• Don’t Worry About Obamacare – Like Other Nationalized Healthcare Programs, It Will Implode.

    Posted February 20, 2013: by Bill Sardi

    Don’t worry about Obamacare, it is going to implode.  Be concerned about the money grab it makes while pretending to expand health care to the uninsured.  Even in its own plan Obamacare does not come close to saving Medicare from insolvency in its first year.  There is no way it can provide health care for 50 million more Americans and put any meaningful dent in rising health insurance costs.

    Obamacare is a fascist takeover of the healthcare industry, working under the guise of improved efficiency (computerized medical records), in order to snoop in medical records and find what drugs doctors are prescribing and then selling that information (aka accepting political donations) to provide that information to pharmaceutical companies.

    In case you missed it, Obamacare is launching pilot programs after rather than before passage of legislation.  No one has a clue of any of this will work.  Imagine building a car before you build a test model.  That is Obamacare.

    Those who couldn’t afford sick care insurance felt left out, but they didn’t realize what they were missing – a medical horror story where 30,000 needlessly die in hospitals every year.  Medical care is a leading cause of death, and many Americans are clamoring for more of it.

    Oh, the uninsured said other countries have nationalized healthcare, so why not the USA?  Well, one of those nationalized health care programs has, for the past few months, admitted that it has been culling its patient pool by withholding water from patients so they would die of dehydration.

    Would that be some backward country ruled by a despot that does that?  No, it is Great Britain.  A program that many uninsured Americans envied has been conducting covert euthanasia.

    And don’t get the idea that geriatric euthanasia is something that is only practiced elsewhere.  It has been well documented on this side of the ocean for a few decades, only its objective now is different than relieving the patient of prolonged pain and suffering, it is to keep a bankrupt sick care system from bankruptcy.

    Read the shocking words used to describe the hidden realities of the National Health Service in England:

    “Patients were routinely neglected, humiliated and in pain as the trust focused on cost-cutting and reaching government targets….   People were left in soiled sheets, and dehydrated patients drank from flower vases.”

    Ironically, a news report says the British hospitals involved in this scandal will likely face “the threat of fines.”  Great, the taxpayers there have to come up with even more money to cover for intentionally discarding patients.

    Enter Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs)

    Accountable care organizations (ACOs) are being formed now to make sure care that is rendered is effective and doesn’t lead to hospital readmission.

    A strikingly blunt assessment of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) has been published in The Wall Street Journal.  It says:

    “We believe that many of them will not succeed. The ACO concept is based on assumptions about personal and economic behavior—by doctors, patients and others—that aren’t realistic. Health-care providers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build the technology and infrastructure necessary to establish ACOs. But the country isn’t likely to get the improvements in cost, quality and access that it so desperately needs.”

    Under Obamacare doctors must conduct an initial preventive health care assessment and prescribe vaccination and other preventive measures years in advance.  It’s like a drug company booking its business and counting its profits beforehand.

    But the Wall Street Journal article says there can be no successful health reform “without major changes in doctors’ behavior.”  Doctors who have been coached by consultants to generate optimal insurance billings, particularly by prescribing drugs to obtain a “drug consult fee,” are now expected to abruptly reorient themselves to deliver the lowest cost care.  While doctors complain of this loss of autonomy, you can’t say they didn’t bring it on themselves, what with an estimated $250-800 billion of needless care being delivered annually.

    Where’s the evidence?

    The Wall Street Journal report says doctors will “need to employ evidence-based protocols more often to determine optimal treatment—for instance, in prescribing medication or deciding whether certain kinds of surgery are necessary.” But is has been said that aside from fixing broken bones, repairing decayed teeth and replacing cloudy cataracts with clear plastic lens implants, most of the rest of what modern medicine has to offer is not scientifically proven.

    Furthermore, none of this focus on positive outcomes addresses needless care.  And we need to remember, patients want care. They paid into the system and they want something in return.

    Moreover, there may be no effective treatment.  For example, there is no single effective drug to treat high blood pressure.  There are drugs that prolong the life of cancer patients a few months, but none that cure.  There are no proven drugs that prevent cancer or heart disease, which is why so many patients seek alternatives and use dietary supplements.  Most anti-diabetic drugs cause weight gain.  Most blood-pressure lowering pills raise blood sugar levels.  It is perverse system of FDA approved drugs that simply cause more side effects that require even more drugs.  The ACOs are only setting into stone what is already disproven.

    Are the patients to blame?

    The Wall Street Journal report also lashes out at patients.  It says a mistaken assumption is that Accountable Care Organization can succeed without changing patient behavior.  Just how far can ACOs go with a significant portion of the population eating themselves to death?  And can it be expected that patients will significantly alter their high-carbohydrate/refined sugar diet when that is what the food industry is serving up?  For the past few decades food purveyors have been lacing foods with taste enhancers and brain reward factors that encourage them to eat snacks to the bottom of the bag.  How does modern medicine reduce costs when the food industry is trying to enhance profits by getting people to overeat?

    What Obamacare also wants to do is change so-called anti-competitive regulations to allow trained nurses and physicians assistants to screen, pre-diagnose, prescribe drugs (on a limited basis) and provide treatment like sewing up lacerations.  But this only initially reduces what is paid out from the labor side, and may actually add another expensive layer to the legions of providers.  What would be competitive is to pay for dieticians (not now paid for by Medicare) and more appropriately, practitioners who prescribe dietary supplements in place of costly and problematic drugs.

    For example, take Nate Lebowitz MD, preventive cardiologist in Hackensack, New Jersey.  At a recent Medicare audit on quality indicators, the auditor informed Dr. Lebowitz he was going to have to re-do his numbers because he must have made a mistake.  He said Dr. Lebowitz’ patients with a history of heart attack or placement of a stent in a coronary artery never experienced a recurrent event.  The auditor went on to say his high-risk patients did not go on to develop coronary artery disease.

    Dr. Lebowitz says he uses 90% less cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and other pharmaceuticals than the average cardiologist.  Dr. Lebowitz responded that he thought the numbers were accurate but the auditor was welcome to tabulate them again.

    For the past six years Dr. Lebowitz has been recommending a red wine resveratrol pill (Longevinex®) for his patients.  What modern medicine is missing!

    The main idea should be to get patients well, not save on labor costs per se. How did that priority get lost in the shuffle to reform health care? Wellness will save hundreds of billions, treatment of illness costs hundreds of billions.  © 2013 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.

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