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A few years ago, one of the Ladies on the View (DrRich does not recall whether it was Rosie or Whoopie or Joy or Daisy May) “proved” that George Bush was responsible for the collapse of the World Trade Center (and not the heat generated by all that burning jet fuel), when she proclaimed that “steel does not melt.” The audience went wild with approval.

DrRich, however, was puzzled. All those years ago, when America still had lots of steel mills and DrRich used to work in one of them, he could swear that once every six hours a massive door would open on the open hearth furnace, and molten steel would flow out of it. In fact, one of DrRich’s jobs was to advance a long-handled ladle into that molten stream of new steel to acquire a sample for analysis. He would be willing to attest under oath (say, to a Federal grand jury) that the steel in his ladle was in liquid form. So, unless DrRich’s Old Fart memory fails him, steel actually does melt, as long as you can make it hot enough.

The thing about conspiracy theorists, however, is that they are never deterred by facts. And if DrRich had actually sent Whoopie (or whoever) a letter explaining her mistake, as he had thought about doing, it would not have caused her to say, “Oopsie.” She simply would have shifted to another “fact” proving that Republicans (and not Islamists) had knocked down those buildings.

The other thing about conspiracy theorists is that their methods know no party lines. Whatever their political affiliation they are usually whack-jobs. And on the opposite side of the political spectrum, the birthers – who are convinced that President Obama was not born in the USA, but instead was born in Indonesia, or Kenya, or Mars – have displayed no more reasonableness than the Ladies on the View.

So, when one thinks about it, the truly puzzling thing about the birther controversy is not that the birthers won’t give up, no matter what evidence is placed before them. That’s just what conspiracy theorists do. What’s really puzzling is why President Obama and his legal team fought them for so long before they actually produced definitive evidence of his American birth.

Astute readers might respond, “You just answered your own question, DrRich. Conspiracy theorists don’t go away just because you have the facts on your side. Even a time machine that deposited them into the birthing room in Honolulu would not have deterred them. And indeed, when Obama finally produced his birth record, the birthers immediately found six ways to show it had been Photoshopped. Giving conspiracy theorists the real facts does not end the conspiracy theory.”

Very true. (DrRich is proud to have readers like you.) The President had no hope of making the birthers go away by releasing his birth documents. But by not releasing these right away, and instead letting the matter fester for several years, he just made more problems for himself. By fighting the birthers all that time, and running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills doing it, all he accomplished was to waste a lot of money, and to raise questions among millions of more reasonable Americans who are not given to conspiracy theories.

DrRich believes he has a possible answer to why Mr. Obama stonewalled for so long on his birth records. It may be that he was signalling to his Progressive followers his baseline contempt for the Constitution.

The birthers, as misguided as they were, were raising a constitutional question. For, if Mr. Obama had been born outside the U.S., he could not legally serve as President under the Constitution*.

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*DrRich, for one, thinks this is a rather silly feature of the Constitution, which he believes Mr. Madison inserted into the document for the sole purpose of disqualifying Alexander Hamilton for the job.
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Typically, therefore, inasmuch as a constitutional question is by definition an important one, one might expect that President Obama would have produced the definitive documentation right away, to resolve the matter once and for all. And, as it turns out, he easily could have done so.

But he chose not to. He chose to let the question fester and grow, for several years, before finally putting an end to it. It’s almost as if he was saying: It’s just a constitutional question. I will actively fight against having to acknowledge the legitimacy of my presidency under the Constitution, because to do so would be to acknowledge the importance of the Constitution. And that would be beneath me, and would be at odds with my real agenda.

This message must have offered much succor to nervous Progressives, who had watched him solemnly take the Oath of Office, and had listened to his public words.

Very few Progressives – much less the President of the United States – are willing to say publicly that the Constitution is a major impediment to their program, and that one of the absolute requirements for achieving the Progressive program is to nullify the underlying thrust of the Constitution.

For indeed the Constitution is an impediment, since it firmly establishes the primacy of the individual, and severely limits the government’s ability to control the property or the behavior of individuals – both of which are critical to the Progressive program.

Mr. Obama has said so himself, publicly, before he became President. He has indicated that the chief flaw of the Constitution is that it places limits on the power of the government, and thereby prevents the government from acting to assure redistributive justice.

You can listen to him say it himself on You Tube, here.

Mr. Obama is right about the Constitution, of course. For indeed, if the Constitution granted the government the power to affect redistributive justice, it would have had to make the government all-powerful, and to make all property communal property, controlled by that government. But the founders, having just fought a war with the world’s greatest power to guarantee the autonomy of individual Americans, were disinclined to write a Constitution that immediately nullified their great victory for mankind. So the Constitution simply does not suit the Progressive agenda.

After just two years, President Obama apparently found that he had no further need to continue the charade with the birthers. He has by now, of course, amply demonstrated that the Constitution will not be an impediment to him. He has created scores of hand-picked, unelected Czars who began setting national policy and running much of the government, in independent fiefdoms, answerable only to him; he has unilaterally cancelled contractual obligations to bondholders when “negotiating” with car companies; in addition to the auto industry, he has essentially nationalized the banking industry, the insurance industry, and student loans (and thus, colleges), and of course, the healthcare industry; he went to war in Libia without even a nod to Congress; he allows his DOJ to selectively enforce or ignore laws depending on who has broken them; and he inserted an individual mandate into his healthcare reform plan, which, if upheld by the Supreme Court, will give the government unlimited authority to control the economic activity of individual Americans.

And that’s why it eventually became OK for the President to release his birth records. American Progressives, by that time, had been suitably reassured regarding his stance on the Constitution.

But thanks to the birthers, the President had a convenient way of signalling his attitude toward the Constitution, well before he had had the opportunity to demonstrate it overtly through his Presidential actions.

DrRich will only remind his conservative friends that, once a President has taken over private industry, made the Congress (the people’s branch of government) nearly irrelevant, promulgated the individual mandate, &c., the fact that the Constitution has in it some verbiage about the Presidency being limited to two-terms ought not to be given much weight.

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Some of DrRich’s conservative friends become quite exercised when they hear news commentators in the major media favorably contrasting the Occupy Wall Street movement with the Tea Party.

The Tea Party, the news readers intone, is a phony “movement” dreamed up by the Koch brothers to embarrass our first black president and to consolidate their own wealth, for which they recruited hordes of superstitious, back-woods, gun-toting, ignorant, NASCAR-loving, Bible-thumping, bigoted Ma and Pa Kettles to gather on the Mall, along with their Fox News cheerleaders and their country music stars, in a futile attempt to intimidate the enlightened leaders of the Democratic party into abandoning their program of good works. The Occupy Movement, in contrast, is a spontaneous uprising of innocent and right-thinking citizens against the tyranny of the Republican-controlled Wall Street fat-cat oligarchy, and their noble efforts have been explicitly blessed by such luminaries as Obama, Biden, and Pelosi.

Conservative Americans have a different perspective: The Tea Party was a completely spontaneous expression of public disapproval of a federal government run amok, and its gatherings are notable for its respectful, clean, polite, hard-working, law-abiding participants. The Occupy Movement, in contrast, is a contrived, Soros-funded attempt to undermine the American system, and, as one might expect from such a travesty, the Occupadoes are filthy, lawless, selfish, lazy and unappreciative of the blessings of America, which they themselves (judging from their smartphones and college degrees) have demonstrably received.

What conservatives and progressives seem to agree upon, in the matter of the Tea Party vs. the Occupy Movement, is that one is disruptive and disreputable, while the other is enlightened and constructive. They simply differ on is which is which.

For the benefit of his readers, DrRich would like to point out that, despite the foregoing, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street actually have a fundamental similarity between them. They are both middle class movements which are motivated by a conviction that the American system is moving in the wrong direction, that a major feature of that “wrong direction” is that an elite few have gained power that has enabled them to block the upward mobility that is supposed to be a part of the American compact, and that a fundamental change is in order. The solutions they advocate are very different from one another, of course, but their problem statements are very similar. And, most significantly, they both arise from the middle class.

At least since around 1500 AD (since the time when we can say that a middle class was present in most Western societies) the true revolutions – rapid, fundamental changes in the political system (not merely in who is leading the political system, but in the system itself) – have come to pass only when the middle class has finally become sufficiently aroused to demand (or at least tolerate) radical change. The American revolution, the French revolution, the Cromwell revolution (and the subsequent restoration), the Iranian revolution, the Nazi takeover of Germany, the fall of the USSR, various Mexican and South American revolutions, and virtually every revolutionary political upheaval one can think of in the last 500 years occurred only when the middle class had finally had it.

