PART ONE - So Called Market Based Healthcare Fix Rhetoric Sounds Good, til You See What They are Promoting

Commentary by Kirby Harris

FIVE ARTICLE SUMMARY:

You may have heard the ads running on your local radio station by
“A Healthy Virginia Works” (AHVW), a project of a coalition of various business organizations and hospitals, touting a so-called market based solution.

They claim they want to reform Healthcare in Virginia in five areas: Increasing Access to Health Care, Reducing Costs for Patients, Controlling Costs for Businesses, Keeping Our Hospitals Strong and Reclaiming Our Federal Tax Dollars.

Sounds great and very conservative or libertarian right? Well yes on the surface it does, but if you read on further beyond the talking points its not.

So, I will look at their five claims point by point using the information from their website in a series of five articles.

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Read all Five Articles:   Part One   Part Two   Part Three   Part Four   Part Five

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** Make sure you read the not very limited government, articles the AHVW promoted on their Facebook and/or Twitter Below **

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Part One

AHVW Point One:

Increasing Access to Health Care – Closing the "coverage gap" through the Medicaid 'Private Option' will expand health insurance access to nearly 200,000 uninsured Virginians who earn too much income to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to qualify for subsidies to purchase insurance on the federal health exchange. - Source

My Counter Point:

Sounds nice until you dissect what they mean by closing the “coverage gap”. Let’s start by stating what closing the “coverage gap” does not mean from AHVW. It doesn’t mean:

• Stopping Obamacare from being forced on the people of Virginia
• It doesn’t mean reforming the Federal tax code so less money goes to Washington and more stays here in Virginia, either by preferably making the tax rate lesser and all working Virginian's to keep more of their hard earned dollars at home, or at the worst have the money that would have gone to Washington go to State Coffers.
• It doesn’t mean making Healthcare cheaper by enacting reform that allows you to buy cafeteria plans, buy plans across state lines, buying Healthcare Savings Plans or making laws to stop price gouging and collusion in the industry or many other truly market based solutions.

What AHVW means is opting into Medicaid expansion, but using the language of reclaiming and getting back Virginia’s money already sent to Washington and earmarked for Medicaid,and then using that money to buy private insurance to give away free to the 200,000 uninsured. And this thing they keep referring to as the “Medicaid private option” is only a “private option” as far as it gives to our tax dollars sent to Washington to “private” business only after DC sends us back a small fraction of what we sent them.

While it is good to try and get back as much money that Virginian’s previously sent to Washington, it has unintended consequences. It doesn’t stop the cycle of Virginians and Americans from being over taxed, and then having to beg for 25 cents back from every dollar sent to Washington. It feeds the beast and allows the big government tax and spenders to keep chewing up our dollars and spitting the left overs back at us, if we obey their commands.

In short, to insure those 200,000 people at NO cost to them, it uses hard working Virginian’s income, in the form of Federal Tax Dollars sent back to Virginia, to put those dollars in the pockets of Big Business, under the Medicaid Extension clause of Obamacare.

Full disclosure, form what I have researched and understand I fall into the “coverage gap”, but this isn’t about me. Its about principle, fairness and doing the right thing.

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Articles that “A Healthy Virginia Works” have posted on their Facebook and/or Twitter:

• I title this article: “A Big Government Democrat and Big Government Republican Team Up”  -  Read Article
• I call this article: “So-called Republican Elected Officials Caving in on their Conservative Principles to for Perceived Political Gain”  -  Read Article
• I call this article: “Virginia General Assembly Republicans Caving Again - This Time Not on Taxes (read here), but on Medicaid Expansion in Guise of Pro-Market Healthcare Solution”  -  Read Article
• I call this article: “Virginia Republicans FAIL in their Duty to Scale Back Big Government in their Districts”  -  Read Article