The real problem with the healthcare system

If Congress is really interested in solving the healthcare crisis in this country they would stopped medical “scalping”. Recently on NBC Nightly News there was a report on third party companies that set themselves up as middlemen in the medical supplies game. They showed a cancer drug that the manufacturer charges $12.00 a vial for, that had been marked up by medical scalpers to over $900.00.

This is one of the many reasons that healthcare is so expensive in this country. There apparently are no regulations preventing this type of profiteering. Hospitals and other service providers routinely double-(or even triple)bill for services received. Or they charge for services that were not rendered. This is especially true in the cases of people who have insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. These service providers feel that if someone else is paying then no harm no foul. Most people with insurance don’t read the itemized bill to insure that they are being charged properly. They have insurance so the big companies will foot the bill. This of course drives up premiums for the rest of their customers.

When Congress passed Obamacare they did little if anything to stop these insane and immoral practices. Instead they simply tried to force everyone to drop their drawers and take it, spreading the same costs around. The problem with this mentality is that because it does nothing to address the underlying one of the causes of spiraling healthcare costs, medical scalping, it will only exacerbate the situation. Instead they passed a bill that will most likely be found unconstitutional. However we have laws against scalping and price gouging and they have NOT been found to be unconstitutional.

This lack of intelligence in lawmaking shows that the healthcare bill was really about vote buying and control of the American public. Both major parties receive campaign contributions from some of the companies and they certainly are not going to endanger their revenue streams by actually making good law.

We need a new Congress that’s smart enough and morally strong enough to say no, and yes when absolutely necessary.

Hold on to your money and your gas

In January, you can probably wave goodbye to the lower gas prices that we have experienced over the past several weeks. When the Democrats take a bigger slice of Congress and Barack Obama moves into the Oval Office the promises of domestic oil exploration will evaporate like so many gas fumes. The Dems are already talking about reinstating the offshore oil drilling ban. But why is it, you may think, that gas prices have dropped by almost half throughout most of the country? It was the furor that the American people raised at paying $4.00 a gallon over the summer. They demanded that domestic oil reserves be tapped regardless of where they were located. The oil speculators and the OPEC nations were scared that their only source of income would completely dry up. Now that the election is won and the prices have dropped so low, you will see all of the platitudes that the Liberals in Congress made disappear and your gas prices go up. And this time they will say that higher gas prices are good because it will force America to find "more sustainable" energy.

An open letter to Republicans

Dear Republicans,

Well here we are at the beginning of our long exile from power. We have two groups to blame for our ouster: the leadership in the Republican party and the selfish American people (see my previous post). Because I have already addressed the issue of the selfishness of the American people, and I have already given fair warning to the Democrats about the next two to four years, it's your turn my brothers and sisters.

I originally was going to do a bullet list of the problems facing the Republicans at this time. However, I felt that maybe it would be better to go in depth with the problems and some possible solutions. I mean we have to be optimistic and have a “Yes we can” attitude.

First of all the leaders of the party must be held accountable for their lackluster performance. We have already shed some like Denny Hastert, but it will take a scorched-earth policy to cleanse us of the scourge of neo-conservatism. We should be die-hard conservatives, pure and simple.

The next thing we must rid ourselves of is the label “compassionate conservative”. The very term should make us cringe. It's as if we're admitting the old liberal chestnut that conservatives are crotchety old Scrooges that want to take the home away from the old widow lady. If we truly believe in the merits of our conservative principles, then it is not necessary for us to say that we are “compassionate” conservatives.

We must not put all of our eggs in one basket. While most of the members of our party are God-fearing people who believe in social conservatism, we can't rely on that one side of our nature to win over the moderates and independents. Abortion is murder, pure and simple, but we have no hope of eliminating that horror if we are still in exile or we don't have a super-majority in the Congress. Gay marriage is slowly being decided on a state-by-state basis, and remember we believe in states' rights, right?

Keeping with the topic of diversification we must also not rely too heavily on security and defense as a crutch. We know we are strong on defense and the American people know we are strong on defense. We don't need to keep reminding people, especially in the current economic climate. Obviously the American people are more concerned at this point with getting something-for-nothing, and robbing those that earned it to give to those that didn't to be concerned at this time with little things like national defense (even though we are still fighting a war of terror).

Next we as a party must become a part of the information age. We cannot sit idly by while people like Moveon.org and Daily Kos corner the market on the high tech sector of campaigning. There are some good sites out there, like RedState.com and PajamasMedia.org, but we have to do more. We have to hit iPods, iPhones, YouTube, Blackberries and new emerging venues. We need to add tools to our arsenal, like Flash animation and Conservative web programming. Again we have a start with sites like Stop-him-now.com (which has apparently ceased to exist) which used Flash animation to poke jabs at Obama and the Dems as a whole. But it never achieved the regularity of liberal forums like MarkFiore.com, only producing sporadic animation. In fact, the site started as Stop-her-now.com, and was directed at Hillary Clinton during the primaries. So it never achieved the coherency of purpose that it needed.

Which brings me to our next point. We cannot continue to target Billary—or now Obama—solely. We must take a broad approach to the entire Democrat party. We can target those that lean too far to the Left, but we also have to target the Dems that are considered moderate of conservative. If we are to gain the necessary seats in the Senate we have to go after all comers.

We must be judicious in our use of the filibuster. We don't want to give the Democrats a reason to use the so-called “nuclear” option. We also can use that refusal to use the filibuster as a way to not go on the record without voting the dreaded “present”. This way it will be easier to put the complete responsibility of Democrat failures solely on their own heads. They won't be able to claim that the reason that things are bad is because of Republican obstructionism.

Finally, any Republican candidate that promises to take only public funding should be immediately disqualified for mental incompetence. We need to target smaller donors, like Obama did in this election. It is the only way we can compete.

We have a long road to hoe brothers and sisters and the days will be long and the winds cold but we can reclaim the Congress and the White House if we are persistent and if we stick to our principles.

Love,

The America Report