World News Korner

The healthcare costs that the Republicans keep blaming on Obamacare have nothing to do with it. Have you ever heard of Reagancare?

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

What’s that you say? Hospitals are mandated to give away free services?

Yes. In response to some earlier bad behavior from hospitals called “patient dumping,” a mandate for unfunded medical care was created and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. It said, “Hospitals provide care to anyone needing emergency healthcare treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.”

That’s right, Reagan created a universal coverage mandate, forced the private sector to pay for it, thereby creating the world’s most expensive, least efficient health-care program. Hospitals hated it, the poor and indigent took advantage of it, and prices were jacked up in response to it. Eventually, the costs spread to everyone else.

Given that history, it is no surprise that hospitals were quietly pleased with Obamacare. After the Supreme Court ruled on the legality of the new rules in June 2012, hospital stocks rallied. It should come as no surprise: They get to remove a huge cost that they had no ability to control. They also get a massive number of new paying customers. And they now have some control over who their patients will be.

Yes the man who claimed to want to keep government out of our lives created a law that put the burden of caring for those without insurance or money onto the hospitals, which forced them to make up the cost by gouging insurance companies, who in turn gouged their customers. In other words, us.

And then when President Obama came up with a plan to reduce the cost of insurance, and remove the burden from hospitals, thereby lowering the cost of medical care and prescription drugs, he was accused of being un-American and undermining the freedoms of the American people.

In other words the man who has worked diligently to protect our citizens from the unseen tax placed on them to cover uninsured hospital visits, is vilified. While the man who created that problem in the first place, is idolized.

Not only that but in order to protect Ronald Reagan's destructive health care mandate, his Republican heirs are willing to bankrupt the entire country.




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