3/18/14

Words I intend to deliver to Greensboro's City Council this evening on Medicaid expansion in North Carolina

The problem with Medicaid expansion in North Carolina isn't that the services shouldn't be offered.

The problem is the federal government chose to charge the cost to our children.

The health and insurance industries stand to reap taxpayer funded gains and reduced costs for the uninsured via increased levels of borrowed money.

The original ACA deficit reducing accounting is no longer operable.

The Obama administration's math anticipated that 18- to 34-year-olds would comprise roughly 40% of the total to offset the costs of older, sicker enrollees, but the current number is about 27%.

Considering how much the law has been broken to date, and how short the total enrollment is, the financial implications of expanding Medicaid in North Carolina are unknown.

The ACA and Medicaid expansion didn't fix what was broken, but preserved the worst of it, making our situation even more precarious.

Governor McCrory didn't tell the whole truth about the deficits to maintain Republican medical and insurance industry campaign contributions.

Congressional Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans and the President for allowing our current health care system to remain a massive skimming operation.

Since 2008, the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund has paid more for hospital benefits and other expenditures than it has received in revenues, and is projected to bleed red ink for the next 75 years.

The health and insurance industry’s position as top political campaign contributors correlates to taxpayer funded subsidized healthcare having the highest price inflation in the country.

Councilperson Sharon Hightower asked "Do people's well being really have a price?". I replied with "Unfortunately, there is a price.” It's not something nice to say, but there has to be a limit to how much we forcibly encumber others.

We should be free to spend as much of our own money to keep ourselves alive and well. But charging everyone else to pay unaffordable costs for those who can’t, makes the system even more bankrupt than it is now.

The government passed the ACA without fixing what's broken based on bogus math they knew was incorrect, and now they want to expand at even higher rates of profitability for the healthcare and insurance industries.

Obamacare will cost by far more than has been disclosed, just like George Bush's Medicare part D, which neither side wants to admit, because on this issue, both Republicans and Democrats are wrong for the wrong reasons.

America’s health and insurance industries don't maintain high profit margins by providing superior care and/or medicine, but by financing the political process with wealth transfer provided by patients and taxpayers.

The ACA and Medicaid expansion is mathematically unsustainable, as are the prescriptions of most right to life movements. There’s no way our economy could afford the abolition of abortion due to the coincident increase in Medicaid and related social services costs.

Pricing transparency would fix a great deal of the cost problems.  Medicare and Medicaid should to be able to negotiate prescription prices like the Veteran's Administration, and state specific health care insurance and hospital monopolies need to be eliminated.

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