[Vision2020] Top Heritage Reports and Photo: THIS DAD IS FED UP | People Will Pay More Under Obamacare | Obama Said This With a Straight Face | Administration Caught in New Obamacare Dilemma | Health Care Website Discredits Liberalism

[Nicholas Gier]

For reason this did not go through yesterday AM.  Please forgive duplicates


Hi Roger:


I’ve done a little research on Dave Ramsey. He has founded what he calls
Financial Peace University, and this has as much credibility as the
University that Glenn Beck had every Friday before he was kicked off Fox
News.  Ramsey’s University, much like Wilson’s counseling services, is
based on strict biblical principles. He is not an economist nor is he an
actuary, and a quick internet search shows that he is a very controversial
financial adviser, especially with regard to investing in gold.


Ramsey doesn’t strike me as credible either, when he equates liberalism and
socialism, and then says that Obamacare is Communism.  Does Ramsey know
that the individual mandate was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation
and then the GOP? (Perhaps you’ve forgotten as well.) Ramsey does not
realize that the lowest premiums in the state exchanges are found in those
states with the most policies being offered.  It’s call “competition” and
that’s what the free market is all about.


I am sure that Ramsey can do basic math, just as you and I can, but I at
least try to start with the right numbers.  He repeats the old GOP canard
that 46 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes, and that Social Security
takes 15 percent of our pay.  The first claim of course is totally
misleading because he forgets about all the other taxes—property and sales
(regressive for the poor)—that Americans pay.  As a far as Social Security
goes, employers and employees pay 6.2 percent each and the self-employed
pay 12.5 percent.  Not a good start for your man, Roger.


Ramsey also fails to understand how Obamacare will work and how insurance
works in general.  If Ramsey is right about Obamacare, then most health
insurance companies would not participate in it; nor would they have met
with Obama to promise that they would contain costs. Currently their
overhead costs are on average 30 percent, while Medicare runs between 10-15
percent.  Obama got the big companies to come down to 15 percent and small
companies to 20 percent.  Wonders of all wonders: the free market becomes
more efficient, fair, and justice with reasonable government regulation.


According to Forbes: “Of the $2.6 trillion we spend on health
care<http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynmcclanahan/2011/11/28/how-much-should-we-spend-on-health-care-the-big-picture/>[including
Medicare and Medicaid] in this country, at least $650 billion
goes toward overhead.”  All the other industrialized countries have far,
far less overhead, primarily because most of them do not let private
insurance companies make huge profits. Nor do their health care bureaucrats
fly around in private jets.


Ramsey’s “math” is based on the claim that Obamacare will have to take all
sick people and they won’t pay larger premiums like professional sky divers
do for life insurance.  So he concludes that the rest of us will have to
pay more to cover the sick (read: “dead beats” and Romney’s 47 percent).
In this calculation, Ramsey neglects many points.

First, all of us do pay for the sick and uninsured.  As one GOP official
once said: “They can go to the ER,” and yes they do, for care that is more
expensive because in most cases the sick have waited too long. Second,
Ramsey forgets to factor in something that the insurance companies are
salivating about: millions of new customers, many of them young and
healthy, whose premiums will cover the risks that are now less in a larger
pool of those insured.

Health insurance premiums have risen 200 percent since 1999, and since
Obama’s agreement with companies, the annual increased has slowed.
Significantly enough, the highest percentage of decrease has occurred in
Massachusetts, which now has almost 100 percent coverage under RomneyCare,
the success story that you chose to ignore.

Roger, I have a video I want you to watch.  It’s on YouTube and the title
is “Dave Ramsey Can’t Do the Math.”

Yours for better sources than these,

Nick
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