(Healthcare reform)'s urgent for many reasons, one of which I said in the speech: it frees us up to be entrepreneurial, to take risks without worrying about the health of our children being affected by our personal decisions to pursue our passions. It's important in terms of our competitiveness internationally. If you're talking about competing with countries in the industrialized, developed world, they don't have healthcare costs. Their societies have that as a priority. Here, we won't have the same kind of healthcare availability because it's still a private sector initiative. But that's O.K. because it's facilitated to be made more affordable in a public way. So it is important now A): because it is long over due; B): it makes us more competitive; C): makes us a healthier and therefore stronger nation and it is specially important to women at this time because women are by and large the caregivers and they are going to inherit that role, it's important that healthcare be as accessible and affordable as possible. I'm very, very proud of it, it was very hard to do, it would not have happened without President Obama, but I never, never once thought that it wouldn't happen.
This comes off the heels of the story coming out Canada, the country who currently has a model of socialized healthcare that most closely resembles what ObamCare will look like, that the government is worried about how the current system will be able to pay for the increasing costs of taking care of their ever-aging population:
In some ways the Canadian debate is the mirror image of discussions going on in the United States.
Canada, fretting over budget strains, wants to prune its system, while the United States, worrying about an army of uninsured, aims to create a state-backed safety net.
Healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded system, which covers all "medically necessary" hospital and physician care and curbs the role of private medicine. It ate up about 40 percent of provincial budgets, or some C$183 billion ($174 billion) last year.
Spending has been rising 6 percent a year under a deal that added C$41.3 billion of federal funding over 10 years.
But that deal ends in 2013, and the federal government is unlikely to be as generous in future, especially for one-off projects.
"As Ottawa looks to repair its budget balance ... one could see these one-time allocations to specific health projects might be curtailed," said Mary Webb, senior economist at Scotia Capital.
Basically, the two main changes that they seem to be contemplating are new and/or raising taxes, of course, and "curtailing" their coverage of certain procedures that they don't deem "medically necessary" like leg, hip, and cataract surgeries. In fact, they're looking back to the private health industry to take care of those procedures. These don't seem like surgeries that anyone would feel is elective.
This is the road that we are about to embark on our way to socialized healthcare. It will only be a matter of time before our government will have to raise our taxes or cut corners on our healthcare, so they can attempt to make ObamaCare solvent.
So, don't worry about your healthcare, unless you have a broken hip, cataracts, or any other condition that Uncle Sam might possibly deem "medically unnecessary" in the future, because Aunt Pelosi's has you covered.
As a final insight, I'd like to point out that: it seems to me that the medical procedures that they are the most willing to call elective are most often the ones that are supposed to take care of ailments that plague our seniors, ie broken hips and cataracts. I'm just saying. Coincidence?!?
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