Showing below up to 25 results in range #101 to #125.
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"Democrats can't expect to ram through a bill as life-changing as health care reform without building broad support. They've got to start over. This work should be done in the middle. The proposals were written by the far left, with no input from Republicans and too little from moderate Democrats. Go back to Washington this fall with the goal of passing a streamlined bill that attacks the cost of health care and expands access, but stays away from anything that looks like a government takeover."
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"Most cases of disease should be managed in other, more affordable ways. Functional, cost-effective health care must be based on a new kind of medicine that relies on the human organism's innate capacity for self-regulation and healing. It would use inexpensive, low-tech interventions for the management of the commonest forms of disease. It would be a system that puts the health back into health care. And it would also happen to be far less expensive than what we have now."
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"In overhauling any segment of our economy, the 1986 tax reform should be the model. Yet today's ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity -- employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions -- with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs. This is all quite mad."
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"Listening to the health-care debate, I hear Republicans and Democrats saying it's wrong to deny anyone anything. That head-in-the-sand attitude is why Medicare has a $36-trillion unfunded liability. It's not sustainable—and they know it. They've given us a system that now can be saved only if bureaucrats limit coverage by second-guessing retirees' decisions. Government will decide which Medicare services have value and which do not. Retirees may have a different opinion."
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"Obama insists that what's needed is more insurance competition. So why is Congress focused on the complex mechanics of creating a public insurance company with his full support, when the chief barrier to national insurance competition is a set of federal and state regulations that prevents competition among existing private insurers?"
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"Massachusetts's experience should caution Congress against focusing primarily on access. While the Massachusetts plan has reduced the number of uninsured people, costs have been dramatically higher than expected. The result? Increased taxes and fees. The Boston Globe has reported on a current short-term funding gap and the need to obtain a new federal bailout. Imagine the scope of tax increases, or additional deficit spending, if that approach is utilized for the entire country."
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"The heavy hand of government on health insurance already in the law is one factor driving up insurance costs. Legislators, responding to appeals from interest groups and real complaints from constituents, load mandates onto health insurance policies."
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"More likely, your employer will simply find that the increased cost and administrative burden is not worth it, and will dump you into the government-run "public option." The Lewin Group, an independent actuarial firm, estimates that under the House version of the bill, as many as 89.5 million workers will simply lose their current employer-provided plan and be forced into government-run insurance."
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"Why be scared of a government health program? After all, the president says, "Medicare is a government program that works really well," and if "we're able to get something right like Medicare," we should have more "confidence" about being able to do it for everyone. On the other hand, the president says, Medicare is "unsustainable" and "running out of money." By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician's contradictory statements, these weren't made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H."
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"How stupid do they think we are? Stupid enough to think that a new $1 trillion health-care entitlement is just the thing to restore the country to fiscal health. Stupid enough not to realize that it is through budget trickery -- the taxes begin immediately, the spending is put off for a few years -- that the program in the House shows "only" a $239 billion deficit over the first 10 years. "
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"The primary cause of medical price increases is the government coercions. But the cause of the coercions is the idea that health care is a right. Until we understand that nothing is a "right" if others must be forced to provide it, we will continue to swallow the same poison, and we will reap even worse consequences in the future."
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"That puts Obama squarely against Benjamin Franklin, who said, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Franklin realized that politicians who attempted to buy votes by promising rich entitlements could not look out for the good of the entire country. Thus, an inevitable decline would occur."
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"It is for these reasons that I have offered market-based, fiscally responsible solutions such as the Coverage, Prevention, Reform (CPR) proposal. I also am a cosponsor of the bipartisan Healthy Americans Act, which has been introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden and Robert Bennett. Both of these measures provide high-quality coverage to all Americans without a government-run option or adding to the national debt."
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"This socialized-medicine package is a giant leap in a direction that changes the dynamic of government as a servant to the people, violating the widely acknowledged precept of democratic government, that it derives its power from those which it governs. Mr. Obama and other big-government advocates are now effectively forcing a shift in how the government views those it serves. The American government will begin to view its citizens as liabilities rather than assets."
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"The end-of-life provisions of the Obama health care plan would upset the balance of power in health care decision-making in favor of doctors and hospitals and against individuals and families. The federal legislation provides an economic incentive for doctors and hospital administrators to use Medicare funds to start hastening certain patient deaths a bit sooner under existing state laws."
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"In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."
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"Consider Medicare, which is projected to go broke within the decade. As the baby-boom generation ages, it will put only more stress on the system. With more than 25% of all Medicare costs generated in the last two months of life, government already has the motive to ration care to the elderly. If the House legislation were to become law, these new government bureaucracies would then also potentially have the power. Are we supposed to trust that they won't use it?"
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"The Heritage Foundation estimated that Jim DeMint's plan, which, like the Patients' Choice Act, is based on vouchers, would insure an extra 22.4 million people -- more than the 16 million that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would be added to health insurance rolls by ObamaCare. The numbers for the PCA, which Heritage did not study, are likely similar."
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"Leave aside the shocking off-handedness with which the president promised to put tens of millions of Americans in a system that he himself compared to the one that "is always having problems." The US Postal Service is characterized by monopoly, long waits, indifferent treatment of customers, dwindling services, billions in losses and expert opinion that it would work better as a private firm -- exactly the list of flaws critics cite about ObamaCare."
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"Now, I don't think "Soylent Green"-style solutions are coming down the pike. But every nationalized health-care system to one degree or another rations care based on the quality of life and number of "life years" a procedure will yield. That's perfectly reasonable. If you put me in charge of everyone's health care, I would do that, too. That's a really good argument for not giving me -- or anyone else -- that power."
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"Back on Earth, a rigorous study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, "if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success," the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country's total medical bill by 162 percent. That's because prevention applied to large populations is very expensive, as shown by another report Elmendorf cites, a definitive review in the New England Journal of Medicine of hundreds of studies that found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs."
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"New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have both community rating and guaranteed issue. And, no surprise, they have the three most expensive individual insurance markets among all 50 states, with premiums roughly two to three times higher than the rest of the country. In 2007, the average annual premium in New Jersey was $5,326 for singles and in New York $12,254 for a family, versus the national average of $2,613 and $5,799, respectively. ObamaCare would impose New York-type rates nationwide."
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"Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America."
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"If the goal is to make each of us pay the health costs linked to our own indulgences, there's a more efficient way to do it: Simply make everyone pay his own medical bills -- and scrap nationalized health care altogether. Lifestyle dictators will have none of that, of course. They'd rather end personal financial responsibility for health-care costs and then claim government has a right to mandate how we live -- since it pays the bills. Which is why a vote for government health care is a vote for government-run life."
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"No president has spoken more forcefully about the need to control costs. Failure, he's argued, would expand federal budget deficits, raise out-of-pocket health costs and squeeze take-home pay (more compensation would go to insurance). All true. But Obama's program would do little to reduce costs and would increase spending by expanding subsidized insurance. The House legislation would cut the number of uninsured by 37 million by 2018, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. The uninsured get care now; with insurance they'd get more."
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