doctors weren't getting paid. Bank accounts were empty. A lot of them were going under. So United Healthcare went out they said, "Hey, we can help you out. We're going to buy . . . we'll buy your practice, or Hospital, your Urgent Care, and they bought them

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ATTN: Everyone!

Listen to this incredibly invaluable breakdown of the situation with United Healthcare.

Gives some chilling context!! pic.twitter.com/B5P09y2o1b

— Krista Monroe (@MsKristaMonroe) December 6, 2024

United Health Care owns Optimum Health, and they own Change Healthcare.  There are 158 subsidiaries underneath United Healthcare, some of which are overseas and most of those are pharmaceutical services.  So, yes, they are also part of the big Pharma.  So now they're insurance and big Pharma.  Change Healthcare, if you don't know what that is, is the service that processes the claims from the provider to the insurance company so the provider can get the pittance of money that the insurance company is going to pay them for their services that have been rendered.  Earlier this year, Change Healthcare got hacked.  It's almost been a year now.  They still aren't completely back up and running, so when this happened, United Healthcare . . .  I know you all think that doctors sit on piles of cash.  That's not how it works.  They have to get the insurance money on a regular basis to keep their money flow going.  Well, when you can't send your claims in because Change Healthcare has been hacked, and you can't mail it in . . . the doctors weren't getting paid.  Bank accounts were empty.  So a lot of them were going under.  So United Healthcare went out they said, "Hey, we can help you out.  We're going to buy . . . we'll buy your practice, or Hospital, your Urgent Care, and they bought them.  So now, now they're insurance; now they're Pharmaceutical; now they own the system that processes the claims.  Now they own the providers that use their insurance.  The providers are owned by United Healthcare and get paid from United Healthcare claims.  You know they're already in trouble with the DOJ because of all of this.  If this is not a monopoly, I don't know what is.

In 2023, their total revenue was $371.6 billion dollars, a 14.6% increase from 2022, and $22.4 billion in profit in 2023.  They paid out $281.4 billion in claims in 2023.   But let me tell you this. United Healthcare is the main insurance for Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare plans. That is the main . . . it's 29% enrollment is United Healthcare under those three things.  Those are all government-run healthcare systems.  And United Healthcare is the main insurer for all of them. 

I don't know about you, but when a company decides to become that big that they are now the doctor, they're the provider, they're the insurance company, they are the pharmaceutical company, they're the company that processes their own claims . . .  . 

They did a study, and United Healthcare by a 90% margin denied more claims than any other insurance company on the market.  And again they are the highest enrollment for all of the government-run Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare.  They deny, deny, deny, and then people die.  People die. 

OBAMACARE: REPEAL IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE

By Dom Armentano  [Via Robert Wenzel @ EconomicPolicyJournal]

Obamacare was sold to the American people as a humanitarian attempt to provide health insurance to the poor and to individuals with a pre-existing medical condition who had been denied coverage. If you were not poor, did not have a pre-existing condition, and already had health insurance and were satisfied with its coverage and rates, you were repeatedly assured that you could keep your plan and doctors. Right.

We now know that the selling of Obamacare was a giant con job. After all, if its proponents had really been sincere, they would have argued that the alleged poor simply be provided vouchers (similar to food stamps) to help purchase insurance; further, a simple one-sentence piece of legislation could have required that insurance companies not automatically exclude potential customers based on some pre-existing medical condition. Done deal. Instead, what we all got smacked with was a 906 page regulatory and tax monstrosity that amounts to a federal makeover and takeover of the entire health care industry.

Can we repeal Obamacare? Defenders of the law, and even some moderate critics from both political parties, assert that repeal is impossible at this point. After all, Obamacare was passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the President, and parts of the law were declared constitutional by the Supreme Court. Moreover, billions of federal tax dollars have already been spent on the bungled website and countless bureaucrats (including those in the IRS) to administer the new regulations and taxes. Thus, defenders assert, there is simply no precedent for repealing a federal law that’s this important and complex.

