Please Pass the Kool-aid

"Drinking Kool-aid" is thus code for doing something you know is wrong, but you do it anyway because someone convinced you that you should.

Believing that you can cut costs by spending $1 trillion dollars is... drinking Kool-aid. Blindly accepting that having health insurance guarantees that you will get health care is ...Kool-aid drinking. Promising people they will get free health care even as you drive doctors out of medicine, well, that is lacing the Kool-aid with cyanide.

Columnist (and Kool-aid imbiber) E.J. Dionne wrote that ACA "would allow 20 million American's to buy health insurance." A 2009 GAO Report showed that 12-15 million uninsured Americans were in the US illegally. Illegal residents fear the government (quite rightly) and avoid identifying themselves by signing up for government assistance.

When illegal residents need medical care, they get it through hospital ERs. The EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) mandates that hospitals must provide all necessary care, regardless of payment source, even none. Thus, while care is free to those without insurance, the hospitals must "find" that money in your pocket or close their doors. This makes no good sense, but the Kool-aid sure tastes good.

The same GAO Report also described how 24% of uninsured Americans qualified for government-supported health insurance programs before the ACA, but refused to sign up.

How will ACA motivate them to reverse course and sign up? Well, say the Kool-aid drinkers, "Now it is free." We Kool-aid rejecters have to remind them it was free before ACA.

Wait, I get it. Eligible-but-uninsured individuals will sign up after they are forced to drink the Kool-aid.

Dionne attacks conservatives who claim that "big government run[s] wild," as though this is a paranoid fantasy. Let me ask any self-identified liberal this fact question: what is the largest single item expense in the entire healthcare budget?

What "costs" more than all the doctors, the drugs, hospital admissions, and wheelchairs combined? Answer: the regulatory healthcare bureaucracy, mostly Federal government but the states as well and more so for those who set up healthcare exchanges.

Before ACA, the healthcare bureaucracy consumed 40% of all healthcare spending. That was over $1 trillion in one year. That sum is roughly the same as the U.S. spent in ten years of war in Iraq.

With full implementation of Obamacre, the bureaucratic cost will rise to ≈50%. Make sure you understand: half of all U.S. healthcare spending will produce no health care.

Read the entire article: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/please_pass_the_koolaid.html