Obama Math

It’s been a long time since I took math in school, and President Obama did promise change. So it’s not surprising, I guess, that his approach to math never seems to add up to me. The first example follows.

The highly respected Kaiser study on health insurance, published a few years ago, broke the approximately 15% of Americans without health insurance into almost equal three parts. The first were illegal immigrants; the second were Medicaid and state assistance eligible people who had not been reached by, or didn’t know how to effectively get government health care; and the third were people who had access to private insurance, but opted out because they decided it was too expensive. The president has now stated publicly, in an address to congress, that no illegal immigrants will have access to his new health care plan. Okay, that solves about one third of the problem, but I fail to see what’s happened positively in that part of the decision. President Obama has also endorsed a plan making its’ way through the Senate, that will force all people not eligible for a government plan (like Medicaid or Medicare) to purchase a private health plan or be assessed $1,900 of a non tax to pay for their health insurance. Let me understand this better. The roughly one third of Americans without health insurance because they opted out…didn’t want to pay the premiums…will be solved by…effectively making them pay the premiums! As the cartoon character on a commercial says…Brilliant! As for the last third, those currently eligible for government aid and/or health insurance, the new plan will…offer them government aid and/or health insurance. Again…Brilliant!

So, all people will have health insurance. The illegal immigrants who don’t have health insurance today, won’t have it in the new plan either, but they won’t count now (‘cause Obama say so). Therefore these numbers, used to inflate the overall uninsured numbers to invoke “crisis”, will be eliminated and immediately bring the uninsured numbers down to about 36 million from the 47 million bandied about in the crusade to save America from the uninsured healthcare “crisis”. (See, success already). As a matter of fact, Administration supporters, since the startling revelation to liberals that it will cost more to add 47 million people to the health care system, have already started to say in the media that “nobody ever planned to add anything like 47 million people to the health care system.

The roughly one third uninsured who are currently eligible for state or Medicaid health insurance (but don’t sign up) will still have the same programs. But there’s a big difference. Now they’ll be told to sign up, or it’s not the governments’ fault, and they’ll count as covered, even though they don’t sign up or use the program (‘cause Obama say so). Whew! We’re down to about 5% of Americans without health insurance now, but that was hard work.

But we won’t rest with our lofty compassion, until we solve the health care “crisis” for the last third of the uninsured. This is the problem of the people we feel the worst about. People who said they can’t afford to pay for health insurance, even though it is available to them. They will be pleased that the new health care plan has a solution for them…Pay! Either pay your health insurance, or we’ll assess it from you (in a non tax, of course). If you don’t pay the assessment, we have the right to put you in jail.

Now that we have everyone covered, we have to manage this little issue of cost. So, we’ll save hundreds of millions by…taking away benefits from Medicare and Medicaid! Second, the government will reduce costs by weeding out hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud in…the government run programs! Then we’ll add dozens of government agencies that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to oversee these programs.

I can’t put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t add up to me. I’ll just have to learn Obama math, I guess.

The Old Man