Saturday, January 12, 2013

Obamacare is All About Death and Taxes


By Alan Caruba

Prior to the November elections, I received an email that was chilling. It was about the new Obamacare rules. Before I discuss the Obamacare taxes that are kicking in this year and next, I want to share excerpts from it.


The email was from an individual whose son-in-law has a brother who is a surgeon at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. It is ranked high among American hospitals. This is what he related:

“A group of non-doctors, from 'our' county's Department of Health arrived last week at Emory for a two day session and is on their rounds around the country to make sure every hospital fully understands the new rules (which start in December (after the elections) concerning treating all patients over 70 years of age.”

This group informed the staff Emory and all the doctors present that they will very soon not be allowed to operate on anyone over 70 (no matter how urgent or life threatening the situation is), without first having it approved by a board of eight doctors.  Failure to comply will result in a huge financial burden to the hospital and more than likely the doctor will lose his/her ability to practice medicine anywhere in the country.”

“This board is to be established at every hospital in the country and the board members will only work eight hours a day…the DOH group almost got lynched at this point by the doctors who were present. The point that got the Emory doctors so upset originally was that the "Death Board" will be available only 8 hours during the day. And once their 8 hour shift is up, they may have to wait 16 hours to get in touch with them and another hour or two or three to get a decision and permission to operate.”

This is, however, anecdotal. Despite efforts to confirm whether this is a new, official policy, no confirmation could be found and, it should be noted that there have been numerous efforts to debunk what former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin dubbed “death panels.”
 
If the report of the visit to Emory Hospital is accurate, fears of death panels are true. If you or a member of your family is over age 70, Obamacare could lead to denied service and even death. According to an article in a December issue of U.S. News and World Report, this process, is also likely to include women seeking mammograms to detect breast cancer and even premature babies and infants in need of preventative treatment for a virus. So every American is now at risk if they have life-threatening health care needs.

If this seems fanciful, consider reports out of the United Kingdom where they have had socialized medicine for decades. There, both the elderly and sick babies are at risk of being abandoned by National Health Service hospitals.

Officially called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Obamacare will surely migrate into a bureaucratic death sentence for an American healthcare system once deemed the best in the world.

In the course of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations Congress actually repealed a section of the ACA, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports affecting people who need long-term care. It is likely that as the 2,000-plus pages of ACA are examined in greater detail by Congress, further dismantling will occur. It needs to be entirely repealed, something the House voted for, but which was deep-sixed in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and Obama would surely veto any effort to do so.

Obamacare’s taxes have arrived and they include another investment tax increase for taxpayers with taxable income exceeding $250,000 ($200,000 for singles). There is also another payroll tax increase of 0.9 percent in the hospital insurance portion of the payroll tax. There is a new tax on medical devices of 2.3 percent affecting manufacturers and importers on all their sales. This increase will be passed along to consumers.

There is a reduction in the income tax deduction for individual’s medical expenses and the elimination of the corporate income tax deduction for expenses related to the Medicare Part D subsidy and a limitation of the corporate income tax deduction for compensation that health insurance companies pay to their executives.

These ACA tax increases are in addition to a variety of other deductions that taxpayers have previously been allowed to take; in addition to a death tax increase there was the elimination of full expensing of capital purchases.

The news about Obamacare just keeps getting worse. Actuaries at the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman are predicting that the law’s age rating restrictions could mean a 42 percent hike in premium costs for people aged 21 to 29 when buying individual coverage.

After the Supreme Court ruled that ACA is a tax, the Congressional Budget Office did an update of its scoring of the law and concluded that Obamacare will spend $1.7 trillion over ten years on its coverage expansion provisions alone, including a massive expansion of Medicaid and federal subsidies for the new health insurance exchanges. This translates to federal health spending by 15 percent.

Infants, the young, middle aged and older, all will find their costs for medical care increase or even be denied. There is nothing “affordable” about Obamacare. It is a draconian threat to every American.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

13 comments:

Unknown said...

This cannot be tolerated. Alan, please do your best to verify the information you got from Emory and then send it to every news organization you can. If none of them report it make sure Fox News makes a big deal out of it. If they do that the others will be forced to report on it before too long. The idiot American citizens may not care about what happened in Benghazi but they will be up in arms on this one. Maybe this will be the country's wake up call. We should be sick of constantly being lied to!

Alan Caruba said...

Hugh, the last thing the MSM wants to report about Obamacare is the truth. As for Fox, just wait until reports of people's parents and grandparents dying after being denied care...then, and only then, will they look into it.

Unknown said...

Well, then this country has really entered into a dark age. Obama is destroying us on all fronts so the last thing we should do is give up our guns. You and I were born in a very different country than today's America.

Judy said...

I'm just not surprised about anything anymore. They're coming for it all--anything they can use to get power over us. God help us.

Judy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Howie M said...

