The "Affordable" Patient Care Act?

A local newspaper headline reads, “Feds Will Cover Most New Medicaid Costs,” to which I would respond, “How?” 

The article details the vast expansion of the Medicaid rolls which is to take place under the “Affordable Patient Care Act”/”Obamacare,” and notes that the federal government pledges to cover all of the new costs for a period of three years, and thereafter to be responsible for 90 percent of the bill. 

A separate article in the same publication notes that the Medicaid rolls in Pennsylvania alone are expected to balloon by 800,000 individuals.

The eye-opening word in the title of the legislation is “Affordable”, which surely will come to be recognized as comical.

We are a nation with a debt of $16.4 trillion that is on the books, tens of trillions more in unfunded entitlement program promises and trillion dollar plus annual deficits. We borrow 40 cents of every dollar we spend. We face the potential for interest payments on the debt alone to rise to one trillion dollars per year at the point at which the Federal Reserve Board is no longer able to manipulate interest rates to be close to zero. One trillion dollars is almost half of current annual federal government revenues.

The Obama administration would have us believe that savings can be wrung out of the health care system in large part through slashing payments to health care professionals and facilities. This is nonsense, and if there is an attempt to implement it, it would serve to push many hospitals into insolvency and would bring about a further decline in the number of health care providers that are willing to accept patients that are covered by government insurance.

At a time that the American people are becoming more obese, sedentary, disease-ridden, and dependent on dangerous drugs that merely treat symptoms, the Affordable Patient Care Act, with its elaborate new benefits, is certain to bring further fiscal distress to our nation.

What will happen when our economic system collapses under its own weight, when American currency is no longer king, and the government loses the ability to write checks with borrowed money for our panoply of entitlement and welfare programs?

I believe that the failure to tighten our belts and be sensible now is planting the seeds for future calamity and widespread and potentially devastating civil unrest which will make that which has occurred in Greece appear tame by comparison.  The road ahead is certain to be rough.