Nonsense to that. There is, in fact, major precedent for repealing important and complex federal law that destroys personal freedom and raises costs and prices to consumers: The Supreme Court’s de facto “repeal” of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) in 1935.

It is difficult now, looking back, to appreciate the full scope and complexity of the NRA (1933). Yet the NRA was the legislative centerpiece of the Roosevelt Administration’s attempt to end the Great Depression and return the country to prosperity. Its major objective was to end “ruinous” price competition (deflation) throughout the economy by the creation and enforcement of so-called “codes of fair competition.”

These codes–created by industrial trade associations and enforced by the federal government–allowed business competitors in any given industry to collude legally and raise prices…with the antitrust laws conveniently suspended. Industrial firms, wholesalers and retailers that wanted to price their own products in defiance of the legal code were forbidden from doing so by law. To encourage labor to go along with this unprecedented government support for economy-wide monopoly, separate NRA codes also encouraged the formation of labor unions and mandatory collective bargaining. There were also separate provisions in the NRA for command and control regulation of the petroleum industry.

The NRA and its distinctive symbol (the “Blue Eagle”) struggled to fly for two years until it unceremoniously crashed to earth in 1935, declared unconstitutional by the High Court. (Roosevelt was so incensed by the decision that he threatened to “pack” the Court by appointing additional judges). The entire gargantuan enterprise, much like Obamacare, floundered badly under the weight of an inefficient NRA bureaucracy, labor union strife and strikes for recognition, endlessly confusing and changing “code” regulations and the eventual loss of political support from working-class households. Besides, there was no evidence that the NRA promoted recovery; indeed, its restrictions on commercial liberty made economic growth far more difficult.

If the NRA could be dismantled and tossed in the legislative scrap-heap, so can Obamacare. The alternative to Obamacare (when Congress repeals it) is the creation of a competitive market for both health insurance and health care. Insurance companies must be free to compete across state lines, free to offer a diverse menu of coverage’s and deductibles and free to price their product based on estimated risk. And health care providers must be free to treat patients absent government licensing and regulation. If we’ve learned anything from the NRA experience, or the “glitch” over the Obamacare website, it’s that government regulation makes almost every economic problem infinitely worse.

Dr. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford and the author of Antitrust and Monopoly (Independent Institute, 1998) and Antitrust: The Case for Repeal (Mises Institute, 1999). His first workplace experience was picking strawberries at a commercial farm for 6 cents a basket in the 1950s.

Copyright © 2014 Dom Armentano. 

EVERY HOSPITAL IN THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN ORDERED TO CANCEL ALL NON-URGENT SURGERY

Socialized medicine cuts servives?  Sooprise, sooprise.  

from the Washington Examiner.  h/t EconomicPolicyJournal

American liberals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders like to tout socialized healthcare systems such as Britain's for spending less and covering everybody, but here's a reality check you shouldn't expect to hear in any of his fiery speeches: the British government-run National Health Service has abruptly canceled 50,000 non-emergency surgeries due to overcrowding at hospitals this winter.

Sanders, I-Vt., has lamented that the United States "ends up spending almost three times per capita what they do in the UK," which is "guaranteeing healthcare to all people." Yet here is what life is like for those living in the supposedly more humane system, as reported by the Telegraph:

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials.
The instructions on Tuesday night - which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed - followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades.

Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space.

The nation's health secretary, Jeremy Hunt has defended the move as “a planned, methodical, thoughtful” approach. He told Sky News, "We recognize that it is better, if you are unfortunately going to have to cancel or postpone some operations, to do it in a planned way … Although if you are someone whose operation has been delayed I don’t belittle that for one moment and indeed I apologize to everyone who that has happened to." He went on to praise the "heroic" efforts of NHS workers.

