In this week’s Weekly Address, the President talked about his “common-sense” ideas for building a “rising, thriving middle class,” which should send prickles up the spines of any middle class citizen who has considered the impact of this President on the middle class to date.
The President’s track record and future actions promise nothing but continued destruction of the middle class. He has promised to cannibalize Medicare, you know that expense that middle class Americans PAID INTO, in order to get his budget passed, much as he willingly threw the idea of a public option for health insurance under the bus simply to get his name on some type of healthcare reform.
Yet, there is money being spent. This week HHS began the second round of monies distributed to the healthcare industry to investigate ways to promote savings in health care expenses using money provided by Obamacare authorized by the PPACA (Affordable Care Act) to the tune of ONE BILLION DOLLARS available to organizations designing innovative ways to address challenges in the healthcare system.
ONE BILLION DOLLARS, made available from Obamacare in the Health Care Innovation Awards, awarded to companies like insurance companies to come up with ways to manage health care including ways to prevent the need for medical care, specifically, by “…linking clinical care delivery to preventive and population health,” (HHS website, 5/15/13).
The policy of managing healthcare costs through prevention is one of the greatest myths sold to the American people in recent times. If you are healthy, you don’t need medical care, and the fractional cost of checkups compared to the ability to obtain treatment for disease was one of THE WORST TRADEOFFS people ever made.
Especially since, the obvious starting point for promoting a prevention policy, if this was really the goal (rather than merely saving money by forfeiting the potential expense of treatment for the tiny expense of paying for preventive tests) would be more efficient government handling of both the approval of and recall of the flood of dangerous drugs and treatments that compromise patient health (FDA).
While preventive surgeries, such as the one publicized this week for mastectomies that are available to those able to afford both the testing and the expense of having such preventive surgery might be interesting from a human-interest point of view, Obamacare does NOTHING for that except for provide for a free mammogram, a tiny fraction of the expense of that process. The rich can afford it and others will not be able to afford it, business as usual in US healthcare.
It will be interesting to note the difference in actual “counseling” patients receive from health care providers and their options depending on the size of their wallets as the focus of care is further compromised by the focus on cost.
In the meantime, read about the next billion, the Health Innovation Awards being given to companies under Obamacare.
