Robert S. Dotson, M.D.

Obamacare: Just give us a bill to hype; we don’t care what it is - In the article below, Dr. Dotson provides more information about Obamacare. The program is not what its supporters or its critics imagine. In my opinion, with Republicans blocking a single-payer national health system, the Obama White House went to the insurance lobby and said, “give us a health care bill that you can get Congress to pass.” The result is a complex system of taxes, penalties, and government subsidized private health insurance policies with a layer of profits added to the costs of new levels of bureaucracy. Nomi Prins reports that the claim is laughable that Obamacare will lower costs by creating competitive insurance premiums, because of consolidations and mergers of insurance companies in preparation for the “insurance exchanges.” Wall Street is already making money off the mergers. What Obamacare really does is to allow concentration and control of health care by large corporations that will sacrifice health care to private profits. Dr. Dotson believes that Obamacare will result in Medicare being blended into some type of corporatist insurance product bringing higher costs and fewer benefits to patients. It will be a “health system” that funnels federal revenues into insurance company profits instead of into health care. The unexpected consequences of Obamacare are likely to require endless amendments to the legislation. The complexity will result in mistakes by doctors and hospitals that will be prosecuted as crimes. Health care for patients and adequate payment to health care providers will become back burner concerns. Once Obamacare is up and running, the private and bureaucratic interests that benefit from the monstrosity will protect it regardless of its failure. It would have been so much better, so much cheaper, and so much simpler to have created a single-payer national health service like every other developed country. Instead, “superpower americans” are to be deprived of good and inexpensive health care for the sole sake of corporate profits. ~ Paul Craig Roberts

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Robert S. Dotson, M.D.

■ “Mitt Romney is a wolf in a wolf’s clothing. Barack Obama is a wolf in a sheep’s clothing, but they both essentially have the same agenda.” – Jill Stein
■ “Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” – George Carlin
■ “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of controversy.” — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, remarks at the 2010 Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties prior to passage of PPACA

October has brought the mini-series that accompanies our quadrennial exercise in faux democracy, the Presidential Debates. As has been usual for many decades, the public was entertained by carefully vetted corporatist representatives of War Party A and War Party B via the televised game show format that is sold as “serious debate” here at the End of Empire. Nothing illustrated the silliness and irrelevance of such spectacle better than the inane exchanges between Obama and Romney concerning healthcare. The charade was played out yet again when the Vice Presidential candidates, Biden and Ryan, performed in another nondebate on October 11th.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, aka Obamacare, aka Romneycare or, most accurately, Obamneycare) is the 21st century poster child for social legislation in our corporatist state. Despite its origins, Obamneycare is simply another hand-out to the ruling oligarchy. In true New Speak fashion, despite the title patients will not be protected nor will healthcare become “affordable”.

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