Healthcare costs for General Motors are growing at an astronomical rate. According to George Will (Washington Post, May 1, 2005) GM healthcare expenditures for its employees equals $1,525 per vehicle produced. As Will stated, “there is more healthcare in a car than there is steel”. It is no coincidence that “GM lost $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2005”. It is also no coincidence that “the company has had to cut $130,000 jobs since 2000”. Meanwhile “foreign automobile manufacturers with plants in the
Given that I don’t work for GM, why do I care? I care because the rise in healthcare costs affects every one of us. Medical and mental health costs are out of control. The truly sad part is that we were saying the same thing in 1984. Then…along came managed care. HMO’s began to spring up around the country. With their oversight and sometimes with their inappropriate actions, healthcare costs started to hold constant…and to decrease in parts of the country. A great deal of waste was eliminated. As the mechanisms of healthcare management were more and more fine tuned, the inappropriate actions of the managed care companies were reduced and generally eliminated. Costs continued to remain constant and to decrease in many regions.
Then along came Hillary Clinton. She brought together a huge number of providers, insurers, and consumers. She made one mistake. She left out the brilliant thinkers who created managed care.
Hillary had a chance to solidify the progress being made by managed care. Through the use of a managed competition model of healthcare, Hillary could have made a real difference in healthcare. But she failed.
Instead of going with what was working, Hillary did the typical leftist thing…she took a socialistic approach.
Seeing that the nation was not going to solidify the progress of managed care, socialists all over the country took their cue. They began to promote outrageous legislation mandating procedures and policies that castrated the process. Regulations spewed from one state legislature after another. Every effort was made in state legislatures to make managed care fail so that the nation would have “no choice” but to move toward socialized medicine (so unsuccessful in Europe and
The result of all this was a return to the 1980’s. Healthcare costs once again began to climb. People began gnashing their teeth in despair. In 2005, we seem to have forgotten that the solution was at hand…before Hillary took charge of healthcare “reform”.
This is just another example of why we cannot be fooled by Hillary’s supposed move to the center. She is a leftist. She always will be. She has to be because her power base is the supposedly disenfranchised (i.e., those who the left need to control to get the votes they need to win an election).
The healthcare fiasco is just one of many examples of Hillary’s leftist failings. Others will be explored here in the future. In the meantime, as we try to take care of our families, we can all take note of the rising and out of control costs of healthcare…and send our thanks to Hillary.
