Obama’s Back Alley Healthcare

14 Apr, 2010 by Warner Todd Huston

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For decades abortion supporters argued that restrictions on abortion would cause women to die in unsafe “back alley abortions” all across the land. This scare tactic was a mantra that seemed to work quite well to spread abortions throughout the states and helped spur the Supreme Court to penumbra its way to a pseudo Constitutional “right” for abortions. But the main thrust of the tactic was ostensibly warning about unsafe medical procedures, a situation that they wanted to change. Flash forward to 2010 and we see President Barack Obama and his Democrats about to send not just abortions, but our entire medial system into a veritable “back alley” situation with a shortage of doctors, rationing, denials of service, and outrageously high insurance premiums.

And now we can add a new twist to the dangerous situation that Obama is forcing on patients in the U.S. The Associated Press reports that 28 states are already seeing a shortage of primary care physicians, a dearth of doctors that will only get worse with Obamacare, and these states are looking toward expanding the medical responsibilities of nurses to cover the shortage.

So, what we see here is a situation where less qualified practitioners will see their roles expanding in the era of Obamacare! Healthcare practitioners with less training and experience are being given more responsibilities in our healthcare system even as Obama claimed that his goal was to improve our nation’s healthcare.

This news comes out on the very same day that a Massachusetts judge ruled that the not-for-profit insurance industry in the Bay State is not allowed to raise its premiums to cover rising expenses.

In Massachusetts, then, even a not-for-profit insurance company will be forced to go upside down in expense to income ratios. According to this court the state can mandate every last business practice, can force the insurance companies to cover any procedure that it is politically motivated to demand it provide and can also deny the company the ability to raise the funds to actually cover all those procedures! At this point it is no longer insurance but has become straight out welfare.

And guess where the extra money will have to come from? Taxes. So, instead of the insurance company being allowed to raise the money it needs to fund the government mandated coverage, the insurance will be faced with a dilemma. How will it approve procedures that there is no money to cover? And when they turn to government to ask that question, government will simply raise taxes to cover the loss. And all the while wait times will increase, services will be denied more often, and people will be ill served. (Already wait times in Massachusetts are increasing. It is now a 50-day wait to see a primary care physician.)

What will it all mean? With some states giving lower trained personnel a larger role in healthcare which will surely put patients in danger, with wait times increasing wildly and denials sure to come, why can’t we expect “back alley healthcare” to come soon on the tail of all these ills?

Obama is certainly putting American patients in danger with his ill-conceived policies. Can “back alley healthcare” be too far off?