This Deck Is Stacked

Harry Reid already knows what's on that card that we can't see. He's the crooked dealer who laid out this hand. And what's on that card is his "Medicare buy-in" for people aged 55 to 64 who are not currently eligible for Medicare. But there's more than that involved. It's worse than the former public option that was supposedly gotten rid of. It is, in fact, the first step to full nationalized single-payer health care.

The Democrats are flailing about trying to get themselves a Christmas present. They're desperate. And they're shooting wildly. But that doesn't mean they might not accidentally hit something. This new scheme may be a non-starter, but it is dangerous enough to be worth discussion. With the parliamentary tricks and rush votes they've been ramming through, I'm beginning to think almost anything's possible. Remember, you got gay rights hate-crimes legislation because it was attached to a vital defense appropriation bill. Damned clever, these socialists.

The sneaky compromise that is slowly becoming public after Reid announced that he had found a plan that the Blue Dog Democrats (and perhaps a few Republicans) could accept is the sneakiest path to socialized medicine that the left has yet come up with. Medicare already proves that for anyone who isn't a millionaire, the government program simply kills any possible competition from private insurers. Medicare is about two steps away from complete bankruptcy, and is accepted by fewer and fewer doctors because of all its restrictions and price-fixing. But many reputable doctors will still accept the plan because they can simply offset the losses they take on their over-65 patients with private payers and better payments from insurers of people who are under 65.

With the "buy-in" in place, another huge portion of the population will drop their private insurance for the "free" government plan, thus pushing more competition out of the market while putting Medicare deeper in debt. Along with lowering the eligibility age, the plan would increase the income requirement to qualify for Medicaid, driving even more people into the creaky Medicare system. And who gets to pay for all of this? The taxpayers. This comes behind Obama's promise that his plan, whatever it turned out to be, would not increase taxes by one thin dime.

And what about that cash transfer? The offsets that doctors and hospitals are doing to accommodate current Medicare patients ipso facto means that they must charge more for private payers and insurance companies. That means that nationwide, the providers must charge billions of dollars more for the real payers to offset the losses from Medicare. Add those millions of people who will opt for Medicare because their costs of private payment or insurance coverage have now become prohibitive, and you have have a fixed card game that virtually guarantees that the government game will shortly be the only game in town.

Medicare already pays doctors and hospitals at a rate that is far below that of the private insurers, and frequently below the costs incurred by those doctors and hospitals. That may work just fine for government liars, but doctors and hospitals have to pay their bills. Private businesses simply can't survive if their costs continually exceed their income. And unlike the government which does it all the time, they can't start printing money.

But more importantly, how is this a "buy-in?" You've paid a small portion of your income into Medicare all your working life. But like Social Security, Medicare payroll deduction payments were intended to cover future retirement and illness for seniors because there would always be so many more young people coming into the job market than there were seniors going into the programs. Wasted money, outright thefts from both funds, and pure bad accounting aside, the younger population which is supposed to support the care of the retiring seniors has not grown at anything like the rate necessary to support either system.

The "buy-in" plan as currently proposed doesn't actually require the new enrollees to pay anything more than they were already paying from those inadequate payroll taxes. The coverage for all those aged 55 to 64 therefore won't be "free," but it will certainly be cheap enough to kill any competition since current Medicare payroll payments are quantum leaps smaller than private health insurance.

The liars who keep telling us that Obamacare won't cost us any additional money have recently admitted that there would be a tax increase necessary to cover some of the costs. But nobody there is talking about the billions heaped on billions of dollars more this "buy-in" would cost. How are these fools planning on cutting Medicare costs while adding millions of people to the Medicare rolls? And this doesn't even mention that employers will have the option to simply drop private medical insurance coverage for anyone age 55 or over. They're already taking out the payroll deductions for Medicare, so their legal obligation is completely fulfilled.

Medicare solvency is already hanging over the brink of complete collapse with the huge influx of new Medicare patients reaching age 65 from the Baby Boom. And now these idiots are proposing to add millions of new clients to that disaster.

You might think that this is just another jury-rigged political ploy to get enough formerly reluctant Democrats on board to reach that critical 60 votes in the Senate. After all, if the Democrats pass a health care bill, any health care bill, they get to crow about their success. But I'm not so sure that this may not have been the real plan all along. Knowing that pure socialized medicine, and even a modified "public option" was a loser, Reid had a backup plan that he could sell as a smaller intrusion into private matters which is in reality the hammer that will kill private insurance and private payer options entirely within a very short period of time. This is a first, and huge, step into single-payer government health insurance. And once the private sector has collapsed, the quality of care and doctor-patient relationships go down the drain. In short order, the profligate government, now completely in charge of your health care decisions, will decide what's "too expensive" rather than "what's necessary to make this patient well" And they laughed at "death panels."

We can't let this slide. It looks relatively innocuous on its face. It purports to eliminate the public option, thereby deflecting objections to government-run health care. It could bring those Blue Dogs on board. And it's worse than anything yet proposed. There's a thing called a "tipping point." This proposal is that tipping point, disguised as a "moderate increase in the Medicare rolls." Medicare is itself socialized medicine that works (sort of), but only because the doctors and hospitals can offset their losses by regaining their profit from the much larger private sector. This increase in the number of people moving out of the private sector and into Medicare is in fact an economy buster. And it's a private enterprise destroyer. Let's hope that enough Democrats can see through this scheme and call it what it really is--the beginning of totally socialized medicine. Unless, of course, they were on board with this all along and were only pretending to be protecting the public with their objections to the public option.