The "Fraud" In Health Care Reform

President Obama began a series of events this week talking up the benefits of and the "good news" stories from Obamacare.  An article in yesterday's Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger, in fact, quoted the President as vowing that he would never let it get repealed and that he would have it working even if if it takes until the end of his term.  He seemed confident that the worst problems of implementing the law were behind the country, and he said he was ready to promote a good-news story about the law each day.

And, then, on the same page, I noticed an article about how the Affordable Care Act is susceptible to subsidy fraud.  

Awk-ward!

It seems that the Internal Revenue Service's existing fraud detection system may not have the ability to catch refund fraud or schemes before tax return refunds are issued.  It's simply impossible for the IRS to keep abreast of all the scams that are possible with this law.  This isn't a Republican House or Senate member making this charge - it's J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

Oops!

Scrapping the whole health care law and establishing single-payer public insurance - something the Brits were able to do in the forties, and without the benefit of an Internet site - is fast becoming the most obvious solution, though we'll more likely see the Republicans' alternative to reform - going back to the way things were - come to pass first.  Obama likes to say that health care reform is not easy, and if it were, it would have been done long ago.  So why was it done long ago - in every other major industrialized nation on the god-damned planet??       

The short answer: Americans are morons. The long answer:  Americans are unbridled capitalists, and they see every problem as something that can be solved by the free market.  The result? We have a health care law that is based on a free-market approach.  Noted curmudgeon James Kunstler explains it quite nicely:

"So-called 'health care' is . . . a hostage racket, since sick people are hardly in a position to bargain for anything, but it is only a sub-system of the larger matrix of rackets that have made this such an unusually dishonest society. My guess is that Obamacare is sure to make it worse, and pretty quickly too, since the rules for Obamacare were written by the hireling lobbyists of the industries that benefit from the racketeering."

What's really pathetic is that the ca-ca ACA started out as a Republican idea, put out by the Heritage Foundation in the early nineties.  Now think about that for a minute.  If Americans can't get a free-market Heritage Foundation health care proposal to work, how can they be expected to get something like the British or Canadian system to work here?

Gee whizbangers, what if Obama tried to establish high-speed passenger rail with the same compromised approach he applied to health care reform? Oh, that's right, he did - that's why we don't have high-speed passenger rail, either!

Awk-ward!