The Public Be Damned

A Tulsa, Oklahoma reader forwards this timely article

“expanding Medicaid would cost Oklahoma taxpayers 11 billion dollars in the first 10 years . . . the program’s expansion would mean 314,000 and 340,000 new Medicaid enrollees in this state . . . you are talking about four times more than we’ve ever spent on Medicaid.”

Despite the Administration’s claims that Obamacare will reduce health care costs – and cover these Oklahomans and even more millions of America’s uninsured at the same time - we all know that can’t be done. Sure we know it. We’ve always known it. Many of us hoped it could be true. Some of us pretended it could be true. But we all knew it couldn’t be true if we thought about it at all.

Similar Obamacare costs are going to hit every other state, too (although Nevada has received a statewide waiver. Why Nevada? Oh, c’mon, you know).

So the additional cost was not unexpected. This puts the media in the awkward position now, of pretending surprise in the attempt to camouflage their credulous and incompetent reporting of the debate on health care and the uninsured during 2007 – 2010.

Who exactly are the uninsured? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2006, it’s surprisingly unambiguous: “people below 2X's the federal poverty level comprised about 65% of all uninsured.”

Well then, why don’t we establish a federal medical insurance program for the poor? Oh, I forgot. There’s already a federal medical insurance program for the poor – it’s called Medicaid. And because the poor make up 65% of the uninsured, it’s clear Medicaid has failed to achieve its [sole] purpose. So then, wouldn’t it make sense just to fix Medicaid?

Not the way the federales see it.

Main reason - a lot of public attention focused on a failed federal program would have been unacceptable, just when the federales had determined to launch a new and even bigger federal program. So the remedy could not be to fix Medicaid. No, these are federales at work, and our federales don’t fix no stinkin’ programs! Just “fixing” Medicaid would have wasted this crisis of the uninsured. The remedy must therefore be a massive, grotesquely expanded, and horrifically expensive NEW federal program whose ultimate aim is . . . whatever . . . or something, just so long as it’s enabled by expanded federal powers regardless of Constitutionality and, of course, incredible new taxing and spending authority.

Besides - fixing Medicaid would require enrolling the millions of the uninsured poor into Medicaid anyway, about half of which the states fund directly. So Oklahoma and the other states (not Nevada) face much higher medical insurance costs for their indigent populations, no matter what anyone calls it – Medicaid or Obamacare. And Obamacare has the advantage of investing so much more power with the federales. This crisis was definitely not wasted.

And no one can be surprised to learn who is going to pay for it all, either.

The public be damned.