Oh Yeah, Reform This!

Currently (emphasis on the word currently) the United States has the best health care system on Earth. We outperform every developed nation in almost every category imaginable. As the health care debate drags on into the fall, there is one thing that conservatives and liberals can agree on:

Reform needs to happen. Soon.

However, thinking conservatively, reform should not come by means of a public option. Instead, health care should be reformed through Tort Reform, eliminate high-cost malpractice suits that cause physicians to over diagnose and over test patients (known as defensive medicine), allow the free market to create competition...especially with employer-based health care coverage (our current system hasn't been a "free market" since the mid-1960's), and restructure community ratings that forbid insurance companies from rating consumers based on current health statuses.

There are currently thousands of private/commercial health care providers. Our problem? We have allowed these companies to run as profit-driven companies instead of quality-driven companies. Through my employment, I am given two choices for my health insurance provider.

Two.

Where is the competition in that? Imagine what could happen to the costs if my employer allowed two more companies to compete. 10 more. 50 more. You get the picture.

America doesn't need a government option to take care of the small percentage of Americans who are uninsured. What we need is a government who looks after our interests as citizens...not their own.

Here is a list of 15 lies being dished out by the media/White House/Democrats in regards to the health care debate:

1. Cutting $500 billion from Medicare will not hurt care or cut benefits for seniors.
2. Spending $1 Trillion will save money.
3. Spending $1 Trillion will not increase the deficit.
4. If you like your plan you can keep it, except in five years every insurance plan design for everyone will be dictated by the federal government design requirements.
5. You can buy any insurance plan from any insurer you want. But you can only buy the government designed, government approved plans — its like saying you can buy the same house from any builder, but the builders all have the same set of plans and can only sell that house.
6. This is not a government take-over of the health care sector.
7. There will not be any rationing.
8. Campaign promises made explicitly by the President that he would not cut any deals with “the drug companies” only to do exactly that in return for Pharma spending million in ads to prop up the sagging ObamaCare this summer.
9. Abortion is not a covered benefit (despite the fact that the Democratic House pro-life leaders say it covers abortion, and more than 20 Democrats have told their leadership in writing that they will not vote for any bill that covers abortion.)
10. Seniors will not be steered in the direction of dying to save money — but most of the public knows that the most expense in health care is in the last six months of life — making seniors think Obama’s promises sound hollow. Seniors, it turns out, do not want the government to make the decision about when that last six months starts.
11. The President is against a single payer system and ending employer provided health care. All those videos of the President saying that he is for a single payer system and for ending employer provided health care, well, they are “misleading.”
12. Except that your employer may decide to put you in a government designed plan, so your employers will be taxed less than it costs to give you your insurance. Your employer will save money by putting you in the government-run Health Information Exchange — and you can never leave!
13. This bill’s purpose is insure the uninsured and do “insurance reform.”
14. President Obama promised no mandate in his health plan, but it has an individual mandate and an employer mandate.
15. If you don’t buy health insurance and you earn more than $19,000, you will be taxed 2.5 percent of your total income. The no tax increase pledge for families earning $250,000 or less does not apply, of course, to ObamaCare.

Dan Perrin