Tag Archives: universal healthcare

A Tipping Point with Ominous Implications is Fast Approaching!

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Note to the reader: This article is an updated version of one that was posted shortly after my blog “Education, Hope, and the American Dream” was created and at a time when the blog’s readership was minimal.
Because I believe it is even more timely now than it was then, it is being re-posted with modifications.

As you read these words, it is vital that you realize that the United States of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, is fast approaching a tipping point that will irrevocably alter the reality in which we live.

As a result of decisions we have made as a nation, since the end of World War II, a society of second class citizens has emerged. These Americans are not full participants in the American dream. Many of these men and women have effectively become disenfranchised and why should we be surprised by this.

These are Americans who have not been well-served by our systems of public education; have little or no access to quality healthcare for their families, Obamacare notwithstanding; and, if they are employed at all, they have low paying jobs with no eligibility for healthcare benefits and no opportunities for advancement. These are Americans who have given up on the American Dream for themselves and their families. They have succumbed to a self-perpetuating cycle of powerlessness and hopelessness.

Although the demographics of this group spans the full spectrum of the American population, African-American, Hispanic-American and other minorities are over-represented. For blacks and other minorities, the sense of disenfranchisement is compounded by their lack of faith that the American justice system will treat them justly.

Mainstream Americans resent the dependency of this segment of our population every bit as much as these men, women, and children resent their lack of access to the American Dream. For a huge portion of this population the American Dream is nothing more than a failed promise.

The bitterness and resentment on both sides of the invisible barriers that separate us as a people are enhanced by the racism and discrimination that permeate our society. How ironic is it that the election of our nation’s first African-American president has proven that racism in America is alive and well.

That there is an equally large and fast-growing population of retirees who are checking out of the game at an age from which they are likely to live another quarter of a century, adds greatly to this burden. It does not matter that these retiring men and women have worked hard for their entire lives to earn their Social Security, Medicare and pensions. These facts do not change the economic dynamics that make this population a burden to the Americans in the middle who must work harder to pay the bills.

Fortunately, many of these men and women have invested well and their money is working for us even if they are not. We are only beginning to understand, however, how this aging population will begin to overwhelm an already inadequate healthcare system over the next two decades.

Add the weight of the disenfranchised and the burden is fast approaching a tipping point after which our national misfortune will accelerate and we will all begin to feel both hopeless and powerless.

The Republican Party, driven by the strong conservative dogma of the tea party movement, is choosing to ignore the needs of Mitt Romney’s imfamous “47 percent” and focus only on the needs of the middle class and, even more so, the corporate elite. These political leaders believe they can turn back the clock to a time when the white man ruled the roost and when values seemed clearer.

The Democratic Party continues to pursue its traditional liberal agenda that has become equally ineffectual.

In the meantime, China, Europe, Japan, India, and other developing nations are challenging our supremacy in the international marketplace; Al Qaeda and ISIS are seeking to spread terror to weaken “the evil empire;” and, Mother Nature is meting out the consequences of global warning.

We cannot continue to trudge down the dry and dusty paths of 20th Century political dogma, conventional wisdom, or business as usual. Somehow we must pull the disenfranchised back into the game as full and equal citizens, as believers in the American dream, and as partners in rising to the challenges of this new century. We need to do this not out of altruism, however compelling the argument, rather because we desperately need the committed participation of every single able-bodied American.

We must demand that our elected representatives cease their paralyzing bickering and begin working together in what is a conflict of historical proportions in which the very survival of our nation and way of life are at an unprecedented level risk.

We desperately need new leadership with fresh ideas to respond to these extraordinary challenges of this young Twenty-First Century and we do not have so much as a single nanosecond to spare.

I invite you to follow this blog, “Education, Hope, and the American Dream,” in which I offer innovative solutions to the problems we face as a society.

I also invite you to read my four books.

1. The Difference Is You: Power Through Positive Leadership, in which I offer the reader powerful principles that enable individual men and women to change the world around them;

2. Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, that offers a way to provide universal healthcare and prescription drugs to the American people without socialized medicine;

3. Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, in which I offer a blueprint for reinventing the educational process to one that focuses on teachers and students working toward success, absent the risk of failure; and

4. Light and Transient Causes, a novel that tells a story of what could happen if we lose faith in the principles of democracy and with one another.

Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act Mis-Named!