Political leaders instinctively understand that they can treat the poor and downtrodden as badly as they want to, and they will never rise up. (This is where John Brown got it wrong.) And so, from the political standpoint, while it might be worthwhile stirring up the emotions of the poor (at least in a democracy), in general the actual needs of the poor can be safely ignored.

But the needs of the middle class must be seen to, at all costs.

This is why Democrats (and their supporters in the media) were so unreasonably critical of the Tea party movement when it first presented itself, painting it as violent, unAmerican and racist, despite the fact that no objective evidence supported any of these charges. They were frightened nearly unto death by the implications of such a widespread middle-class expression of dissatisfaction with the direction the country is going – a direction that had been manifest for decades, but which was greatly accelerated during the first years of the Obama Presidency.

And it explains why Republicans were so quick to identify with the Tea Party (even though the mainstream Republican party is actually quite suspicious of it).

And so, when the Occupy movement finally appeared – a different middle-class movement sporting a redistributive agenda that is in line with major elements of the Democratic party – our Democrat leaders could not contain their delight. This, despite the rather odious and “non-traditional” behavior of the Occupadoes, including their public defecation, urination, fornication, rapine, drug use, property destruction, &c, that, in more normal times, would have politicians of both parties lining up to vilify them. Democrats reassure themselves that, while the Occupadoes might be dirtbags, if we play our cards right they can become OUR dirtbags.

Smart politicians in both political parties recognize the potential for real revolution in both of these movements – to reiterate, that both arise out of the middle class, and both are demanding fundamental change – and they understand the need to co-opt the one, and suppress the other.

And so the battle lines are drawn. The Tea Party agenda, which is often unfairly summarized in diminished form as “smaller government and lower taxes,” actually is fighting to restore the Great American Experiment, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, whereby the autonomy of the individual is paramount. Under the GAE, the chief job of the government is to protect the citizenry from foreign aggressors, to grease the skids of a free economy, and to allow free Americans to strive as they will, and in doing so, the government may utilize only its very few, explicitly enumerated powers, and otherwise must stay out of the way.

In contrast, the agenda of the Occupy Movement is a levelling one. The fruits of America should be distributed equitably, so that there are no longer haves and have nots. Obviously, the only entity that can accomplish this feat is a strong, all-powerful Central Authority, which can confiscate the property of the “greedy” and award it to the “deserving.” Fundamentally this means that all property, in fact, is the government’s. To the Occupy supporters, while few of them will come out and say so, the Constitution is not a sacred document, but rather is an unfortunate and obsolete impediment to progress, a document that must be undermined and replaced.

To brush off either of these movements would be a mistake. Each of them is firmly grounded in the middle class; each of them discern a fundamental problem with the American system that can no longer be ignored; and each of them have already taken to the streets demanding that solutions cannot wait, and that action must be taken now.

But the two solutions being demanded by these two movements are not merely different; they are polar opposites, and are deeply irreconcilable.

Our political leaders have likewise taken sides, and the sides being irreconcilable, we can expect no cooperation or compromise between their two camps, at least not until we have another election in which the great, seething, conflicted middle class has an opportunity to say which of the two movements they have now spawned actually holds the key to their hearts.

This is a blog about the American healthcare system, and DrRich has not been bashful about expressing his belief that Obamacare – whatever good elements it may contain – is fundamentally a vehicle for undermining the autonomy of individual Americans, and handing to the government the authority to determine who in this country will get what, when and how. Until the last few months DrRich viewed the fight over Obamacare as the proxy fight for the real, underlying, fundamental question – the question of what kind of country we will be from now on.

But between the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, DrRich has come to believe we no longer need a proxy. It looks more and more like we will have this fight out in the open, and instead of settling it with the kind of sneaky legislative legerdemain that brought us Obamacare, perhaps it will be decided by an actual election.

But whether it is decided by an election, a coup, or an exhausted capitulation, the fate of American healthcare – and everything else American – will ride on which of these two movements eventually predominates within the middle class.

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Progressive Americans have this much going for them: they can, without any reservations, second thoughts (or perhaps even first thoughts), enthusiastically and wholeheartedly support Obamacare’s individual mandate. For them, the individual mandate is an unalloyed good. Not only does it enable Obamacare to proceed, thus giving the government unprecedented control over every aspect of American healthcare, but it also establishes the authority of the government to control the economic activity of individuals. This new authority will come in very handy as our leaders continue working toward redistributive justice. So if you’re a Progressive, what’s not to like about the individual mandate?

Conservative Americans do not have it so easy. In principle, of course, the very idea of an individual mandate is constitutional heresy to a conservative, since it violates not only the letter but the very spirit of the Constitution. This is why, over the past three years, opposing the individual mandate has become for conservatives a more fundamental litmus test than opposing abortion. Accordingly, it is conservatives who have launched the constitutional challenge to the individual mandate, and who have now succeeded in bringing it before the Supreme Court, and who have based their chief strategy for bringing down Obamacare on the idea that the Supremes will agree with them about it.

DrRich, like most conservatives, is aghast at the idea that the Court might actually find the individual mandate to be compatible with the Constitution. Such an expansion of the power of the Central Authority over the lives of individuals will essentially gut the main idea behind our founding, and send us even more rapidly down the path toward tyranny.

But as he contemplates how he might feel on the day the Supreme Court finally strikes down the individual mandate, DrRich can’t help conjuring up the last scene from The Graduate. In that scene, Dustin Hoffman, who has just burst into the church and fought through a horde of wedding guests to grab his girl from the altar, and, with her in tow, has fought his way past the stunned groom and back through the angry crowd, and having at last jumped with her onto a city bus, is now sitting breathlessly, his hard-won love at his side, as the bus pulls away leaving their pursuers behind. And as that last scene fades, his look of elation at finally winning his heart’s desire gradually slackens, and transforms into a look of utter panic, a look that silently beseeches, “Now what?” Or, perhaps, “What have I done?”

DrRich thinks that’s what will happen to Republicans on the day the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional.

There is a reason, dear reader, that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and the Heritage Foundation, all of whom claim to be conservatives, at one time or another supported something very much like Obama’s individual mandate. That reason is: it is very difficult to conceive of a workable, market-based solution to our healthcare mess without one.

Any scheme for reforming healthcare that is based on private health insurance will fail if a substantial proportion of the population declines to purchase health insurance. Whether people have chosen to acquire health insurance or not, they will still get sick. And when the uninsured get sick there are only two choices.

The first choice is to refuse them care. Libertarians have no problem with this. They believe that if you want some healthcare, you should pay for it yourself. If you choose not to buy health insurance, or otherwise fail to make arrangements to pay for healthcare should it turn out that you need some (as well you might, if you engage in all the activities and abuse all the substances that libertarians say is your right), well, that’s too bad for you. Let your painful and untimely demise serve as an object lesson to everyone else, so that perhaps they will make better personal choices. Most non-libertarians, however, find this option abhorrent.

The second choice is to take care of the uninsured anyway. If you do that, not only do you drive up the cost of health insurance for people who have chosen to buy it, but you also create a huge incentive for people to not buy it in the first place.

This is why Republicans or conservatives who have thought deeply about healthcare reform (Gingrich, the Heritage Foundation), or who have actually instituted healthcare reform (Romney), will often settle upon a solution that incorporates something very much like President Obama’s individual mandate. Unless everyone is strongly “incented” to buy health insurance, a market-based healthcare system will collapse.

More to the point, Republicans ought to recognize that, while it seems to have wound up that way, the individual mandate in Obamacare did not start out as a sneaky way to undermine the Constitution. It was, in fact, a necessary concession to the more conservative of the Democratic members of Congress. President Obama and his minions (or handlers, depending on which talk show hosts you listen to) are on record as saying that their real goal is a single-payer, government-controlled healthcare system. And there is no reason in a single-payer, government-controlled healthcare system to invoke anything like an individual mandate to purchase insurance. The President would have been quite happy without any individual mandate, if he could have gotten his way in the first place.

The individual mandate was inserted into Obamacare purely as a necessary component of healthcare reforms that are ostensibly based on private health insurance, which is the only kind of reform the President could possibly get through even a Democratic Congress in 2010.

If the Supreme Court declares the individual mandate to be constitutional (which will violate everything DrRich holds dear about America), then it’s a huge win for Obamacare.

But if they declare it unconstitutional, that will trigger the Republican’s real problems.

