From the 06 August 2007 Lockport Union Sun and Journal (Lockport, NY) |
THE HIGH COST OF UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE Since taking control of Congress this year the Democrats and their ilk have been relentlessly pushing their agenda to the masses. This has included an emphasis on the concept of universal health care, the Big Government people believing that the government has an obligation to provide health care to all of its people. This concept sounds wonderful to many Americans, but that’s because they are being fed rainbows and butterflies and are left oblivious to the many weaknesses inherent to government-run health care. Among these weaknesses – and perhaps its greatest flaw - is the cost of such a system. The best way to ascertain what the cost may be is to compare it to something that mirrors the Democrats’ wish list. We need look no further than the Rolls Royce of health coverage…New York’s Medicaid system. Our Medicaid offers expensive top-of-the-line health care that has many features lacking in the more frugal and controlled HMO programs offered by private sector employers to their employees. Some of the things Medicaid recipients can dabble in are dental, audiology, and psychology services, and reckless prescription drug medicine allowances. NY’s Medicaid system truly is all-inclusive and all-intrusive, just as guaranteed, publicly-funded coverage would be. The costs associated with Medicaid are almost unfathomable. In Niagara County over 54% of our $73,477,000 tax levy is dedicated to Medicaid. You can add even more to this $40,000,000 cost by looking at the state and federal funding. New York’s Medicaid yield equation is: For every one dollar of the state budget spent on Medicaid the state yields another 47 cents from the counties and $1.47 from the federal government. Using those statistics, Niagara County’s Medicaid population also relies on a total of $266,183,794 in non-county funding, bringing the fully burdened total cost to $306,183,794. This number is scary big, but understand that the Medicaid bill covers only one-ninth of the County’s population. So, if you extrapolated that to 100% of the population (as national health care coverage would) the cost to support Niagara County’s population of 216,130 would be $3,402,042,155. That’s just under $3.5 billion and a cost of health care of $15,741 per person! Not sick enough yet? A family of four would cost the government (read "taxpayers") $62,964 per year just in health care alone, never mind what they cost in their share of other government supplied services like education, roads, law enforcement, military, and bureaucracy. Funding of universal health coverage can come from only one place: taxes. Based upon the load that Medicaid already places on the taxpayers, the taxation and subsequent funding of universal health coverage is completely and undeniably impossible. Just look at the indicators across the Empire State. Many counties’ tax revenue margins have tanked. They can’t invest in other government services or infrastructure because all of their monies are going to Medicaid. They can’t raise property taxes because property owners can take no more, so a handful of counties have found no choice but to follow Niagara County in increasing their sales tax in an effort to equalize the pain amongst all citizens. Even with such creativity the losses continue to mount. "Free" health care is anything but "free" and that’s the part that the Democrats forget to tell you. Our state’s taxpayers are in ruin because of Medicaid and the so few people it serves. We can only give so much. Yet, the Democrats’ want much, much more with their plans for socialized health care for everyone, one that takes the Medicaid concept to the masses. The socialists want the world yet fail to see that the funding of such coverage has to come from somewhere and, when that somewhere becomes empty, financial destruction and a delinquent end product in national health care will be the end results.
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