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The Affordable Care Act, affectionately or not so affectionately called Obamacare has been misnamed. It should have been called the Affordable Health Insurance Act because it addresses the issues of healthcare, only indirectly.

What Obamacare does is allow people to purchase health insurance coverage for themselves and their families. “Allow” is not the right word, however, as the law is set up with penalties for families who do not enroll in a health insurance plan within a designated time frame.

The types of health insurance coverage that will be available to people will vary as each individual or family will be shopping for coverage that seems to best fit their unique requirements.

The ACA also asks health insurance providers to incur more risk by eliminating provisions like pre-existing conditions. Apparently, it is a trade off for being assured of getting more business.

We admire the sentiment of the act, which was intended to reduce the number of Americans who are uninsured and, therefor, not able to get the medical or hospital care that they need.The logic is somewhat confounding, however.

Rather than make health care available to all Americans as a right of citizenship, as so many other nations have done, it was decided to require everyone to have health insurance. How they arrived at the next logical conclusion, which was to penalize people who are unwilling or who think themselves unable to pay for the now more readily available coverage, is somewhat of a mystery.

The problem with Obamacare is that it will commit our nation to a future in which we are tied to the health insurance industry. Almost certainly, the people of other developed nations must be shaking their heads in bewilderment at those crazy Americans. I’m sure they must be asking themselves why we think it a good idea to do business with a middle man who only adds cost and complexity to the process of delivering needed healthcare to people.

It is hard to come up with a comparison that illustrates the absurdity of the concept but here’s an example that at least comes close.

Earlier I used the example of fire protection for citizens and asked the reader to imagine a scenario where the fire department pulls up to your burning home and asks to see your fire insurance card before they will turn on their hoses.

In most communities in the U.S., people have determined that everyone deserves fire protection and that the community will pay for that protection with tax dollars.

I have heard of a few communities where citizens are asked to pay a direct fee for fire protection. Now imagine that, in these latter communities, a problem has developed because not everyone is willing to or can afford to pay the fee for their fire protection. This theoretical community could decide to solve the problem the way most American communities have, by paying for fire protection with local tax dollars even if this initially requires an increase in property tax rates, the adoption of some type of local option income tax, or even some type of earmarked sales tax. Whatever the method of taxation, these communities have made fire protection a right of citizenship.

Now, lets consider that there is another community that still requires individual property owners to pay a separate fee for fire protection and that this community is also concerned that not everyone seems willing to pay for fire protection. The leaders of this community are not willing, however, to make fire protection a right of citizenship in their community.

Instead, someone comes up with the idea that requires insurance companies to provide at least a minimal level of fire protection coverage, no matter what the condition of individual properties, and also requires all citizens to purchase fire protection insurance coverage or pay a penalty.

Now, it is difficult to imagine that any community would choose such an approach because common sense would dictate that it will almost certainly cost more to pay a middle man for fire protection insurance than it would be to pay for it directly, through tax revenue. After all, the middle man has to cover their operating costs and, because we live in a free market society, make a profit.

Why is it that so many Americans seem so wrapped up in their daily activities and challenges that they are unable to step back and think about what they are doing and why?

Act Now and Save $15 Trillion ($15,000,000,000,000)