Republicans, Democrats and federal judges all seem to agree that without the individual mandate, Obamacare is infeasible. The moment the mandate is declared unconstitutional, Obamacare disappears.

And this will create a “Graduate” moment. There the Republicans will be, sitting on the bus with the healthcare system they have just saved from the handsome-but-arrogant groom who had Big Plans for it, and heading to – where?  They can’t just go back to the old healthcare system; we’re past that. The health insurance industry has made it plain that their business model is broken, which is why they acceded to and even campaigned for Obamacare (a system under which they are to become federally-regulated public utilities) in the first place. Should Republicans institute their own market-based healthcare reforms? Good idea! But what do they do about the people who choose not to buy private insurance, now that they have had mandates to purchase declared unconstitutional? And even if they have an answer to that question (which they do not), do they have a plan ready to go, one that can be implemented quickly, before the healthcare system implodes? (Remember, Republicans, you will be dealing with a health insurance industry that has run out its string, and that will be at least angry if not panicked at the demise of its public-utility end-game.)

As it happens, DrRich himself has proposed a fix for the healthcare system that addresses all these problems – a system that is based on individual choice and incorporates private insurance, and at the same time covers everyone without any individual mandate, and controls healthcare costs to boot. The details are entirely irrelevant at the moment, and DrRich will not bore his readers with them now. (If you’re interested you can buy a copy of his book in Kindle format for five bucks, or if that’s too steep you can read an outline of his plan here for free.) The point is that workable solutions to our healthcare problems are indeed imaginable. The likes of DrRich has imagined such a thing, and so have others. But Republican candidates for President, and Republican congressional leaders, are not creating these solutions. Instead, they are steering us into a blind alley.

Here is what DrRich fears. When the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional next June, the Republican celebration will last all of 7.5 minutes. The insurance industry will make it very clear very quickly that they simply will no longer be able to function, and to have any hope of survival they will have to resume cherrypicking healthy patients, massively increasing premiums, denying recommended care, and dropping subscribers when they get sick. Even with these drastic steps, they will say, there’s no guarantee that health insurance will still be available for most Americans in a year or two. And at the time these astounding revelations are made, the Republicans won’t even be finished choosing a nominee, let alone be able to articulate a coherent plan for replacing Obamacare. By Independence Day panic will reign across the land.

The President will then make a speech. He will say, “We tried, America. In the spirit of bipartisanship we tried to give Republicans a system of market-based healthcare reforms, just like they say they wanted. But that kind of system requires an individual mandate, and our misguided friends on the right have now shot the individual mandate through the head. And when the American people ask those same Republicans who brought this disaster upon us, “Now what?” the American people get no answer. The Republicans are quite good at destroying healthcare solutions, but are hopeless when it comes to creating them. And you can hear for yourselves what the health insurers are now threatening to do to all of us when we get sick. It will be just like it was before, but much, much worse.

“We tried, America. We tried to create a market-based healthcare system that would be fair to all. But the Republicans, caring for nothing but their own selfish political fortunes, have blocked our efforts, and have left us all for dead.

“Fortunately, in a few short months you will be able to exercise your God-given right as Americans to choose. If you want to, you can vote into office the Republicans, the people who have traded your healthcare security and that of your family in favor of the chaos we are all witnessing today. Or you can re-elect me, and you can give me a Congress I can work with, and let us try to salvage something good from the ruins of the glorious reforms we fought so hard for the last time. Let us try to give you the best healthcare system that is still possible, given the new constraints the Republicans have now made for us. While you and I might not have started out wanting a healthcare system run entirely by the government, today our choice is either that, or the chaos, pain, suffering, disability and death that, thanks to the good offices of the Republicans and their friends in the health insurance industry, are now staring us in the face. But this is not the first time Americans have stared evil in the face. We have done it before, and we have always prevailed.

“We tried, America. We tried – but the Republicans denied, and babies died.

“My fellow Americans, in November you will have the opportunity to say no to the forces of evil, and to set this travesty right. I know the heart of Americans, and I know that you will do the right thing, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of your children, and your grandchildren, and generations of Americans yet unborn.*”

And when President Obama is finished laying out his argument, the Republican nominee, whoever he or she turns out to be, won’t know whether to cry, “Oops!” or “Nein, nein, nein!”

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*DrRich is a conservative but also a capitalist, and so his speechwriting services are available to the highest bidder. Mr. Obama, mutual “friends” in the DOJ have proven adept at tracking DrRich down when necessary, and will know how to contact him.

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DrRich has long argued that a non-negotiable necessity of Obamacare will be to gain complete control over the behavior of American physicians. Most of the important medical decisions which doctors make – the ones that cost the government the most money – will be forcibly centralized. That is, panels of experts will determine which services are to be delivered to which patients under which circumstances, and doctors who fail to follow the experts’ dictates, in all their particulars, will be prosecuted as criminals.

This is more than just a matter of cost management. Placing control of most important decisions into the hands of sanctioned experts is a central tenet of the Progressive program. Centralizing decisionmaking – rather than leaving it in the hands of individuals, who will always operate for their own selfish benefit rather than for the benefit of the collective – is the principle mechanism by which the Progresive program (i.e., achieving the perfect society) is to be realized.

In recent years, growing numbers of doctors who recognize that their independence is quickly being taken away, and that the principle ethical precept of their profession (i.e., to always act for the benefit of their individual patient) is quickly being converted into a mortal sin, and that their own professional organizations are acquiescing with these changes, are realizing that the only way left open for them to retain some of their professional autonomy and professional integrity is to opt out of the system altogether, and begin contracting directly with their patients for medical services.

While the trend for doctors to opt out has not yet become widespread enough to have reached the consciousness of the broad public, it has certainly grabbed the attention of our Progressive leaders. For autonomous physicians pose the greatest possible threat to Obamacare, or to any Progressive healthcare system. And Progressives simply cannot abide these physicians who establish direct-pay practices.

So it has never been a question to DrRich whether our Progressive leaders will act to stop direct-pay medical practices. The only question has been how they will do it.

Over the past couple of months, DrRich has developed a theory about this. He hopes his theory is wrong, but he fears it is not.

DrRich believes that the medical profession is about to become nationalized, and doctors will become government employees, just like the airport security screeners. Furthermore, the mechanism by which they will become nationalized is the very same mechanism by which the airport security screeners were nationalized into the TSA, an event which occurred, DrRich reminds his readers, with barely a peep of protest from American conservatives, or anybody else. That is, it occurred precipitously, out of dire necessity, due to a grave national crisis that seemed to leave us little other choice.

DrRich believes the outline of the crisis that will justify the nationalization of the medical profession is becoming discernible. He believes the crisis will be precipitated by a provision of Obamacare that, for most observers, has just come to light.

On August 10 Medicare announced that, by March 23, 2013, most American physicians – at least 750,000 of them – will have to recertify their Medicare credentials. Now, for most Americans this prospect does not sound too odious. But be assured that it is.

The Medicare certification process is always a bureaucratic nightmare, and the nightmare will be greatly magnified when three-quarters of a million doctors are recertifying nearly at the same time.

All doctors have gone through Medicare certification at least once, and many have done it more than once. Because several common activities – such as changing your address – trigger the need to recertify with Medicare, doctors go through this process on an average of every decade or so. And most dread the experience.

Certifying requires filling out a 60-page form, a form which is absolutely masterful in combining obtuseness, opacity and redundancy, and then submitting it, along with all sorts of additional documentation, to one of several Medicare administrative contractors. These contractors are famous for their incompetence, their indifference, and their glacial bureaucratic pace. DrRich has experienced the ordeal himself, and knows countless doctors who have as well. The experience is nearly universally painful and expensive.

It is very common – possibly the rule – for submitted applications to be “lost,” at least once. (Officially, of course, the doctor never sent them in.) This event is so routine that doctors know to check with the contractor to confirm that their paperwork has been received. But the contractors have caught on to this gambit, and now refuse to reply to such queries for some specified period, usually for 30 days (at which time, it often turns out, the paperwork has disappeared into the ether). When the doctor finally gets to the point where the contractors will admit to having the documentation, there is another prolonged period of enforced silence, while the contractors painstakingly comb through the documents for misplaced commas, “X’s” typed over the line, or any other trivial excuse for discarding the application and notifying the physician (often, 2 or 3 months after originally submitting it), that they must begin the whole process again, and submit new forms. It is common for the entire process of recertification to take 3, 6 or even 12 months.

