AAPS News January 2012 - ObamaCare: More Power Means More Corruption

Jan 1, 2012

Volume 68, no. 1 January 2012

Once big government reaches a critical mass, it may be impossible to turn back. It picks the winners and the losers.

The elite in both parties have accepted the premises of the welfare state, central planning, and fiat currency—and in medicine, third-party payment. Being contrary to the laws of economics (human nature), these ideas are historical losers, leading always and everywhere to corruption, oppression, poverty, and death.

Beware of the “repeal and replace” mantra—the result might simply be a reshuffling of special interest groups, the temporary winners, while Americans lose their Republic.

Craig Cantoni suggests a frightening analogy: “Unfortunately, voters are now like capos in a Mafia family. Knowing that the other party, or family, is headed by a ruthless don, they feel they have no choice but to elect an even more ruthless don to protect their family from being plundered by the other family.” This has been the pattern throughout history, he notes, as republics “morphed into empires and then into theft rings.”

Republican and Industry Complicity

Republicans and Democrats, or industry (including the AMA) and government may do a lot of mutual finger-pointing, but the current system is based on bipartisan legislation and on public-private partnerships (a.k.a. fascism). These include the private fiscal intermediaries that administer the Medicare program, and the managed-care companies that use Medicaid as a cash cow.

The sustained growth rate (SGR), the prime target of multi-million dollar AMA lobbying efforts, is from a bipartisan (Clinton-Gingrich) deal. The Texas Medical Association, in ads reminiscent of Al Gore’s scary cartoons with greenhouse gas villains beating up on poor Mr. Sun, feature a little girl’s voice worrying about how Big Bad SGR Man is going to hurt her grandma (http://tinyurl.com/8x5ez4n). In the background we see mathematical formulas and the weird equation “beets + clock = wagon,” reminiscent of the logic behind the resource-based relative value scale (RB-RVS), implemented through AMA’s lucrative coding monopoly and secretive “RUC” committee.

Leading Republican Presidential contenders Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are trying to distance themselves from ObamaCare, but both are big-idea, big-government men (“visionaries”) and have some inconvenient history.

CONTINUED:http://www.aapsonline.org/index.php/site/article/aaps_news_january_2012_-_corruption/?newsletter=off