A Glimpse Of What Socialized Medicine Would Produce

In another example of government bureaucracy s lack of compassion toward elder health care and complete disregard for accepted clinical treatment standards and the Hippocratic Oath. The federal government(DHHS) is demanding repayment of hundreds of millions of dollars from hospices that exceeded arbitrary Medicare reimbursement limits because they enabled residents to live longer than permitted by the government. The key words are "live longer than permitted". Showing no sense of humanity, the federal government’s retroactively assessed reverse charges are being sent to hospices that already spent the funds delivering care for the terminally ill in prior years.
The result of this retroactive Medicare reimbursement demand is that many hospice providers will be put out of business. The unintended consequences of this bureaucratic meddling will reduce the number of hospice facilities and encourage the remainder to withhold care while simultaneously demanding premium increases. It is rarely clearer that government health care and its cost-control rationing is a prescription for an early grave. And still we have Democrats running for President advocating socialization of the Fine Health Care system we now have for the majority of Americans. Better they build government clinics and hospitals for the indigent, and staff them with Doctors, PAs and Nurses who are delinquent in paying there student loans, which in many cases amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We have a 9.13 trillion dollar National Debt. The three leading drains on the U.S. Treasury are Medicare, Social Security and the War. We can't quit spending for the war, or we will loose yet another war that we were wining, as we did in Vietnam.

If you don't believe that statement just read the memoirs of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap that were recently published. He wrote," the American media won the Vietnam war for the Vietcong. “What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it,” then he wrote. “But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!” Giap’s words are an important lesson from the past, to be sure. He says, "had the U.S. kept bombing Hanoi for just a few more days after Johnson called a halt they would have surrendered!"

Perhaps politicians should concentrate on waste and extravagant spending first, before they advocate more burden on the already heavily taxed American middle class.

An example of waste outside the realm of 10,000 dollar toilets for Congressmen and other such extravagant spending is the lack of communication between the IRS and the Medicare Auditing arm of Health and Human services. This would be a good place to start.

The following was reported recently by The Washington Post: The federal government has failed to collect more than $1 billion in back taxes owed by Medicare doctors and suppliers, nearly half of it payroll taxes deducted by health-care providers who spent the money on luxury cars and other personal expenses rather than sending it to the IRS, a congressional report says.
The money has not been collected because the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare, has failed to connect its computers to the Internal Revenue Service and other Treasury Department divisions, the Government Accountability Office report says. Such a connection would allow the agencies to quickly identify who owes taxes and begin deducting that money from checks the federal contractors receive from Medicare.

The situation is particularly distressing because there could easily have been a system in place to fix it. Apparently. in 2001, when the GAO first suggested to HHS that it could coordinate with Treasury to identify tax deadbeats, HHS said the two agencies' computers were not compatible, making it impossible to work together. HHS computers were updated by 2004, giving the department no excuse.
Imagine how much confusion we would have if the whole medical system was socialised if these type things were allowed, and in a free society it appears there is no limit to the graft and corruption that can occur.