And the best part is, during the time the documentation is being reviewed, the physician cannot bill Medicare for any services. So during the recertification process the physician must either stop seeing Medicare patients, or continue seeing them without hope of payment. It is standard to lose at least a month – and very often more – of Medicare income during the recertification procedure.

These cost savings, of course, are why Medicare demands recertification every time you change your address, or add a partner, or sneeze. And this is why a slow, bureaucratic, demeaning recertification process is not only perfectly OK with the “system,” but is lovingly nurtured.

That, DrRich reminds you, is what happens during the typical recertification. The en masse recertification mandated by Obamacare, when 750,000 physicians will be going through this process at the same time, promises to become much, much worse. Doctors certainly believe it will be much worse.

“Tough luck for you doctors,” many loyal readers are now saying, “but what’s that got to do with the TSA-ification of American physicians?”

There are many thousands of PCPs today who are strongly considering opting out of Medicare, or who would like to opt out but they are afraid to take the chance. That is, they’re on the fence.  There are many thousands more who are hoping to retire within several years, and are hanging on almost on a year-by-year basis, waiting either to meet their target retirement funding, or until things get so bad that they just can’t do it any more.

DrRich thinks that a great many of these on-the-fence physicians will be tipped by the prospect of having to recertify for Medicare, especially under circumstances in which the process of recertification promises to be much worse than even the usual stomach-turning process.  If a doctor is thinking about getting out anyway, and now faces the prospect of losing (most likely) several months or possibly a year of Medicare income, then he or she is much more likely to just do it.

If this doesn’t do the trick, then add to it the fact that Medicare reimbursements to all providers are likely to be reduced by something like 25%, when the pre-deadlocked Congressional Super Committee* fails to agree on the necessary budget cuts later this year.  And last Thursday night, when the President announced that the Super Committee will have to find $2 trillion instead of only $1.5 trillion in budget cuts by Thanksgiving (in order to pay for his Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! bill), the likelihood that doctors will take a 25% cut in pay increased even more.

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*The Super Committee is pre-deadlocked because: a) the Republicans audaciously appointed at least one Tea Party supporter to the committee; b) the Democrat leadership (specifically, the Vice President) has identified the Tea Party as terrorists, a designation they have never been willing to assign to any other group, for instance, to Islamic extremists; and c) it is well known that one does not negotiate with terrorists.

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DrRich thinks the Progressives, whether by design or by blind luck, are now precipitating a crisis in healthcare. They are giving American doctors a huge incentive – probably two huge incentives – to opt out of Medicare all at once (instead of opting out gradually, as they are doing today).

If this occurs, the shortage of doctors who accept Medicare will become a hyper-acute problem. Panic will take hold.  The media will decry the crisis, running heart-rending stories about old people dying in their homes because they cannot get an appointment with a doctor, and blaming it all on the abiding greed of physicians (who, after all, probably still owe the government for their education, and hold their professional licences at the pleasure of the state). Medicare beneficiaries will flood their congresspersons’ offices with emails, letters, and their very bodies, demanding immediate action.

The autonomy of physicians may be OK in theory. Classic medical ethics might be a nice idea – a nice-to-have – if you can afford it. The doctors who “opted out” might actually be standing on principle, instead of on greed. But little matter. However you cut it we’ve got a real crisis here. The public’s right to healthcare is being violated. People are dying. The very security of the country is in jeopardy.

Not even conservatives will be able to withstand the tide of public opinion. Something will have to be done to compel doctors to provide that which they owe the public. In the war on illness, doctors need to be good soldiers. So like real soldiers, if they fail to volunteer for duty in sufficient numbers they will need to be drafted – and like soldiers they will need to work for, and receive their orders from, the government.

The politicians will be sorry about this. Nobody wanted it this way, they will say.  A little less greed, a little more compassion, and we could have avoided this. The doctors brought it on themselves, and have nobody to blame but themselves. The welfare of the public must take precedence.

Anyway, that’s DrRich’s theory. With luck, he is wrong. (Perhaps, for instance, many fewer physicians than DrRich thinks are on the fence about opting out.) But if he’s wrong, he’s more likely wrong about what, specifically, will precipitate the crisis that will finally justify taking away what remains of doctors’ autonomy, than he is about the general outline of what the end-game for American doctors will look like.

Progressivism often “progresses” toward its goal not gradually, but in major, discrete leaps – and it usually does so as the result of some “crisis” that causes the people to go along with changes they would never otherwise agree to. Which is why, if you’re a Progressive, a good crisis never goes to waste.

And the requisite “good crisis,” more often than one might think, turns out to be something you can goose along, just when you need it.

Podcast:

We are, the pundits tell us, staring down the barrel of an economic catastrophe. By this time next week, we may all be huddled in our darkened hovels, breaking up furniture for our meager fires, roasting the family dog for our sustenance, and dreading the likely invasion by the great Canadian menace.*

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*By cutting government spending and not raising taxes, the Canadians have not only turned a deep recession into an economic boom, but have set an embarrassing example which our leaders in Washington and our press have taken great pains not to notice. The Canadians indeed are a menace.
___

But fear not. DrRich is here to assure his readers that, despite what you’ve been told, this isn’t Armageddon. He offers three proofs for this assurance.

First, the debt limit is a meaningless fiction.

The term debt “limit” implies that there is some limit to the amount of borrowing which we can do; that we may borrow money up to a certain and well-defined point, and no further. But history tells us this is absurd.

Each and every time we decide we’d like to spend more money than the debt limit says we can spend, we simply increase the debt limit. We have blithely blown past dozens of supposed debt limits in recent years, with nary a glance behind us.

DrRich is not sure why we have a debt limit at all. At some point, he supposes, somebody determined that publishing a debt limit would convince people (which people? the voters? the credit-rating agencies? the Chinese?) that we actually have some sort of built-in controls to our fiscal profligacy. But surely, after decades of treating our debt limits with less regard than one would treat speed bumps during a police chase, nobody can actually believe that we would honor those limits, ever, under any circumstances. It is obvious that the only thing debt limits can accomplish is to create transient, artificial fiscal crises, like the one we are all enjoying now.

The only logical solution to our current crisis is to simply eliminate debt limits once and for all. We would not be giving up anything substantial, since no debt limit has ever been honored nor ever will be. Debt limits clearly do no good; they only cause trouble.

So DrRich offers this solution, this change we can all believe in: Eliminate the debt limit altogether.

No problem which has such a simple and happy solution can be Armageddon.

The second reason this is not Armageddon is: One cannot schedule Armageddon.

The current debt ceiling, the one we’re going to exceed on Tuesday, is $14.3 trillion. The President wants it increased by another $2 trillion or so, enough to delay the next debt ceiling crisis until after his re-election. This, of course, is understandable. The Republicans, it appears, would like to increase the debt limit by a lesser amount, so that the next crisis will occur at a time more to their convenience. This is also politically logical.

The point here is that, by simple manipulation of the value of the meaningless fiction known as the debt limit, we have full control over scheduling the next debt crisis which will threaten our markets, economy, &c.

A feature of Armageddon upon which everyone can agree is that it cannot be scheduled. Therefore, this is not Armageddon.

The third reason this is not Armageddon is: The amounts of money we’re talking about are too trivial.

Everyone is arguing over the questions of whether we ought to leave the debt limit at $14 trllion, or increase it by another $2 trllion or so, and whether we ought to cut spending and/or raise taxes by a mere $100 billion a year or so. And the results of these arguments, we are told, will determine whether or not, in a few days, the skies will split asunder and the seas will boil away, and Old Farts like DrRich, suddenly bereft of our God-given entitlements, will immediately be reduced to dining on cockroach-kabobs toasted over a smouldering dung fire.

But worrying so much about increasing our debt by another $2 trillion (an amount so massive, so huge, as to be unimaginable to mere mortals) is akin to worrying about having another smoke as one lies dying of lung cancer – it sure won’t help, but either way, the outcome is the same.

Our debt limit, as huge and unmanageable as it is, is not only a fictional construct, but it serves as a soothing distraction from our real fiscal problem – the one that really does promise Armageddon.

Our unfunded liabilities, over the next few decades, for the things our society has promised and is obligated by law to shell out for us Old Farts – things like Social Security and Medicare – is at least $62 trillion, and some have projected double that amount. Now, there’s a real problem.

We can’t talk about that, though. If a politician proposes the first, meager step towards finding a solution to that, they will show up in a TV ad pushing sweet old ladies off a cliff.

