Although polls show the American people’s opposition to ObamaCare is increasing to all-time highs, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid is making no secret of the fact that Democrats look at Obama’s signature legislation as merely a step towards putting ObamaCare on steroids through a single-payer system.
The Las Vegas Sun reports that during an appearance on “Nevada Week In Review, Reid answered, “Yes. Yes. Absolutely, yes,” when asked if “the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it.”
The idea of introducing a single-payer national health care system to the United States, or even just a public option, sent lawmakers into a tizzy back in 2009, when Reid was negotiating the health care bill.
“We had a real good run at the public option … don’t think we didn’t have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system,” Reid said on the PBS program, recalling how then-Sen. Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the idea of a public option made them abandon the notion and start from scratch.
Reid also said that ObamaCare was “a step in the right direction” and that America has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care.
“Single-payer” is a deceptive term that means “socialized medicine.” Insurance companies are put out of business and the government takes over as the sole payer of all health care costs.
This also means that the government decides on how much will be reimbursed for services and which procedures are paid for and which ones are not. These policies frequently result in what is known as health care rationing and “death panels.” If certain procedures are not covered or adequately reimbursed, doctors will not perform them (except for the very rich who can pay out of pocket).
Lousy reimbursements, government red tape, and the lack of flexibility and innovation that comes in a free market tend to drive health care professionals to professions that the government does not exert full control over. Fewer doctors equals health-care rationing and the long waits for vital procedures that are common in countries currently under a single-payer system.
The first services usually axed by death panels staffed with a handful of bureaucrats are the costly and uncertain experimental procedures that sometimes fail many times before leading to a breakthrough, as well as expensive, life-saving operations on the ill, handicapped, and elderly.
Some Democrats, most notably Howard Dean, are already pushing back against the “death panels” that are already a part of ObamaCare.
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