Alan, surely you can do better than quoting a chain email to make a point. The source of the chain email sounds like something out of a James Clavell novel. The email even has the name of Obamacare wrong. It is officially called "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,".
Does this mean I disagree with you? Not completely, The death panels are in the Public Law 111-148 as signed by Obama. The official name of the Death Panel is ''Independent Payment Advisory Board'' (IPAB) ., renamed as or from the Independent Medicare Advisory Board. See page 834 of PLAW 111-148.dated March 23, 2010. I have seen no indication that the Death Panel will set up offices at every hospital, Why bother? They will have central control of everyone's medical records, and they can train any Marxist monkey to repeatedly type DENIED. The premise behind all of this is that if you cannot ration care, you cannot save on cost. Why else would anyone think that increasingly costly medical care will eventually go down in cost to the government, but not to the private sector? As I write, private sector premiums are increasing. This is to force people to get government insurance, and then we can start calling it Obana Pare, because it will start paring off people from the ranks of the live into the ranks of the dead and thus reduce the costs of taking care of the rest. As a matter of fact, when old and/or sick people are removed from the cost base, that will leave only the young and healthy, which will enable the powers that be at the time to steal even more than they are stealing now - bit lest we not forget...all for the "greater good"

D said...

It's all lies, of course.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/over75.asp

Howie M said...

No, it is not all lies. Snopes is not infallible. The Obamacare Law does call for an IPAB which will ration health care. And as I mentioned above, it is not necessary to have IPABs at each hospital. The IPAB was initially called the Independent Medicare Advisory Board. This implis that the intention of Obamacare is to ration health care mainly to the old and sick. The same thing happens in Britain now and has happened in other countries where health care must be rationed because of costs that are arbitrarily decided instead of determined by the market. But most Americans are clueless about what a market is.

Alan Caruba said...

Sorry, Howie, but Snopes is often an unreliable source of information and has been known to tilt to the Left.

Bottom line? Obamacare will begin to kill people who thought they had a right to health care. It's even going to drive up the cost of insurance premiums.

Howie M said...

Alan, please re-read my posts. D. is the one claiming that your email is not true based on snopes, and I pointed out that snopes is not infallible. However I maintain that you should not use chain emails to justify claims. As I pointed out by citing chapter and verse, there ARE death panels called IPABs in PLAW 111-148, regardless of what Snopes says. My point is that by using unconfirmed claims it blurs the facts and gives the D's of this world, who just read snopes and not the law itself, the opportunity to discredit you. Another point: When I read snopes or the other debunking sites, I actually double check their research, and in most cases the research by snopes is accurate. The problem is that Barbara's opinions tend to distort her research. She also tends to take what people say as fact. I go by the adage that no matter who says it, it does not mean they are telling the truth.

Furthermore Obamacare as passed into law is now 906 pages, not 2800 pages. I have not been able to find a source that contains the Obamacare law with the many thousands of pages of amendments still being made by Sebelius. In fact the words, "The Secretary shall..." and similar, appear many hundreds of times in the law, This means that Sebelius will be writing new regulations and rules until 3 years from the date that the phony signed the law on 23 March 2010. In other words, we might have a final document by 22 March 2013. Only then is there a chance that we will really know what is in it. Furthermore, knowing what is in it does not mean that it will be functional, practical or economical. Government policies are in nearly case I have ever studied are bad for more people than they are good. Another myth is that Obamacare will affect 1/6th of the economy, which is total garbage. No one at this pointy knows how much of the economy it will affect because it is not a finished piece of work. It already took control of educational loans which are about a trillion bucks.
Anyway if you want to prove me wrong, it should be easy. Just call the source of the email you received and find our who to call at Emory Hospital who should be able to provide some basis for his claims.

Alan Caruba said...

@Howie: The original bill was over 2,000 pages and no one in Congress had time to read it before it was passed on a party line vote by the Democrats. It has currently generated over 3,000 new regulations and growing.

Stop pretending this will not harm the economy and end up killing people denied medical care.

Unknown said...

I believe this is all part of the ultimate plan of the government to completely take over the health care system of the country. While as tax payers we are facing increasing taxes for health care, the hospitals are facing REDUCED reimbursements for Medicare and Medi-Cal (Medicaid).

I've worked for a non-profit hospital for the past 22 years in a non-clinicl department. This is the first time I've feared for my job because of the legislation that has been passed.

It is my opinion that the government is reducing the payments to hospitals in order to bankrupt them. Then, they come in to "save" the failing hospital in order to keep it from closing. Now you have a government run hospital. Over time, all the hospitals will fail, because the income from government contracts will not be enough to cover the costs of medical care provided by the hospital. I presented this scenario to our CEO, and he agreed with me that this a very real possiblity.

Right now, Obama can't just come in a take over the whole system, but if it is rigged to fail, over time complete goverment run health care will become a reality.
Steve

Alan Caruba said...

A very useful insight, Unknown. Thanks.