Friday, 28 August 2009
Rep Chandlers Drifts To The Left
Asked about what a Health Care bill should have Chandler gave the following answer.
Would reform as expected and discussed right now, have any effect on people who already have insurance?
My understanding of the proposals being floated around right now is that they do not affect anyone who has insurance right now in a negative way. Hopefully it would over time either lower the cost of what they’ve got to pay for insurance or at least limit the rise of insurance costs. Insurance costs have been going up dramatically for the last several years, by double digit percentages annually.
This is ridiculous. The public plan option is a key ingredient in both the Senate and House bills. Legislation that would dramatically affect peoples insurance and and do it quickly. Why? Because throwing government into the private sector competition will destroy the private sector. How is that possible?
The government has two major advantages over private companies. First off, they have a limitless supply of money to fund their plan. They have not only plenty of tax payer money, but they can also print more money. I don't know of any private companies that can print their own money to fund the company. Secondly, government gets to set the rules of the game. That puts them at a huge advantage over the private counterparts. With such disadvantages it won't take long for the government to crowd out the private sector from the market.
How is government control of health care going to drive down costs? The only way government as a sole provider will be able to drive down costs is to ration the amount of health care offered. Such rationing will take us a long way away from our current level of health care availability.
What scares me is that he is not fundamentally opposed to such a public option.
I don’t think the public option has much likelihood to pass right now, that’s one of my concerns. As far as a public option goes, I’m open minded on the subject. I would have to see what kind of proposal we have on a public option. I would have to see if it did those things I mentioned before. It all depends on the details in any kind of plan that was offered.
Which means he is open to the idea of government run health care. Does that seem like a "conservative" position? Asked about lower premiums he responds with this liberal boiler plate.
One of the things I want to see happen is some way to cut costs. One of the basic problems we have in this country is that we already spend twice as much as any other country in the world per capita on health care and our health outcomes are not much better - in many instances they’re worse.
In effect, he is telling us we are paying more and getting less for our money. If our health care sucks so bad why are people all over the world coming to U.S. for health care? Why would he want to keep any of it? Yet earlier in the interview he talks about wanting to keep our level of health care. Something doesn't add up.
It gets worse. He plays the "evil insurance and pharmacutical" card when talking about containing health care costs.
One leads into the other, to a large extent. I think there are a lot of abuses in the health insurance system – we’ve seen profits of health insurance companies rise dramatically. In fact, they’ve risen some 428 percent in the last seven years, which far outstrips the rise in wages people receive.
Plus, when you see the salaries of some of these CEOs in health insurance companies make in many cases, as much as $12 million a year, there is a lot of abuse there which can be taken out of the system. Hopefully it would cut the cost to the average consumer. But at the end of day, we’ve got to address the cost of health care itself, such as the cost of pharmaceuticals – that’s one of the big areas.
Nothing about tort reform anywhere in his discussion about costs. I wonder why? Of course he saves the biggest whopper for the end when he is asked if he has spent time dispelling rumors about the plans.
Our office is continually dispelling rumors … about abortion, illegal immigrants and death panels. There’s even confusion about Medicare and Medicaid and the fact they are government programs. Those are several things people are unsure about. I think certain groups have made efforts to intentionally get that disinformation out there. It’s very important that it gets corrected whenever possible. We can’t do the right thing if we can’t get the right information to people. We’re trying to debunk any thought, for instance, there would be any death panels. Nobody’s thought about putting death panels into any legislation and nobody would consider that. It’s quite irresponsible for people to scare the public and that’s what is going on. I think, to a large extent, the insurance companies are behind those efforts.
Except that all of the misinformation he supposedly deals with really are legitimate concerns about the current health care bill. I am not sure what rumors he is dispelling because Obamacare does provide government funded abortions. There are provisions in the bill that could provide health care to illegal immigrants. The worst is Chandler'ss complete lie about death panels. If death panels were never part of the legislation then why was the wording that would have formed what are effectively death panels dropped from the Senate version?
