ObamaCare: Will It Solve Or Confound Our Health Care Problems?

I found this alarming opinion piece over at Canada Free Press ...

One-man and multi-Czar mission to turn the USA into--at least--a third world country

Obama Resolutely Turning US into Third World Country

On a one-man and multi-Czar mission to turn the USA into -- at least -- a third world country, Obama is in the process of taking over all major US industries -- thus far, he’s commandeered the auto industry and banking. He is now going after the creme de la creme -- healthcare and the attendant insurance companies. ObamaControl of this industry will give him ultimate power over all of us.

During a recent speech to the American Medical Association (AMA), he said: ‚"What accounts for the bulk of our costs is the nature of the healthcare delivery system.” Translation: ‚"I don’t like this entire US system and plan to trash it.” He then said: "We spend vast amounts of money on things that aren’t necessarily making people any healthier.” Translation: ‚"I know how to manage healthcare better than doctors. Besides, I not only want a piece of this action, I want it ALL!”

In order to support his claims of ‘cheaper healthcare is better than expensive healthcare’, he decided to tell a story -- one which probably will never be verified by the still-fawning ObamaMedia. As supposed support for his argument, he advised the group in attendance that McAllen, TX has higher healthcare costs than does El Paso, TX. He said this is due to doctors giving their patients ‚"in some cases, treatment they don’t need and in some cases [treatment that] can actually do people harm by raising the real risk of infection and medical error. This error is being repeated across America!” Translation: ‚"As I have virtually all of my State-run news channels covering this speech--and they love me and will do anything and everything I tell them--this message will get to the American people. If I can scare them enough, continue to confuse them with my double-speak and convince them that less healthcare really means more healthcare I’ll get this miserable program passed! Then, we can really do some real damage to American and my opposition. Then, I’ll control almost EVERYTHING and EVERYONE! Heh-heh.”

Like Socialism, Communism, Fascism and other forms of totalitarian governments, Universal healthcare (for the USA it’s called ObamaCare) has never worked ...

[Go here for the entire article with links.]

In a related story, John Lott on FoxNews reported yesterday that several studies show that Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their health care, including most uninsured Americans. Here are excerpts (emphasis added):

As Obama Pushes National Health Care,
Most Americans Already Happy With Coverage

As the Obama administration pushes for a national health care plan, studies show that most Americans are overwhelmingly happy with their own health care -- but they are dissatisfied with the country's overall system, because most Americans who have insurance believe that those who don't have it are not receiving care.

Those same studies, however, show that a surprisingly large 70 percent of the estimated 46 million Americans who don't have insurance say they do, in fact, receive health care, and that a vast majority of them are satisfied with it.

A survey conducted jointly by the Kaiser Family Foundation, ABC News and USA Today, released in October 2006, found that 89 percent of Americans were satisfied with their own personal medical care, but only 44 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of the American medical system. The survey is the only recent poll for which data is publicly available that allows for a comparison of the satisfaction of insured and uninsured Americans. (The data from a just-completed New York Times/CBS poll won't be publicly available for several months; the results that have been reported so far don't make the comparisons discussed in this article.)

Those with recent serious health problems, possibly the people with the best knowledge of how health care is working, were generally the most satisfied. Ninety-three percent of insured Americans who had recently suffered a serious illness were satisfied with their health care. So were 95 percent of those who suffered from chronic illness.

President Obama, in his press conference on Tuesday, seemed to understand that degree of satisfaction. While promising to help people who are "out of luck" on insurance, he said: "If you like your plan and you like your doctor, you won't have to do a thing. You keep your plan; you keep your doctor. If your employer's providing you good health insurance, terrific. We're not going to mess with it."

But while insured Americans say overwhelmingly that they are satisfied, more than half of them -- 52 percent -- believe that becoming uninsured poses a "critical problem," 36 percent view the threat as "serious but not critical," and another 7 percent see it as a "problem, but not serious." Only 4 percent view it as "not much of a problem."

Uninsured Americans, not surprisingly, are not as satisfied as people who have insurance. Nonetheless, 70 percent of the uninsured who indicated their level of satisfaction said they were either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their health care, and only 17.5 percent said they were "very dissatisfied."

Analysts say legislators should pay close attention before enacting a national health care plan.

"If the insured come to believe that the uninsured are not that dissatisfied with their health care, it is extremely important. It could throw a real wild card into the whole health care debate," Jack Calfee, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told FOXNews.com.

"It is a common finding in public opinion research," Henry Aaron, a senior fellow for economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told FOXNews.com. "People are satisfied in the small, but dissatisfied in the large. People are satisfied with their child's teachers or school, but dissatisfied with schools generally.... They are satisfied with their doctor or their last visit to the hospital, but they are dissatisfied with what they perceive is happening with medical care as a whole. This finding is just one additional example."

The Kaiser/ABC News/USA Today survey found that about 13.4 percent of Americans were uninsured (a number slightly smaller than the 15.5 percent estimate used in policy debates from a Department of Labor survey). In crunching the numbers, since 13.4 percent multiplied by the 17.5 percent of the uninsured said that they were "very dissatisfied," it follows that out of all Americans, only 2.3 percent are both uninsured and "very dissatisfied" with the care they receive. The number rises to 3.9 percent when you include all the uninsured who are dissatisfied in any way with their health care.

To put those numbers differently, 5 million uninsured Americans are very dissatisfied with their health care. Including those dissatisfied in any way raises that to 8.4 million.

The survey of patient satisfaction also asked about the aspects of health care that dissatisfy Americans. The uninsured were most dissatisfied with their "ability to get the latest, most sophisticated medical treatments" (35 percent were "very dissatisfied"), followed by their ability to get non-emergency medical treatments without having to wait" (32 percent), and their "ability to see top-quality medical specialists, if you ever need one" (31 percent). At the other end, only 10 percent of the uninsured felt "very dissatisfied" with "the quality of their communication" with their doctor.

A majority of the uninsured are not desperately poor; about 60 percent of them have personal incomes over $50,000 per year and pay out of their own pockets when necessary, rather than paying for insurance. Others manage to obtain care at highly discounted rates as charity cases.

...

The studies also compared patient satisfaction in Canada and the U.S.

A May 2008 survey by Harris/Decima TeleVox asked Canadians the same questions that appeared in the Kaiser/ABC News/USA Today survey two years earlier. In most comparisons, Canadians were more satisfied than uninsured Americans, but just barely, and they were nowhere as satisfied as insured Americans. Canadians are most similar to insured Americans in terms of their happiness with their ability "to get non-emergency care without having to wait." While 77 percent of insured Americans and 41 percent of uninsured Americans were satisfied with timely non-emergency care, the figure for all Canadians was 60 percent.

Among the biggest differences between percentage of Canadians and insured Americans who were satisfied were the "ability to see top-quality medical specialists, if you ever need one" (26 percentage points difference) and the "ability to get emergency care" (24 percentage points difference).

Another comparison between the U.S. and Canada can be made in terms of how egalitarian the two systems are. That is, is there much difference in levels of happiness between people based on race, education, income, marital status, age, political views, or income? For both Americans and Canadians, higher incomes don't buy higher levels of satisfaction with their health care. In the U.S., there is no difference in happiness by race; blacks are just as satisfied as whites or Asians or Hispanics. Canadians do experience greater differences in happiness across provinces than Americans face across states.

Lott's article is lengthy and well-researched with links to his sources. I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

It is important that we have an open debate that encompasses various viewpoints of this very complicated issue ... something that OBC ... er, ABC ... was not willing to do! (Go here for that story.)