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Let us forget, for just a moment, the debate about the Affordable Care Act or, as most of us would call it, the Obamacare Act, and focus, instead, on the issue of providing universal healthcare (translated to mean comprehensive healthcare for all American citizens and legal aliens).
No matter how we feel about Obamacare, we certainly would agree that the Affordable Care Act will not provide access to healthcare for every single American. The absolute most the Affordable Care Act will do is to make it easier for more Americans to purchase health insurance coverage. There also seem to be few illusions that Obamacare is going to cost less than what healthcare in America cost before implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Many will suggest that it will, in fact, cost more than what we have spent in years past.
The real question we should be asking, however, is “why are we unable to provide comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs to every single American Citizen and legal alien?” In other words, why are we unable to provide universal healthcare?
For the moment, I want to forget about all of the altruistic reasons as to why the richest and most powerful nation in the world should have a healthcare system that meets the needs of all Americans, like virtually every other developed nation? I want to forget about these things because no one really seems to care.
We seem more concerned with rejecting the concept of socialized medicine than we care about all of the men, women, and children in the United States who are unable to gain access to and afford the medical care they require.
The fact is that the vast majority of Americans are unable to distinguish between the concepts of universal healthcare and socialized medicine. These to concepts are, in the minds of these people, synonymous. I suggest to you that it is this inability to differentiate the concept of universal healthcare and socialized medicine that is at the root of the entire problems with the American healthcare system.
Since no one seems to care about the suffering that so many Americans are made to endure, let us focus on the one issue about which everyone seems to care and that is the cost of health care in America.
From 2001 through 2011, the total annual healthcare expenditures of the U.S. grew from $1.2 Trillion to $2.8 Trillion. This represents an average increase of 8.8 percent per year. If that trend continues from 2012 to 2022, our annual healthcare expenditures will increase from $2.8 Trillion in 2011 to just under $7.1 Trillion in 2022. For the eleven calendar-year period from the end of 2011 until the end of 2022, we will have spent just under $56 Trillion on healthcare. Mind boggling, is it not?
In 2001, I wrote a book entitled, Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, in which I proposed a healthcare solution that would provide universal healthcare without socialized medicine. In other words, I wrote that we could provide comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs to all Americans and legal aliens without relying on government. Let me say it differently in order to alleviate any confusion. I proposed a way in which we could give every American access to whatever healthcare they required but that would involve neither federal nor state government in the healthcare delivery or decision-making process.
One of the features of this new system was a mechanism that would allow us to control the increases in the cost of care so that costs would rise no faster than increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). At that time I projected that the CPI would grow at a rate of 5 percent per year. At that rate, I suggested that healthcare expenditures would have risen to $1.86 Trillion by 2010. Had we been able to hold the increase in annual healthcare costs to 5 percent per year we would have saved an aggregate amount of $3 Trillion over the ten year period. Pretty significant savings, wouldn’t you say?
In fact, the actuall CPI growth during that same period was an average of 2.7 percent per year. Had we been able to control the rise in healthcare expenditures to actual inflation rates, costs would have grown only to $1.55 Trillion resulting in an aggregate savings over the decade of just under $4.5 Trillion. Even more impressive, don’t you think.
Now, let us assume that the actual rate of increase in healthcare costs between now and 2022 would remain the same as the previous ten year period (8.8 percent). In that case healthcare costs will rise to a staggering $7.086 Trillion by the end of 2022.
If, however, we were to implement the healthcare proposal presented in Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, and inflation would continue to increase at the rate of 2.7 percent per year as it did over the last decade, our annual healthcare expenditures would rise to only $3.9 Trillion. Under this scenario, the aggregate saving in healthcare costs over the ten year period from 2013 to 2022, compared with the projected 8.8 percent per year increase, would be $14.9 Trillion dollars.
Forget altruism, just give me the money!
The question for the reader is a simple one. Can the American people afford to spend an extra $15 Trillion over the next decade for a healthcare system that will continue to leave a significant percentage of the American population with inadequate access to healthcare?

Disenfranchisement and Hopelessness

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What does it mean to be disenfranchised? What does disenfranchisement have to do with Hopelessness?

The most common use of the term disenfranchised has been associated with the right to vote. People who are disenfranchised are not permitted to participate in their own governance. More generally, it could refer to the loss or denial of any of the civil liberties to which a free people are entitled, under the law. Typically, when we say that someone is disenfranchised we are talking about people from whom something has been taken away.

We have chosen to expand the term to include people who have essentially disenfranchised themselves. These are individuals who no longer believe that what they do, think, or say matters to their community, their nation, or society. In this case, disenfranchisement is a voluntary abdication of one’s responsibility to participate in one’s own governance. This type of disenfranchisement flows from hopelessness.

Human beings experience hopelessness when they no longer believe they have control over their own destiny or over the outcomes in their lives. Literally tens of millions of people, in this great nation of ours, have lost hope. They no longer believe that the American people, as a whole, care about them. They no longer believe that anyone is interested in listening to their complaints of woe let alone take action to address those complaints. They no longer believe in the “American Dream.”

It is easy for the rest of us to shout out in pious righteousness that these people need to do something for themselves but, literally, these people do not see anything they can do. That’s what it means to be powerless. Hopelessness and powerlessness are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other.

We tell them to get a job, but there are no jobs for them that will enable them to support their families. They can work somewhere for minimum wage but no employer is going to give them a sufficient number of hours per week that would obligate the employer to offer benefits. They can make a better living on Welfare. The argument that Welfare offers no advancement opportunities is meaningless to people who cannot envision something better. We must be able to envision if we are to believe.