In any case, we are not facing Armageddon next week.

That’s for later.

Podcast:

While all the Republicans and Democrats in Washington are spending all these fine summer weekends fighting over the debt ceiling, and so far have absolutely nothing to show for it, the smart people at the New York Times have gone ahead and solved the whole debt problem for us.

Blaring at us from the front page of today’s Sunday Review, in huge, bright red print, we see the following chain of logic: A 20% tax on soft drinks will produce a 20% reduction in consumption, which will prevent 1.5 million people from becoming obese, which will prevent 400,000 cases of diabetes – yielding $30 billion in health savings.

This revelation leaves DrRich slapping his forehead and wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Simply use the tax code and the regulatory muscle of the Central Authority to change human behavior in the proper manner, and everything will fall into place.

It takes a special kind of person to believe that human behavior is so predictable, and so controllable, that one can actually titrate in such a manner the amount of obesity that exists in a society, and therefore, titrate the cost of healthcare. It takes a special kind of person to believe that, simply by tweaking a specific tax here, or adding a specific regulation there, one’s actions will yield precisely the response predicted by the “experts,” and that this response will translate precisely down a complex chain of assumptions (based on selective analysis, conjecture and wishful thinking) to yield cost savings anything similar to those predicted, and that the cascade of results (not being subject to any vagaries of human nature) will not have all manner of unintended consequences. That special kind of person is called a Progressive.

Let’s say that some really smart operative in the Obama administration, reading today’s Times, takes it into his head to solve the obesity crisis, the healthcare crisis, and the debt crisis all in one brilliant stroke, and accordingly, gets the President to appoint the entire New York Times Editorial Staff as the country’s new Czar of Food. These fine folks, sensing a once in a lifetime opportunity and not wanting to squander it on such small potatoes as a softdrink tax, decide to go all out. They institute large, prohibitive taxes on ALL the foods consumed by our society that contribute to our obesity. As a result, the only foodstuffs that remain untaxed are fresh fruits, vegetables, and fish. (And, considering the possibility that one or more of the NYT editorial staffers may very well be vegans, DrRich is not sure about the fish.)

According to the Times’ variety of calculus, this action will have remarkably positive consequences.  The consumption of unhealthy, obesity-producing foods will drop by some very large amount – probably 90% if the taxes are high enough – and American obesity will nearly disappear. Diabetes will go the way of tuberculosis and leprosy, all the other medical disorders made worse by obesity will greatly diminish, and we will save trillions of dollars in healthcare expenditures.

What would actually happen, of course, is quite different.

If all sugary foods and fatty foods and processed foods were heavily taxed, the demand on the untaxed foods (the fruits, vegetables and fish) would skyrocket, and prices would go through the roof. Only the very wealthy could get all the healthy food they wanted. The merely wealthy would get some of the healthy food, and would supplement their diets with the unhealthy stuff, grudgingly paying the excessive taxes to do so. DrRich does not know what the poor would do for food, but he bets they would be pissed.

A lot of other unpleasant things would happen as well. The companies that process foods and soft drinks – and most American restaurants – would suffer badly, and would probably go out of business. Robust black markets would establish themselves, trafficking in inexpensive, calorie-dense (and possibly even tasty) foodstuffs, which would now be produced in Mexico, Canada and China instead of in the US. Junk food cartels would murder each other along our borders. Americans would find themselves envying, rather than pitying, that occasional old fart who is discovered dining on a can of Fancy Feast Cat Food.

And furthermore, Americans will learn something about one’s ideal body weight that we don’t hear too much about today, because it does not fit into the “overweight is bad” narrative. Namely, while severe obesity is very bad for your health, being a little overweight is probably not so bad. Statistically speaking, it is more threatening to one’s longevity to be too thin than to be a little overweight.

DrRich does not have the solution to the obesity problem we have in America. If there is a solution, DrRich thinks it is likely to be some combination of science (since there is a large genetic component to true obesity), encouraging a sense of personal responsibility for living one’s own life, and yes, even public policy. But he finds the kind of linear thinking displayed in today’s Times – relying on assumption piled upon assumption, ignoring the obvious human and economic reactions that will knock those assumptions off their straight-line path – to be silly. And if they actually encourage public policy experts to behave in such a manner, they can be dangerous.

Podcast:

In the speech President Obama gave responding to Congressman Ryan’s budget plan (the one in which he lured Ryan to sit in the front row in order to be publicly pilloried), the President did something DrRich did not think he would do before the next election. He openly invoked, and openly embraced, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) as the chief mechanism by which Obamacare will control the cost of American healthcare.

“IPAB” might be a new term to many Americans, but DrRich pointed his readers to this entity, within a few weeks of the passage of Obamacare, as the lynchpin (and a very scary lynchpin at that) of the whole enterprise.

Until President Obama’s recent “outing” of IPAB, however, this new board has been almost entirely ignored by most commentators. Since the President’s speech, of course, many have written about it, either to celebrate it or to castigate it. (Of all these commentaries, DrRich most highly recommends the analysis provided by Doug Perednia at the Road to Hellth. In fact, DrRich recommends Perednia in general, as he is regularly producing some of the most insightful commentary, anywhere, on health policy.)

DrRich does not wish to simply repeat here all the observations that have lately been made by others regarding the IPAB. Rather, he will emphasize three particular features of the IPAB, features which are remarkable indeed, and which will tell us something very important about our Progressive leaders.

Three Remarkable Features of the IPAB

1) It has dictatorial powers.

The IPAB is a 15-member board appointed by the President.  Section 3403 of the Obamacare legislation tells us that the purpose of this board is to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending,” a noble goal indeed. Furthermore, in a superficial reading of Section 3403, one might think of the IPAB as a sort of Mr. Rogers of healthcare – a mild-mannered, friendly, always-helpful, but ultimately undemanding agent for good. This is the impression imparted by the first few paragraphs of the Section, which paint the new entity as an “advisory” board, whose main task is to develop “proposals” and “advisory reports,” which “proposals” and “advisory reports” would solely consist of various “recommendations,” that ought to be “considered” for the purpose of cost reduction.

Indeed, one might get the impression that the main difference between the IPAB and DrRich (another Mr. Rogers-like, mild mannered and undemanding personage) is that the former is appointed by the President and has a travel budget.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The IPAB is actually all-powerful.

Once the Chief Actuary of CMS determines that the projected per capita growth rate for Medicare exceeds a certain target growth rate (which it inevitably will), the IPAB is required to submit a so-called “proposal” which will cut healthcare costs sufficiently to bring the growth rate back in line; which is to say, the IPAB will determine what will be paid for and what will not. Then, the Secretary of HHS is required to implement that “proposal” in its entirety, unless Congress acts to block implementation. However, Congress is hamstrung.  The representatives of the people are forbidden from taking any action “that would repeal or otherwise change the recommendations of the Board,” unless it replaces those “recommendations” with its own legislation that would cut healthcare spending to the same target level.

For all practical purposes, then, the cost-cutting “recommendations” which the IPAB would “propose” for “consideration” will be implemented nearly automatically, with the full authority of the Federal government.

And, for all practical purposes, the IPAB will become a new agency of the executive branch, with near-dictatorial authority to cut healthcare spending where and when and for whom it sees fit.

2) It will control all healthcare spending, not just Medicare spending.

A common accusation, heard these past few weeks from conservative commentators, is that the secret desire of the President and his supporters is to make it so that the IPAB will have these same dictatorial powers over not just Medicare, but over all healthcare spending – public or private. DrRich believes these conservative commentators are unnecessarily accusing the President of being conspiratorial. In truth, no conspiracy is necessary, as this result is already law.

DrRich recommends that these conspiracy theorists read the actual legislation. It is a bit difficult to sort out, but in fact the IPAB is already granted the authority to control private as well as public healthcare spending.  It got this authority in a suitably convoluted way.

Those who paid attention to the remarkable process that brought us our new and transformational healthcare system might recall that the Senate bill, which ultimately became law of the land, was never designed to be actually implemented. It was designed solely to assure 60 votes in the Senate, after which the Joint Conference with the House was to meld the House Bill and the Senate Bill into a workable law.

As part of the negotiations to gain those original 60 votes in the Senate, five or six Democrat Senators went behind closed doors to cobble together a list of amendments to the original Senate Bill – the so-called Manager’s Amendments. It is in the Manager’s Amendments that one can find such famous niceties as the bribes paid to Nebraska in order to obtain an extra vote. But the Manager’s Amendments (which, contrary to the expectations of the actual Managers, are now part of our new healthcare law) contained lots of other stuff as well.

