President Obama is attempting to add trillions of dollars of spending for his socialized medicine health care scheme on top of the unmanageable debt this country now owes, while destroying the best health care system in the world. His goal is to eliminate private insurance by offering a cheaper, “Medicaid/Medicare-like” government plan. 

As more people move to the government plan, private insurers will be forced out of business; the quality of care will deteriorate; advanced treatment and diagnostic equipment will be less available; access to care will worsen; and rationing will be forced on us. The government will dictate who is eligible for what treatment and there is no appeal of their decision. Ask anyone who is on Medicare today. The government will determine who lives and who dies. 

This is the case in every country that has adopted socialized medicine and the internet is loaded with honest facts that support this inevitable result. All this in the name of insuring 47 million so-called uninsured people which the last U.S. Census breaks down as follows:
 

• 12 million are illegal aliens
• 18 million live in households with income of $50,000 or more (and could likely afford insurance if they wanted it) 
• 10 million are between jobs and will have health insurance within the year (Improved COBRA assistance plans are helping many of these people)

For the 3-5% of citizens who need health insurance and who cannot afford it, our nation should and could provide a financial pool for these folks if the administration would only focus on reducing the cost of health care for everyone.  

No one in Washington seems to understand that tinkering with various forms of insurance does absolutely nothing to address the real problem, which is the ever-increasing cost of health care. 

The only item in Obama’s health care scheme that is intended to address cost is his outlandish and ridiculous plan to provide a national computerized health records system. Anyone with a modicum level of systems knowledge knows that this is an impossible task that would demand billions of dollars over decades only to prove that it is not doable. 

I spent twenty years with IBM and later ran a software company and I have been exposed to many large and complex systems projects. Kaiser Permanente and The Cleveland Clinic each spent tens of millions of dollars over many years to centralize the medical records just for their enterprises and both are still a work in process. 

Like so many of Obama’s ideas, this one is simply a nice-sounding concept, totally devoid of any solid planning, facts or reality, that we are supposed to blindly accept. 

At the same time, he refuses to consider capping the non-economic damages portion of malpractice awards that has significantly reduced the number of malpractice cases as well as the cost of malpractice insurance in those states that have adopted this proven measure. Another benefit of this approach is that the huge costs for unnecessary tests, drugs, and treatments, commonly referred to as defensive medicine, are greatly reduced.

Over 100,000 people die of hospital based infections each year in the U.S. What is the penalty for hospitals that consistently have infection rates far in excess of established medical standards? Absolutely nothing. The cost of treating those who survive and those who don’t is $20 to 30 billion a year. In, Pennsylvania an ad hoc organization in Harrisburg is empowered to collect infection data from hospitals but they have no authority to penalize or close hospitals that that have continually unacceptable levels of infection. Obama’s plan does not address this on going tragedy.

No one in the current administration, or in Harrisburg, is looking into the fact that doctors who lose their license in one state due to a record of malpractice can simply move to another state, get a new license and continue maiming and killing patients while adding greatly to the cost of health care.  

Five to ten percent of all medical claims are fraudulent and no one is doing anything about this huge and unnecessary cost.  The list of known, proven programs to directly reduce the cost of health care while improving quality is lengthy yet legislators in Washington and Harrisburg are not seriously pursuing any of them. 

The reasons for ignoring solutions to these problems, as with so many areas of our society, is that the politicians want to insure their financial support from special interests such as trial attorneys, insurance companies, and other factions so that they can be reelected to continue their record of ignoring problems and building a legacy of insurmountable debt for future generations. It’s time that we vote those who demonstrate this self-serving behavior out of office and keep voting them out until we see a change.

I encourage you to call or write your federal and state Senators and Representatives and tell them you want them to leave health insurance alone and that you want them to seriously address the cost problems while preserving the best health care delivery system in the world. This is the care that you and I want for our loved ones and no one and ourselves should be allowed to destroy it. 

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Stan Alekna lives in Cornwall, Lebanon County, and is a former CEO of a TEXAS HMO and served on two statewide committees for the Texas Department of Insurance.