Obamacare Section 3001 Senior Care Point System

Listen from 9:40-14:40 in the following video from Financial Issues with Dan Celia (A program played every morning on the AFR Talk radio station which I love dearly):

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8WW4Vn0zR0&w=560&h=315]

Betsy McCaughey is one of the few people who actually read EVERY PAGE of Obamacare (Cough Polosi is a moron cough). She is also former Lieutenant Governor of New York. She is a relatively balanced source having been in offices both as a Democrat and as a Republican. She has written a book about what it does, which is much shorter than the bill itself and it helps to simplify the whole thing.

As per the clip, the thing I learned which was very scary was that section 3000-A of Obamacare creates incentives for hospitals to spend less money on seniors. This will of course deteriorate care to the elderly and reduce the odds of a senior surviving a hospital stay by an expected 15% if the statistics from the California study cited in the video hold for the rest of the USA. I've got to tell you, though, California currently takes very good care of their elderly compared to some other states. I wouldn't be surprised if a 15% reduction only holds for the best-case states and a much more dire statistic comes for the others.

<a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3590enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr3590enr.pdf">Here's a copy of the bill itself. Section 3000-A is actually a subtitle, not a section. It is more technically correct to call it Title 3, Subtitle A. There is no section 3000 and the first section in Title 3, Subtitle A, is section 3001 which is only a small part of the whole strategy to do the things discussed by Betsy. The bill itself says it is "linking payment to quality." The way it does this is by setting up an elaborate redistribution scheme where some money is taken from hospitals which spend more and give to hospitals which spend less, completely ignoring the fact that a free market would already do this in a superior fashion. Press Control + F and type "sec. 3001" and you will be taken to the appropriate area. Or just skip to page 235.

Just a short one today. Think about that. Try to learn about what Obamacare actually does and NEVER support a bill that no one has read. Passing a bill to find out what it does is beyond idiocy, Pelosi, it's a sign of trying to hide something by getting it passed before it's contents are revealed.