One of the more interesting parts of the Manager’s Amendments (Section 10320) is entitled, “Expansion Of The Scope Of, And Additional Improvements To, The Independent Medicare Advisory Board.” (The original language in Section 3403 did not actually create something called an IPAB – it created an IMAB. The Manager’s Amendments re-christened it as the IPAB, as explained below.)

Section 10320 (which can be found way down on page 2210 of the new law) grants the IPAB (beginning in 2015) the authority to limit all healthcare expenditures, that is, all healthcare expenditures, and not just expenditures by Medicare or government-run programs.

To emphasize this expanded authority, Section 10320 changes the name of the “Independent Medicare Advisory Board” (created in Section 3403) to the “Independent Payment Advisory Board.” It directs the IPAB, at least every two years, to “submit to Congress and the President recommendations to slow the growth in national health expenditures” for private (non-Federal) healthcare programs. Furthermore, it designates that these “recommendations” may be implemented by the Secretary of HHS or other Federal agencies “administratively” (that is, without the interference of Congress).

The justification for this expansion of the IPAB’s authority is that controlling private healthcare expenditures will directly impact Medicare, since the “target” Medicare growth rate which the IPAB is charged with achieving will be determined by overall healthcare expenditures. Therefore, it is necessary to control those private expenditures. More practically, if Medicare patients (who are subjected to arbitrary cost-cutting measures) see their younger counterparts enjoying less restricted healthcare, we old farts are likely to become inconveniently rowdy.

Once the Managers had devised enough paybacks in the Managers’ Amendments to get the needed 60 votes, and the law finally passed in the Senate, President Obama and his Congressional allies, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi, determined that allowing the new law to go to Joint Conference would be counterproductive (in particular, they would undoubtedly have lost Section 10302 if the House Democrats ever saw it). So the entire Congress was coerced into voting on the bill as passed by the Senate – including all the Managers’ Amendments – under the reasoning that passing the law right then was a manifest emergency.  And Congress, like the rest of us, could find out what was in it after it became law.

We are likely to hear grumbling from even some House Democrats as the real implications of the IPAB become more apparent to the public, since the House Democrats really didn’t get an opportunity to vote on (or read) this provision, except as part of an “all or nothing” healthcare reform bill.

Whatever. While the IPAB may begin by only controlling the cost of Medicare, it already has the authority to control all healthcare spending, including private spending. That’s you, dear reader. No further legislative action is needed.

3) It is an immutable entity.

Section 3403, the section that creates the IPAB and spells out its functions, contains some remarkable language that, DrRich suspects, has never been seen before in American legislative history. To wit:

“It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.”

So, the astounding truth, dear reader, is that the IPAB and all its designated dictatorial functions are in force for perpetuity. Our Congress has passed legislation that purports to bind all future Congresses from altering it in any way.

We can surmise from this fact that those who wrote this law must consider the IPAB to be very, very important. Of course, we know this because President Obama said so just the other week. However, what many Americans may not yet realize is that the IPAB provision of Obamacare must necessarily be not only the most important feature of our new healthcare system, but also the most important legislative provision ever written. We know this because no other provision has ever received such extraordinary protections from any future alterations whatsoever.

DrRich asks his readers to bask in the utter audacity of our current crop of leaders, leaders who are so sure they know what’s best for us that they were willing to engage in all manner of legislative legerdemain to pass Obamacare, not only against the apparent expressed will of the people, but also (as it turns out) against the objections any future American Congress may have that is sent to Washington by those people.

Not even our Constitution itself – a document that attempted to establish a government for all time – was as audacious as this. For the Constitution, at least, provided a mechanism for its own alteration.

As DrRich racked his brain to think of the last time a law was promulgated with such audacity – not with the audacity of hope, but the audacity of perpetuity – he initially drew a blank. Even monarchs who purported to reign under Divine Right understood that future monarchs, who would also rule under the same God-given right, might thus alter any laws they made.

DrRich believes we need to go all the way back to Moses, coming down from Mt. Sinai and holding aloft his awesome Tablets filled with divine writ, to find a law or set of laws that, from the moment they were written, were decreed to remain in force for ever and ever.

Only God has ever tried this before.

What Does This Tell Us About Progressives?

DrRich has gone on at some length about the Progressive program and the Progressive mindset. The creation of the IPAB, its configuration, and the manner in which it was created, simply reflects that program and that mindset.

Progressives are dedicated to “progressing” to a perfect society, and they know just how to achieve it. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people – not merely right-wingers and a few Republicans, but most of the masses – just don’t see it their way. Specifically, the Progressive program requires individuals to subsume their own individual interests to the overriding interests of the collective – and human nature just doesn’t function that way.

Thus, the Progressive program inevitably relies on a cadre of elites – those who have dedicated themselves to furthering the Progressive program – to set things up the right way for the rest of us, while manipulating we in the teeming masses to let them. And the rest of us, once the correct programs and systems are in place, will at last understand that it was all for our own good. (Those of us who still don’t get it, to extrapolate from the actions of various collectivist governments of the past century, will either have to be re-educated or eliminated.)

The IPAB would serve as an ideal poster child for the Progressive program. It is an all-powerful commission of experts, appointed by Progressive leaders, which will make decisions based on only the “best” available data (and they are the determinants of what is “best”), that deeply affects the lives of every individual American, whatever the decisions might be that individuals would have made for themselves.

The manner in which the IPAB was created is a model for the Progressives. It involved manipulating the body of government that the Progressives find most problematic – the Congress, the voice of the people – and entirely marginalizing it.

The immutability of the IPAB is also a Progressive dream. Congress was manipulated into creating an all-powerful entity which it (the voice of the people) is enjoined from ever altering, down into perpetuity.  The IPAB is forever within the control of the executive branch, which the Progressives, of course, intend to hang on to at all costs.  (And, if lost, is relatively easy to regain.)

The fact that President Obama has at last brought the IPAB out of the closet, and has deemed it to be ready for public scrutiny, indicates that he is confident that the people will not understand the profound nature of what has been accomplished by the establishment of such an entity, or if they understand, will still be indifferent about it.

DrRich dearly hopes the President is wrong about this.

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A well-known Progressive blogger has taken issue with this post – and with DrRich.  See DrRich’s reply to said well-known blogger, here.

Podcast:

When Congressman Ryan released the House Republican budget plan a few weeks ago, he made it clear that he believed his proposal would engender a vigorous reaction from the Progressive leadership of our government. He further expressed the hope that such a reaction would at last engage both sides in a real debate about how to reduce our crushing federal deficit, which is growing fast enough to promise societal disintegration within a generation or two.

So when President Obama subsequently announced that he was giving a speech that would articulate a meaningful response to the Ryan proposal, and invited Congressman Ryan and some of his Republican confederates to attend, the Republicans respectfully showed up and sat in their designated front row seats, expecting, they said, to hear the President lay out some common ground for tough but necessary negotiations on reducing our debt.

Of course, that is not what happened. The President’s tone was righteous, accusatory, uncompromising. He ripped Ryan and colleagues each a new one, accusing them of attempting to “end Medicare as we know it,” and of trying to balance the federal budget by throwing old people under the bus, and depriving them of their God-given right to healthcare. While I am President, he indicated, the Republicans will never succeed in their efforts to break the social compact we have made with our elderly citizens. Never! (And through the whole speech, there the hapless Republicans sat, fidgeting with increasing discomfort and dismay – the self-satisfied perpetrators of this dastardly plan, the unfeeling tools of the wealthy and special interests – right there in the front row.)

After the speech, Congressman Ryan described himself as supremely disappointed by the President’s words and his tone. Ryan clearly felt he and his Republican friends had been set up by the President’s invitation, and had been maneuvered into attending their own lynching.

DrRich is disappointed, too – not by the President’s speech (which DrRich could easily have written for him) – but by Ryan’s apparent surprise. It occurs to DrRich that members of the President’s opposition simply do not understand where he is coming from, or how to deal with him. This is a very scary thought.

President Obama’s response to Ryan’s budget plan was not offered as an opening position for negotiations. It was, instead, an impassioned statement of First Principles, principles that define the difference between good and evil. There will be no compromise on first principles, no compromise with evil, no negotiations, no taking of prisoners.

