Obamacare - It's Worse Than We Thought

This chart represents only about a third of the complex structure that is the new Obamacare. It's worse than this.

I had two choices today to kvetch about our ever-growing big government. I had first thought to talk a bit about the Born-Again Republicans (so-called as they try to prove themselves to be, indeed, conservatives), Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John McCain of Arizona who released a report about the massive government waste embedded in the 2009 spending ("stimulus") program. They highlighted 100 programs of pork-barrel spending that obviously have nothing to do with stimulating the economy and everything to do with getting representatives reelected to Congress. (ABC News)

Do we need to spend $71,623 in borrowed money on The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys? (Cool for the monkeys. Bad for the taxpayers.) (Speaking personally, I'd rather spend my money on turtle bridges and exotic ant photos.)

To any thinking American, this all seems rather obvious and not a surprise at all. What? Government is wasteful in its spending? How could that happen? What surprises me is that some people still think that the spending package has produced the mystical Keynesian recovery of the economy. At least Barack Obama thinks so - pointing to the lack of evidence as proof that the economy would have been far worse off without the spending package.

However, the best story today comes from the office of Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas. When the Obamacare bill passed this past year, Brady had his office staff go over the bill and create a flow chart of the bill's effects on the bureaucracy of healthcare. The photo above is the result. Here's a link to a larger PDF file of the chart.

What does this complexity mean, with regard to health care in the US? As Brady's office reports, the program will impose:

• $569 billion in higher taxes;
  
• $529 billion in cuts to Medicare;
  
• swelling of the ranks of Medicaid by 16 million;
  
• 17 major insurance mandates; and
  
• the creation of two new bureaucracies with powers to impose future rationing: the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Independent Payments Advisory Board. (house.gov)
  

Maybe we could have predicted that. (Thank you Nancy "pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy" Pelosi.) But the chart indicates some far-reaching problems, hidden by the Democrats until the bill was passed. From Bloomberg we learn the following:

This clearly is a candidate for most disorganized organizational chart ever. It shows that the health system is complex, yes, but also ornate. The new law creates 68 grant programs, 47 bureaucratic entities, 29 demonstration or pilot programs, six regulatory systems, six compliance standards and two entitlements.

That's quite a record for a bill that's supposed to reform health care. Bureaucracy always adds complexity, always slows down the process, and always, always, produces more waste. Is this what Americans asked for when they said that their insurance premiums were too high and that the insurance companies were running roughshod over patients' rights?

I'm thinking we got just a bit more than we bargained for. Consider this gem of "reform":

Democrats streamlined the process by granting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the authority to make judgments that can’t be challenged either administratively or through the courts. (Bloomberg)

What that means in political terms is the establishment of a government office that has no accountability to the people of the United States. While this is not a new concept (this is not, after all, the first time this has happened considering the US has more czars than the entire of Russian history) the ramifications of such an office with control over all health care in the country staggers the imagination. The Secretary cannot even be challenged in court to redress potential wrongs.

How about this?

This monarchical protection from challenges is extended as well to the development of new patient-care models under Obama’s controversial recess appointment, Donald Berwick, whom Republicans are calling the rationer-in-chief. Berwick will run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he can experiment with ways to use administrative fiat to move our system toward the socialized medicine of Europe, which he has at times embraced. (Bloomberg)

Between the new bureaucracy, the increased taxes, sticking it to the elderly, new entitlements, and the potential for even more government growth and interference, I'd say that Obamacare is a bust before we even start to feel its effects in 2012.

If Congress doesn't repeal it next year, the law will go into effect and will be harder to root out than nut grass in a healthy lawn.