When faced with serious injury or illness of a family member, the disenfranchised know that the American people are prepared to let them suffer. They know that every other developed nation in the world, apart from “the land of the free and the brave,” has addressed this issue of access to healthcare. Americans, however, steadfastly refuse to provide healthcare to all Americans. Even when the President of the United States has pushed through healthcare reform legislation in the form of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), however imperfect, the opposition attacks it relentlessly. The message that the disenfranchised hear, loudly and clearly, is that the majority of Americans “do not want us to have quality medical care for our families nor are they willing to pay for that care.”

Mainstream Americans are frustrated that so many people have become dependent on the government for welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. We cry out, “What more do you want?” We do not understand why these people express resentment rather than gratitude.

When, in the face of our staggering national debt, all the disenfranchised hear from those in power are proposals to cut food stamps, welfare benefits, or other entitlement programs; why would they feel anything other than resentment?

What Americans need to wake up to is the idea that this reality with which we are confronted is a consequence of decisions we have made over the last seventy years. We created this monster called welfare. It was intended to make sure that poor mothers could care for their children but the reality is that it succeeded only in trapping huge populations of Americans in a reality that is little more than second-class citizenship.

It used to be that even the poorest of the poor would see an education as a ticket out of poverty and as a stepping stone to the American Dream. In most urban communities, the disenfranchised no longer believe in education as a ticket to anywhere other than free day care. What they know is that huge percentages of their children are failing in a school system that is also second class. When we offer voucher programs to help families put their children in better schools we are sending a subtle but powerful message that America has given up on urban public schools.

The fact is that the only parents that take advantage of vouchers are people who still cling to hope and some vestige of the American Dream. The other significant fact is that unless the parents who opt to take advantage of vouchers are also willing to accept responsibility as partners in the education of their children and ferociously encourage their sons and daughters to work hard at school these kids will be no more successful in their new schools than they were in their old ones. Many “charter schools” and other schools that admit “voucher children” to their classrooms are finding this out as they see their school’s declining scores on state competency exams.

So, let’s think about this for a moment. We have an expanding population of poor Americans who:
• Are third- or fourth-generation beneficiaries of welfare
• Cannot gain access to anything more than the minimal level of healthcare for their children and little or no healthcare for themselves,
• Who cannot find jobs that pay better than minimum wage and that offers enough hours to qualify for benefits,
• Who see their children fall so far behind in school that “failure” seems inevitable, and
• Who hear elected officials and policy makers demand that we cut entitlement programs rather than increase taxes paid by the wealthy and the middle class.

Why in the world would we expect these men and women to believe in an American Dream that is nothing more than an illusion for them and an empty promise for their children?

Welfare and other programs that teach people to be dependent rather than independent and interdependent are a cancer that is eating away the heart and soul of our nation.

We must acknowledge, as we move further into the Twenty-first Century, that the policies that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out. We desperately need new ideas and new solutions. We need to think exponentially and challenge all of our assumptions about the way our society provides for the poor, takes care of the sick, and educates our children.

How much longer can we expect working men and women of our nation to continue to carry the burden of a burgeoning population of poor and disenfranchised people on one end of the productivity continuum, and population of retirees that is growing at an unprecedented rate on the other? What happens to our status as the leader of the free world when our economy buckles under the oppressive weight of the retired and the dispossessed?

In a few weeks, I will be introducing my latest book entitled, Re-inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century. It is a book that offers a strategic action plan to address major components of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. In this book, I suggest that our systems of education, both public and private, offer the best hope for attacking the problems we face as a society and for bringing the disenfranchised back into a game in which their contributions are desperately needed.

My book Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, published in 2002, already offers a solution for providing universal healthcare and prescription drugs at a price that we can afford; and, in a way that relies on free market forces, not government, to drive quality, cost, and accountability.

Many people have branded Radical Surgery, sight unseen, as just another proposal for socialized medicine. If they would set aside their prejudices and open the book they would learn that Radical Surgery rejects socialized medicine and offers another alternative. It is an alternative, however, that requires that we open our minds to a whole new way of thinking about healthcare.

Implementation of the very specific strategies offered in these two books, Re-Inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream and Radical Surgery, will provide a realistic opportunity to re-engage the disengaged members of our community. The consequence of seeing this population continue to grow will be nothing short of apocalyptic, which is what my novel, Light and Transient Causes, has been written to illustrate.