This firm, uncompromising and immediate response (with the evil-doers sitting just a few feet away) came from the same President who deliberated for months after commanders in the field begged for an immediate infusion of more troops in Afghanistan, who equivocated for two years over the closing of Guantanamo, who waffled, also for years, on where to try captured terrorists and who should try them, and who allowed the tax rates for 2011 to remain unresolved until the last days of 2010. But this time he was sure of his position, and he was sure of it instantaneously and instinctively, as a matter of principle. His position on this matter is a reflection of his very core.

And what was it about Ryan’s plan that suddenly turned President Obama’s spine to titanium? It was this: Ryan’s plan would require at least some of the elderly to pay for some of their own healthcare.

The Ryan plan, in outline, is to convert the Medicare program to a voucher system, and allow the elderly to purchase their own health insurance from a pool of choices. Ryan has specified that the poor and the sick would receive full healthcare coverage – better coverage (he insists) than they are getting today. But well-to-do elderly Americans would have to carry at least some of their own weight, and to get the coverage they need would have to add their own funds to their federal vouchers. (An oft-ignored point is that anybody currently 55 or over would never be subject to Ryan’s new system, but would continue to receive Medicare as it is today.)

DrRich chooses to ignore for now the fact that the health insurance industry will never go for such a plan, since it requires them to operate under their current, utterly broken business model, and that therefore Ryan’s plan is a non-starter.  It is still an honest and principled attempt at a solution.

Ryan’s plan has the virtue of recognizing the fact that we cannot afford to purchase with public funds all healthcare for all individuals. That’s what is causing our federal debt to skyrocket to catastrophic proportions. And, recognizing that fact, his plan would require some elderly Americans, the ones who can afford it, to contribute their own funds to their healthcare coverage.

Require the rich to pay more. Isn’t this what President Obama has been saying all along?

So why is the President so adamantly opposed to such a thing?

This whole Obama-Ryan kerfuffle is simply a graphic illustration of a point DrRich has made many, many times before. Any Progressive healthcare system, at the end of the day, must attempt to centralize all healthcare decisions, and thus to direct ALL healthcare spending, and therefore, will have to restrict individuals from spending their own money (and making important decisions) on their own healthcare. DrRich has explained why this kind of restriction will be fundamental to Progressive healthcare reform, and he has described some of the steps our government has already taken to implement such restrictions. It is likely true that Progressives will have to make a few minor compromises here and there in order to advance the program as a whole (perhaps, for instance, allowing people to buy their own “alternative medicine” products). But they can never compromise to the extent that the Ryan plan would require.

Obama’s impassioned speech neatly reflects this fundamental precept. For the Ryan plan, or any plan, to not only allow but also require people to contribute to their own healthcare is a mortal sin under the Progressive program. And anyone who advances such a plan is anathema, and must be dealt with harshly. Just as Obama dealt with Ryan.

We are only a tiny step away from having any proposal such as Ryan’s being labeled as hate speech. Heck, after the President’s performance, we may be there already.

Podcast:

The last two weeks have made clear that the debate over our national debt will play a major role in the next election cycle.

On one side, many Republicans, lead by Representative Ryan, insist that the rate of growth of our national debt – especially the massive projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid – promises to destroy our society within a generation or two; and that the only way to avert that catastrophe is to make substantial structural changes to our entitlement programs. The subtext of their message is: Federal debt is bad, and debt of this magnitude will be fatal.

On the other side, most Democrats, led by President Obama, stress that our entitlement programs are promises that simply can’t be changed in any substantial way, insist that such entitlements are “investments in our future,” and suggest that whatever shortfalls our current system might encounter can be remedied by taxing millionaires and billionaires. The subtext of their message is: Federal debt can be a force for good, and in this case will trigger a much-needed redistribution of wealth (which is a primary goal of Progressives).

The debate over the national debt is as old as the Republic. In the original version of this debate, the part of the modern Republicans (i.e., debt is bad) was played by Jefferson, and the part of modern Democrats (i.e., debt is an investment in the future) by Hamilton.

In the early 1790s, unsupportable debt obligations, accumulated during the Revolutionary War and held by the various states and by private individuals, had entirely frozen up the credit markets, and precluded the brand new United States from having a functioning economy. Hamilton’s idea was for the federal government to buy up all these private and state obligations, and then issue federal bonds to raise enough capital to pay off the debt and to provide stuff, like a United States Navy, that would encourage investment and economic growth. (That Jefferson so viscerally disagreed with this approach, believing that all Americans should grow their own food and make their own clothes, etc., and that a national financial system was not only unnecessary but dangerous, was one of the chief factors that led to the two-party system in the U.S.)

Hamilton ended up doing a deal with Jefferson, and got his way (agreeing to move the nation’s capital southward, where the feds would find it more difficult to undermine some of the south’s more peculiar institutions).  And as a result of Hamilton’s massive and unprecedented bailout of the various states and private investors*, the United States of America became not only one united country, but a stable and growing concern. Indeed, it is arguably by this action that Hamilton definitively earned his place as one of our most important Founding Fathers.

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*Many of the “private investors” who needed to be bailed out turned out to be prominent political figures and supporters of Hamilton, whose names we’ve all heard and revered, and whose shady deals had helped to produce the fiscal crisis in the first place. So there are indeed many parallels to our current situation.
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Clearly, not all national debt is bad. Sometimes, just as President Obama insists, acquiring debt can be an investment in the future.

In fact, Hamilton’s great insight was that national debt can be the engine of economic growth. When the government borrows money to build out the national infrastructure, to provide easier access to markets, to provide easier transportation of goods, to provide easier access to energy, and to provide a stronger military to guarantee that its investments are safe, the government is doing what businesses do when they want to grow. It is borrowing money today that will generate economic growth, and that will, in turn, repay that borrowed money with interest. That’s good debt.

When Hamilton bailed out the various states and the private investors, he was essentially buying up war debt. He was taking upon the federal government the responsibility for paying for the war that had created the United States in the first place. In economic terms the Revolutionary War was like the high-risk start-up that exhausts its funding in creating its product. While the product of their effort (i.e. independence) was intrinsically very valuable, the various states had bankrupted themselves in achieving it. And because the states were bankrupt, commerce was paralyzed, and the new country was about to break up into warring factions. Hamilton saw that by creating a central entity to buy up the debt, and to raise capital against the country’s new independence, he could realize the intrinsic value of the new nation. Hamilton’s debt, because it was truly a catalyst to pent-up economic potential, was good debt. It truly was an investment in the nation’s future, one that paid off for future generations of Americans beyond even his wildest dreams.

On the other hand, when we accumulate national debt not to catalyze a growing economy, but instead to buy consumable products for individuals that the individuals “ought” to be buying for themselves (because they are consuming the products themselves), that’s just debt. It’s like credit card debt – it’s debt that is not paying for itself by stimulating new economic growth for the borrower, but instead it’s debt that will just have to be paid off sooner or later, and that in the meantime requires large payments in the form of interest. Such debt is not an investment in the borrower’s future; it’s not creating future growth that pays for itself. Instead, this kind of debt often compounds until it collapses of its own weight. That’s bad debt.

That’s the kind of debt, for instance, that was created by the mortgage crisis. The federal government has now gone into great hock buying up mortgages taken out by its individual citizens. It is taking steps to help those individuals stay in the houses they cannot afford, and to protect the institutions that made those bad loans. It is not taking active steps to stop the issuing of the sub-prime mortgages that created the crisis in the first place. One of the chief reasons we hear for freeing up the credit markets is so that more sub-prime mortgages can be issued. The notion that all Americans should have access to reasonable shelter is a compelling one. But that’s different from a policy that allows individual Americans to choose their own shelter, from a vast array of choices, and then send the taxpayer the bill.

While going into national debt bailing out the sub-prime mortgages is bad debt, it is nothing compared to our going into national debt buying healthcare for individuals. Our accumulating healthcare debt is really bad debt. According to the GAO, we’re already committed to accumulating $25 trillion to $55 trillion in healthcare debt over the next several decades. Furthermore, when a person “consumes” healthcare, it is well and truly consumed. There’s nothing left (except, for the individual, some chance of prolonged life or less suffering, which is good for the individual but neutral to our national economic health). At least when the government buys up mortgage debt it owns actual real estate, which has some intrinsic worth. Not so when buying up healthcare debt.

So going into massive debt paying for Medicare and Medicaid is not the same as the debt Hamilton took on in the 1790s. We’re merely accumulating debt, and not stimulating future growth. In fact, our irresponsible accumulation of bad debt is stifling economic growth.

So President Obama is correct to the extent that, sometimes, taking on a certain amount of the right kind of debt (the kind that stimulates real economic growth) can be an investment in the future.

