Reflections From a Murky Pond

President Obama held his “Jobs Summit” – formally called the “Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth” – on Thursday, December 2, 2009, where he summoned 133 civic, labor, and business leaders to the White House to discuss how to curb or possibly reduce the American unemployment rate which is currently stated as being at 10.2%. The actual (U-6) unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is 17.2%!

Firstly, if President Obama is actually willing to listen to business leaders as well as the heads of various labor unions and academic institutions, this might have been a good step forward. To date it has been painfully obvious that essentially nobody in Obama’s administration has any practical idea of how the private sector functions.

I’m not sure if that is how it played out though. Parts of President Obama’s keynote speech at the Job Summit leads me to think otherwise.

I want to hear about what unions and universities can do to better support and prepare our workers, not just for the jobs of today but for the jobs five years from now and 10 years from now and 50 years from now.

I want to hear about what mayors and community leaders can do to bring new investment to our cities and towns and help recovery dollars get to where they need to go as quickly as possible.

I want to hear from CEOs about what’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring.

That sounds an awful lot like President Obama is asking academia, the labor unions, and local government officials how they think they can help spur job growth, but asking business why they aren’t doing so themselves and need this “help” in the first place.

There’s also the issue of whether President Obama would truly listen to- and act upon the likely responses to the question of what’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring?

Now Give One Good Reason Why You’re Not Hiring

As Gary Varvel’s cartoon so aptly points out, there is not just one but several reasons why many businesses – especially the smaller companies with lower margins and market caps – aren’t hiring. So very much of what Obama and his Liberals are trying to do would have a chilling and quelling effect upon American businesses, especially small and mid-cap ones.

If President Obama’s “Jobs Summit” is going to have any tangible value and end up being anything more than yet another PR stunt in his ever ongoing Presidential Election Campaign, he’s going to have to listen to the issues that American businesses have with his agenda. But, for the sake of creating needed jobs, can he and would he cast aside so many key planks of his political platform?

I sincerely doubt that President Obama has the will and strength of character to do so - just as I doubt that any other man placed in that position would. Universal Healthcare, Cap and Trade, and rolling back the Bush era tax cuts on businesses were key promises he made to the Liberals in order to get elected. Turning aside from that agenda would be political suicide.

Face it, how many men would sacrifice their own job in order to get one for someone else? That may very well be the upshot of Obama’s “Jobs Summit.” President Obama may have to gut his own chances at reelection in order to do what is needed to salvage the American job market.

In the course of President Obama and his Liberals’ ongoing war to nationalize the health insurance industry we Americans have been subjected to countless rants about how those “evil insurance giants” keep denying people’s insurance claims and withholding coverage from them in the “selfish” pursuit of shareholder value.

To the Leftists only a Public Option will save us.

So let’s look at the data provided by the American Medical Association (AMA) itself in order to see which health insurance providers seem eager to deny patients’ claims:

Much like President Obama’s lies about ObamaCare covering abortions and illegal immigrants, his and his followers’ sob stories and angry rantings about insurance companies denying patients’ claims veer very far from a true and objective account of the situation.

Medicare, America’s best known nationalized health insurance program, denies a higher percentage of claims than any other health insurance provider monitored by AMA in their annual National Health Insurer Report Card (NHIRC).

This is not something that the Liberals, enamored as they are of government controlled, administered, and regulation healthcare, want Americans to hear. Their agenda can’t survive the truth.

At first glance it would seem that the private  health insurance company, Aetna, runs a sadly close second in denying people’s health insurance claims. A slight bit of research in the AMA’s 2008 NHIRC shows that this initial opinion is wrong though. 65.7% of the claims that Aetna denied were denied because the benefit for the service was already included in the payment for another service or procedure that had already been adjudicated. If one factors out these duplicate claims, Aetna’s overall percentage of denied claims is only  4.47%.

Medicare’s claim denial figures have no similar amelioration to be found within the AMA’s annual scorecard. Indeed, the top 5 reasons – which together total 76.8% of the total denied claims – Medicare has given for denying patients’ claims are far less than soothing.

Paperwork errors, flat-out denial of coverage, and the inability to identify and track enrollees – these are the government’s primary reasons for denying healthcare benefits to the American citizenry.

…And yes, this is exactly the sort of Hope and Change that Obama threatened America with during his campaign for the Presidency. Americans’ were duly warned of the Reconstruction.

Judging by how the federal government administers Medicare, ObamaCare would be, “A medical system with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, and the financial solvency of the Social Security system.” That is something that Americans can and should do everything and anything within their power to prevent from happening to us, our children, and our children’s children.

President Obama’s attempts to quasi-nationalize America’s health insurance industry is based upon providing people with a “Public Option” that will directly compete with America’s current private, semi-free market health insurance providers – whether those providers are the evil insurance giants or individual Americans’ employers.

But why is this the focus of his plan?

What possible valid reason or necessity could there be for the creation of a fully government ran health insurance agency? What does Obama and his Liberals gain by pushing this Public Option? What would America gain by having it?

A Few Facts About The Public Option

1. President Obama’s Public Offering would only be available via the Health Insurance Exchange that President Obama wants to create.
2. President Obama’s Public Offering would have to abide by exactly the same restrictions as any private health insurance plan that was offered on the proposed Health Insurance Exchange.
3. President Obama’s Public Offering would have three tiers of coverage:  Basic, Enhanced, and Premium; it may or may not have a fourth level of coverage designated as Premium-Plus.
4. President Obama’s Public Offering may or may not be directly administered by the government. Provisions are in place to allow them to contract a 3rd-party administrator such as USHealth, Aetna, or WellPoint to administer all or part of the Public Offering.
5. President Obama’s Public Offering utilizes the same “cost sharing” and federal subsidies as any private health insurance plan that was offered on the proposed Health Insurance Exchange.

The Public Option put forth by President Obama and his Liberals would be identical in every way, shape, and form except for one critical point – the Public Offering doesn’t have to generate a profit.

Indeed, much like a number of other government programs over the decades, ObamaCare’s Public Option could actually run at a net loss but hide that fact by using support from other government agencies with their own budgets. This sort of budget gimmickry is currently done by Medicare and Medicaid to disguise their true costs and insolvency. Fully 50% of the administrative overhead of Medicare and and Medicaid is provided by other state and federal agencies and therefor not reported as expenditures by Medicare or Medicaid.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide for the offering of an Exchange-participating health benefits plan (in this division referred to as the “public health insurance option”) that ensures choice, competition, and stability of affordable, high quality coverage throughout the United States.

I find it hard to believe that President Obama and his Liberals’ Public Health Insurance Option is meant to provide “choice” or “competition.” There not much in the way of competition when one player doesn’t have to realize any profits and can hide losses, whereas the other players cannot do so, and that will inevitably lead to a commensurate loss of choice when the other players pull out of the game.

I can understand, given the facts above, what President Obama and his Liberals gain by implementing a Public Option; they maintain the support of their Left-Wing base and they gain greater power over we, the People. Can someone tell me what Americans gain though?