As the American Left tries to push single-payer into the forefront of the national conversation, it's important to have a real conversation about the tradeoffs involved. In the U.K., having the government "guarantee" healthcare while trying to contain costs results in strained medical services, turning one of the largest economies in the world into a "third world"-like environment. The NHS "guarantee" doesn't always translate into actual access to care when you need it. The other option is to throw more money at the system, in which case single-payer becomes much more costly than promised. It's also worth thinking about the cultural component. Do we think Americans are going to stand for a system in which government officials cancel surgeries en masse based on bureaucratic judgments about what is urgent and go on TV to offer inadequate apologies?

Obamacare: A Nixon Legacy?


Dr. Gary North reviewed this video.  Parts of it he likes.  

The segment on Nixon is terrific. The tapes reveal the connection with Edgar Kaiser. The key fact is this: Nixon heard about this plan on February 17, 1971. He then had a speech written for him, which he delivered on national TV the next day. The video reported this, but did not mention it. It is clear that Kaiser and Ehrlichman had the whole package ready to go. Nixon approved it without having read it or even thinking through the implications. This was the #1 source of HMO's in U.S. history. Nixon had given no thought to the whole program. It changed American medicine.

He definitely likes the video but doesn't have high hopes for it.  

The video was posted in 2014. The video as of this week had 96 views. It took two years to get this. Maybe there is another posting of this video online with more views, but with under 100 views in two years, this project was a failure. I have rarely seen any YouTube video with so few views.

We need lots of videos like this one. But they take lots of time to produce. There is no guarantee that anyone will view them.

Then there is this fact. They change nothing. Ever. 

There is no one better in assessing government programs than Gary North.  He understands Congress. He worked inside its bowels for a few years under Ron Paul.  This point here is not so much hopeless as much as it is practical.

Voters cannot get Congress to repeal a bad program. Congress will only make it worse. We never see repeal -- only "repeal with replacement." Once there is a constituency for a program, it's forever.

In other words, don't waste your time on federal activism or federal legislation.  His antidote? 

There is only one way to kill a program: the bankruptcy of the federal government. They all must go down together. It is politically impossible to kill them once they become law.   

It's coming.  So he says.

Though Dr. North did admit that he finds national politics entertaining.

I love national politics. It's a three-ring circus: Senate, House, and White House.

The big economic issues are never addressed, such as:

1. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare: $210 trillion (present value)
2. Federal Reserve policy
3. The extension of administrative law -- 81,611 new pages in the Federal Register (2015)
4. Tax reform: 74,600 pages
5. The causes of, and solutions to, the flattening of households' median real income since 1965

There is a reason for this silence: there are no politically acceptable solutions. "Don't ask. Don't tell. Don't worry."

Buy a monthly subscription.  It may be the most valuable purchase you've made this year.  

"The law prohibits the IRS from using liens or levies to collect any individual shared responsibility payment."

This was interesting. But when you're dealing with the IRS, I would be very careful. Okay, so current federal law prohibits the IRS from using liens to collect "failure to pay" responsibility tax under Obamacare. "The law prohibits the IRS from using liens or levies to collect any individual shared responsibility payment." However, the IRS may offset that liability against any federal refund that may be due to you. So there's that. Anyway, have a listen. It's worth hearing and considering.

Crony Heathcare Insurance and Provider Stocks Surge

[Bob Wenzel on the Obamacare connected and pending disasters.]

In response to the Supreme Court decision in favor of Obamacare subsidies, which will benefit the crony healthcare system, crony healthcare insurance and provider stocks surged today.

Hospital stocks soared 13.19% and HMOs climbed 6.88%. Large cap pharmaceutical company stocks, and generic drug manufacturer stocks were up fractionally.

Aetna closed up 3.99%, United Health +2.65%, Cigna +2.43%, Humana +7.13%, Universal Health +7.73%, Community Health Systems +12.97% and HCA Holding +8.82%.

In contrast, the market overall was down today:

  -RW

Younger, healthier workers will have to subsidize older, sicker workers. This should be fun to see how this will play out. I can imagine muggings by young people of the elderly. Just because. Obamacare is a dangerous policy.  Can also imagine older workers a lot more expendable.