But the Republicans are correct that the debt we’re taking on to pay for Medicare and Medicaid is not that kind of “investment,” but is a fiscal black hole – as we will all find out if we don’t get this debate right.

Podcast:

For some time now, numerous loved ones and dear friends have been advising and occasionally urging DrRich that, perhaps, it has become a bit inappropriate, and even unseemly, for him to continue in his longtime position as President and sole member of Future Old Farts of America (FOFA). For a not unsubstantial interval DrRich ignored this advice, feigning incipient deafness. But finally, after some focused study of that which these days returns his gaze in the mirror, and reluctantly concluding that maybe his loved ones have a point (and not wishing to seem Cranky), DrRich has reluctantly decided to resign from (and therefore disband) FOFA.

DrRich is pleased to announce that he has accepted a new position as President and sole member of Glorious Old Farts of America (GOFA).

And it is in this new capacity that DrRich has become alarmed at some of the dire warnings now being sounded by respected leaders of the Democratic Party, to the effect that the Republicans’ proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2012, released last week by Congressman Paul Ryan (who serves, DrRich believes, as Deputy Whippersnapper of the House Republican caucus), proves that Republicans are trying to kill old people.

Article 3, Subsection 4(D) of the GOFA charter clearly states: “All things being equal, we would prefer that Old Farts not be killed.”

Therefore, as President of GOFA, DrRich feels obligated to make some sort of public response to the Ryan budget, and to our ever-vigilant Democrat friends’ assertion that it is aimed at producing lethal harm to old people. DrRich’s important position in GOFA, of course, means that his opinion on this matter ought to carry serious weight in any high level discussions about this proposed budget.

By carefully studying the thoughtful commentary being offered by GOFA’s Democrat friends, DrRich has ascertained that Ryan’s proposed budget apparently will kill old people by “ending Medicare as we know it.”  DrRich does not find this a compelling argument, since Medicare as we know it is already being ended, by Obamacare, which is now the law of the land. Strangely, Democrat leaders are not claiming that Obamacare also kills old people.

So, as is all too often the case, the logic being offered up for public consumption by our political leaders does not hold up to simple analysis, which places DrRich into the position of having himself to provide the logical analysis of the question at hand.

DrRich, to be clear, frames that question thusly: Which plan for Medicare most threatens to kill old people? And he finds abroad in the land three distinct plans for Medicare: Medicare “as we know it,” Medicare under Obamacare, and Medicare under the Ryan budget. Let us analyze dispassionately how each proposes to kill the elderly.

Medicare As We Know It. Medicare as it is being operated today is generally popular with GOFA’s constituency, and most old people would like to continue things just as they are. And if you are one of those elderly Americans who is above, say, 75 years of age, chances are you would do just fine under Medicare as we know it. That is, odds are that you would live out your allotted years, and finally die from your heart disease or cancer only after enjoying every modern contrivance our healthcare system has devised.

However, if you are substantially younger than that, there is a real chance that your demise will be related to more systematic causes. This is because Medicare, if it were to continue just as it is today, would drive the U.S. into insolvency within a couple of decades, leading to cultural collapse, societal upheaval, &c. Our modern healthcare system (any modern healthcare system), being totally dependent upon a robust, complex, reasonably stable and technologically advanced society, would cease to exist. All of today’s life-prolonging therapies would either become very scarce, or would disappear altogether. And unless there arises out of the ashes a new culture which is centered upon ancestor worship, odds are that what little healthcare is available would not be disproportionally offered to the very old.

As DrRich sees it, continuing Medicare as we know it would ultimately result in most of our elderly dying much earlier than they do today.

Medicare Under Obamacare. Obamacare promises to prevent a Medicare-induced societal collapse by centralizing virtually all healthcare decisions, thus controlling expenditures. Government-appointed “experts” will decide which medical services ought to be offered to which patients, and will publish those decisions as “guidelines” (a euphemism for “directives”), which will be followed to the letter by doctors who wish to continue their careers and stay out of jail.

DrRich has argued herein that such a system will do great harm to many individuals in all age groups, and will effectively end the Great American Experiment. (Unlike some, DrRich would consider this latter result to be a bad thing.) But our question at the moment is more focused: Will old people be killed disproportionally under Obamacare?

DrRich thinks the answer is yes. First, “guidelines” have the most merit when they are applied to patients whose only (or main) disease is the one to which the guideline applies. For patients with multiple serious ailments, or who are beginning to suffer from various motor and sensory disabilities related to aging, the response to (or ability to follow) standardized treatment directives may be far less than supposed. The reduced ability of doctors to tailor therapy to individual needs (without incurring the undifferentiated wrath of the Central Authority) may thus prove particularly harmful to the elderly.

Second, our leadership class has already anticipated that merely centralizing all healthcare decisions will be insufficient to avert a fiscal disaster, and that more stringent controls will have to be employed. While they do not like to discuss such contingencies publicly, when they do, they make it clear that the elderly will have a reduced priority for healthcare services. That is, there will be age-based rationing.

Third, it is plain that Obamacare will attempt to make it illegal for elderly Americans (or any Americans) to go outside the system to purchase their own healthcare. Old farts will get what the Central Authority says they will get, and nothing more.

DrRich believes Obamacare would end up being pretty tough on the elderly, and that many old people will die earlier than they would die today.

Medicare Under The Ryan Plan. The Ryan plan offers to allow anyone who is 55 or older to remain on Medicare as we know it today. For those currently younger than 55, when they reach the age of Medicare they will be given a suite of health insurance plans to choose from, and will be given a certain amount of money by the government to use to support their premiums. This system is quite similar to that currently offered to many federal employees.

The amount of premium support will be based on the wealth of the individual. The poor and the sick, Ryan insists, will get full premium support, and indeed will end up with “better” health insurance than they would get today under Medicare. Wealthier individuals will have to pay a much higher proportion of their own insurance premiums.

The Ryan plan in its current form is little more than an outline, and DrRich would need to see details before feeling warm and fuzzy about it. But fundamentally it takes medical decisions away from a Central Authority and places those decisions back into the hands of patients. Further, it not only allows but insists that people (who can afford it) spend at least some of their own money on their own healthcare. Also, patients under the Ryan plan will be legally permitted – even encouraged – to purchase any additional healthcare they want, any time they choose. This plan restores individual autonomy (and its twin, individual responsibility) to American healthcare.

Undoubtedly, the insurance companies under the Ryan plan would be no less evil than they are today, and would do harm to patients every chance they get. But (as DrRich has amply demonstrated) so will the Feds, and it is far easier and far less dangerous for doctors and patients to fight insurance companies than the Central Authority.*

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*DrRich hastens to remind his readers that health insurance companies will want no part of a plan such as Ryan’s. Ryan’s plan would require these companies to continue operating under their current, broken business model. After fighting so hard for Obamacare (which converts insurance companies essentially to public utilities), the insurance industry will not give up its victory without a fight – especially if doctors keep insisting on publishing articles showing that old farts can do just fine after receiving intensive medical care. DrRich thinks the health insurance industry will watch the progress of the Republicans’ budget proposal carefully, and if they perceive it has any chance of success, will do whatever they need to do to stifle it.
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Would elderly people die earlier under the Ryan plan? Those who are deemed wealthy enough to contribute to their own health insurance premiums, and who as a result choose to become under-insured, may certainly die earlier. DrRich supposes this is what the Democrats mean by “killing old people,” since he can find no other rationale to support such a statement.

The Bottom Line. Ultimately, the worst thing that could happen to us old farts would be for the current Medicare system to continue as it is, without any meaningful fiscal reforms. The two other plans for Medicare both promise to control government expenditures on healthcare, and thus promise to avoid the societal collapse (and mass elderly casualties) that likely would be produced by doing nothing.

Obamacare accomplishes this by placing healthcare decisions into the hands of government-chosen “experts” who will determine the management of individuals from a great distance, and by giving the elderly a lower priority in unavoidable rationing schemes.

In contrast, the Ryan plan proposes to avert catastrophe by placing elderly individuals in the position of having to choose (and in many cases partially pay for) their own health insurance product, and then live with those choices.

Speaking on behalf of the entire GOFA organization, DrRich would rather his fellow old farts die as a result of their own personal choices in a plan like Ryan’s, than die as the first victims of the societal upheaval, or through the tyranny, promised by the other two options.

DrRich trusts that his position as President of such an august organization will render his opinion in this matter dispositive.