicare is broke, despite all the crazy old folks who think it is a wonderful program. They can’t see themselves as mini Bernie Madoffs...they got theirs but the money those coming behind them have paid into Medicare...it is not there. Obesity is at epidemic levels and its related diseases (childhood diabetes) will doom any and all cost or quality improvements to our health care system.

It is similar to providing better food and health care to areas of Africa that are over populating and destroying their ability to live off the land. The increase in population growth just guarantees larger next generations will starve and suffer.

Bernie Madoff is sitting in jail today watching the pretenda Santa’s like Harry Reid and Madam Pelosi take credit for their extravagantly crafted NeoPonzi scheme and is probably thinking ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

If any of you all think I am way overboard on the Madoff analogy, I can prove I am not. It is on record now that despite Harry Markopolis spilling the beans to the SEC on Bernie's scam, their investigators were never really able to see Bernie's books. And second, no one at the SEC seemed too concerned about that little detail. No one felt it was their responsibility to really understand what he was doing.

The following YouTube clip will show you the Senate version of this not wanting to be required to understand what is really in the health care bill. As you are watching this and feel you have entered The Twilight Zone, then we have bonded. That is how I felt.

Batten down the hatches folks. Hard times are ahead…and for a long time for all of those that don’t have a gilded occupation. And I have no faith in our elected officials saving us. It’s every man, every family for themselves now.

Jim Dean is the producer of Heritage TV and a member of the Georgia Heritage Council.