Social Program Lesson

[regent]

Perhaps there is a political lesson to be learned from programs such as Obamacare and the Medicare Catastrophic Medical Coverage Act of 1988: social programs should not be passed piece-meal. Those that already have the coverage will be against extending the program, and even the Tea Party slogan: keep government out of my medicare, then makes more sense. For government to extend medicare to others becomes a threat to my medicare coverage.
Today many people today are covered medically and so most of us see no national need to cover others. With government medical care we have become self reliant.

 

[Moonglow]

In other words

 

[DGS49]

The general lesson is this:

You have a problem that seriously affects about 5% of the population. Somehow, they are surviving without a Government program to help them out, but Congress, with its limitless empathy, wants to allocate some of YOUR money to relieve this suffering.

So they come up with a giant program that, in one way or another, TAXES everyone except the wretched 5% to fund the "solution." And the 5% are generally taken care of. In this case, the 5% are people with chronic, expensive diseases that can't get insurance coverage at a tolerable cost.

But somehow, inevitably, the program becomes a benefit to another 15 or 20% of the population who figure out how to scam it, and cash cow to the thousands of entrepreneurs who have perfected the art of milking the government. And of course this is why it ends up costing many times more than was initially thought. Many times more, in fact, than it would have cost to just deliver a dump-truck full of money to the wretched 5% and be done with it.

And at the end of the day, basically every productive citizen in the country is paying more for less, we have lost a little bit of our freedom, and while we were not looking, the Federal Government just got a little bit bigger, and real estate values in the D.C. metropolitan area went up by another 10%.

And we wonder why we are going broke.

And as to the initial point about not passing things "piecemeal," keep in mind that the Progressives really want socialized medicine (euphemistically called, "single payer"), and since they could never get away with it if they tried it openly (remember Hillarycare?), they are going to try to get it by making the entire healthcare system into an insufferable cluster ****, so that the majority of the population will become so pissed off that they will demand it. And when this happens, 5-10 years from now, remember that at the time when ObamaCare was passed, about 80% of the U.S. population was generally satisfied with their health care and how it was being paid for.

 

[g5000]

The general lesson is this:

You have a problem that seriously affects about 5% of the population. Somehow, they are surviving without a Government program to help them out, but Congress, with its limitless empathy, wants to allocate some of YOUR money to relieve this suffering.

So they come up with a giant program that, in one way or another, TAXES everyone except the wretched 5% to fund the "solution." And the 5% are generally taken care of. In this case, the 5% are people with chronic, expensive diseases that can't get insurance coverage at a tolerable cost.

But somehow, inevitably, the program becomes a benefit to another 15 or 20% of the population who figure out how to scam it, and cash cow to the thousands of entrepreneurs who have perfected the art of milking the government. And of course this is why it ends up costing many times more than was initially thought. Many times more, in fact, than it would have cost to just deliver a dump-truck full of money to the wretched 5% and be done with it.

And at the end of the day, basically every productive citizen in the country is paying more for less, we have lost a little bit of our freedom, and while we were not looking, the Federal Government just got a little bit bigger, and real estate values in the D.C. metropolitan area went up by another 10%.

And we wonder why we are going broke.

And as to the initial point about not passing things "piecemeal," keep in mind that the Progressives really want socialized medicine (euphemistically called, "single payer"), and since they could never get away with it if they tried it openly (remember Hillarycare?), they are going to try to get it by making the entire healthcare system into an insufferable cluster ****, so that the majority of the population will become so pissed off that they will demand it. And when this happens, 5-10 years from now, remember that at the time when ObamaCare was passed, about 80% of the U.S. population was generally satisfied with their health care and how it was being paid for.

It's more like 5 percent have a problem, so the government decides to solve the problem for 50 percent.