On Creating Wealth, or Taking from the Poor to Give to the Rich

It’s kind of funny how the President and the Democratic Party complain on the one hand about the 1% and then work so hard on the other to make the bankers and insurance companies richer then they were before.

I had a chat with a doctor in training the other day, talking about the hospital he works at in NYC and how the poor are able to get better health care without insurance than he can with it.  Now with the ACA, the first thing the hospital does is sign everyone up for Medicare so the hospital will be paid for the care they provide.  I think you will agree it is a wonderful idea that everyone has all the medical service they want for free, but it really isn’t free is it?

The ACA mandates that everyone have insurance or pay a tax if they don’t.  Either way they are paying a tax, only they are paying it to the insurance company.  The taxes individuals pay in lieu of insurance also go to the private companies as well; just through the supplemental payments the government makes for those who can’t afford the insurance.

So at the end of the day the ACA is really a government mandate that people pay the private insurance companies more money than they were before.  The noise about birth control, keeping your insurance, losing your insurance and all the other stuff is really there to mask the economic scheme to make the rich richer.  But as Mr. Gruber pointed out the average American voter is not very smart and can be easily fooled.

The Doctor to be pointed out that we really should have a single payer health care system and if we had that it would be better for everyone.  I love the idea of a single payer system.  I’ve lived with one my entire adult life, at least until I got out of the military in 1996.  I never had to worry about a doctor’s visit, but then I never really got to choose one either.  When my daughter had appendicitis it took over two weeks and a lucky visit to the emergency room after it burst for them to figure out what was going on, but it was a benefit we all appreciated.

The only problem I see with a single payer system is to whom do you complain if you don’t like the service? 

As a point of reference -- the VA is a single payer system and if you think another government run healthcare system charged with the care of over 230,000,000 Americans would be more efficient, honest, and caring than the VA you are wrong.  Government ineptitude does not improve with size.

If we do go to a single payer system the hospital corporations, both public and private, for profit and not, large and small, will still get richer for there will be no charity write-offs, every patient will be cared for with the bottom line and government payment schedules in mind.  The insurance companies won’t be disappointed for they will be contracted to administer the claims and payments and of course they will be offered a nice profit for their work as well.

In the end the government will take money from the middle class and redistribute it to the rich and throw a few scraps to the poor to keep them on board with the social welfare idea.  Think of it as kind of like the anti-Robin Hood.  Of course it is this same scenario that kept the serfs in their place back in Robin Hood’s time.

For those in favor of a bigger, all-powerful government please keep up the drum beat.  Wall Street knows a good deal when they see it and the market will continue to climb until the economy collapses like the housing market.  I saw a Facebook poster the other day showing how this administration is doing a bang-up job on the economy with the stock market up over 12,000 pts.  Isn’t this making the rich richer?  If you’re so much in favor of this why are you complaining about the 1%?

I used to worry about the national debt and the need to put balance in the amount we spend versus what we take in.  I figure I was wrong to have that concern because no one, and I do mean no one, gives a damn about balancing the budget.  Let’s just abandon the idea of limited government and jump with both feet into nationalization of all American industry, including health care.

By the way, those opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline… thank you.  I own a number of railroad stocks and since the oil won’t be flowing through a pipe (like it does in Alaska) it will be moving across the Great Plains on the railroads… like Warren Buffet's CSX.  Hopefully we won’t have any big derailments, I’d hate to cut into the bottom line over a few hundred thousand gallons of spilled oil from Canada.