Curmudgeon's Corner

We need simply look at the gyrations occurring in Congress as the “great debate” over SCHIP and Medicare Advantage takes place to see exactly where we’ll be if Healthy Wisconsin were to become the law in Badgerland.

SCHIP is being re-engineered to bring in more and more adults and to permit families of four earning over $80,000 per year to join. This is a very obvious expansion of government-run healthcare.

Medicare Advantage funding is being threatened because it represents an incursion of the private sector into the world of government-run healthcare (Medicare) that is a threat to all those whose goal is just that…government-run healthcare.

Doctors in Medicare would be favored by much of the money freed up by the reductions in Medicare Advantage while SCHIP would get the rest plus the huge increase in tobacco taxes at the federal level. Why is this happening? Because there simply isn’t enough money to go around to do everything the politicans want to do. Medicare Advantage could disappear as the direct result of this move. In this instance, oldsters who had selected Medicare Advantage would be forced back into Medicare parts A & B with lesser benefits available to them at higher costs. This subtle form of rationing should give us all pause. Future forms of rationing promise to be far less subtle.

Politicians running healthcare is oxymoronic. They will be unable to resist the temptations of all that power…and you and I will suffer…just as those on Medicare Advantage programs are about to suffer. What will it be next? Will it be mandatory health prevention as suggested by one presidential aspirant? What will happen with all that data that is collected? And then where will healthcare go? Will we ultimately see consciously controlled death rates since death is less expensive than living with and treating a disease? That happens in single payer countries around the world today. What makes us think that it wouldn’t happen here as well?