A Response to O'Reilly on Health Care

The following is a recent column by the Republican polemicist, Bill O’Reilly, along with my paragraph-by-paragraph response. I am going to try to find columns by members of the right wing media machine on various subjects and respond in the same way. Perhaps in this way I can help illustrate the difference between cynical political talking points and reasoned argument backed by facts. The column is complete and unedited, broken up only by my responses. I have changed the typeface of my responses, put them in italics and made the font size larger. I hope that it is not too difficult to distinguish between O’Reilly’s words and mine. If it is, please let me know and I will try to make the distinction even greater. I can be reached at brucerosen52@yahoo.com
Bruce Rosen

Unhealthy and Unwise
By: Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.comThursday, Jul 21, 2005
The devil has frostbite because hell has just frozen over. The New York Times, the elite media champion of government entitlements, has printed a "knock your socks off" investigation of Medicaid fraud in New York State.The headline is that 40% of New York's $45 billion a year Medicaid tab is paid to crooks who have figured out how to beat the chaotic system. The Times ran down a list of thieves including doctors, dentists, transportation providers and individuals. The paper did a nice job exposing the scams and fraud but just dented the crime wall, because to steal about $20 billion a year, there has to be an army of villains and there are.

What does the above imply about the right wing myth that the New York Times is a biased, liberal newspaper? If the Times truly had a left wing agenda would they have published an article like that? Would Faux News ever do a story that contradicted their established right wing bias? If so, please show me an example. If not, then a fair minded person would have to admit that the Times is an unbiased news source that tells the truth, whatever the ideological consequences and that Faux News is merely a propaganda organ of the Republican party.


Now, I don't think anyone is surprised that entitlement fraud is rampant in New York State, which is the highest taxed state in the union and has two U.S. Senators that love the entitlement gravy train: Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. But the state also has an allegedly conservative governor, George Pataki. However, Pataki has little power because the State Assembly is controlled by perhaps the worst elected official in the country, Speaker Sheldon Silver, who makes Boss Tweed look like Elliot Ness. Silver has consistently and unrepentedly stalled bills that would provide more legal oversight on entitlement fraud.

The reference to Schumer and Clinton is a gratuitous statement that O’Reilly, as usual, does not back up. He just pulls nonsense out of his butt. The Presidential administration of Bill Clinton greatly reduced the amount of government entitlements. It also streamlined the government bureaucracy. The worst elected official in the country sits in the White House and he makes Elmer Fudd look like Albert Einstein. His chief advisor makes Benedict Arnold look like Nathan Hale. As chief executive of New York, Governor Pataki is responsible for enforcing the law. Fraud is illegal. Any failure in stopping that is ultimately his responsibility.


So why should you care if you don't live in New York? Well, because the liberal mantra that all Americans are entitled to government-funded health care has gained momentum over the years, and is likely to be one of the cornerstones of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.

I certainly hope so! It is long overdue that in the most advanced and wealthiest nation on Earth, basic health care be available to everyone.


Can you imagine the federal government sending checks out to hundreds of millions of Americans and their health providers? Can you just picture the chaos and the theft potential? We have massive fraud now with targeted health plans for the poor and elderly. Universal health entitlements would send the country into fiscal disaster.


Medicare actually works remarkably well, with the exception of the recent change, which the White House pushed through after deliberately lying to Congress about its cost. The only beneficiaries of this “reform” are big Pharmaceutical companies. Our present system of private health care is already sending this country into fiscal disaster. Of course, you will never hear about all of the corporations and families on the verge of financial ruin due to runaway medical expenses if your only news source is Faux News.
General Motors recently announced another downsizing, in which they will lay off 25,000 employees. They attributed most of their problem to out of control medical costs. Many jobs are moving to countries like Canada, where the government relieves the burden of health care from corporations or to third world countries, where corporations do not have to offer any medical insurance and life expectancy is much lower.


The truth is that our Constitution does not mandate any responsibility on the part of the feds to pay you anything. There wasn't even a federal income tax withholding before 1913. But now the American left has decided that a "compassionate" society must provide health care, even though it is virtually impossible to do that in a nation of 300 million. The national health system in Canada is chaotic and they have just 33 million citizens.

The constitution was written in 1787 and leaves provisions for future generations to pass laws as they see fit. Is an unsupported grand pronouncement from O’Reilly enough to convince anyone that universal health care is impossible? Is anyone truly that gullible? The Canadian system, on balance, works quite well and the overwhelming majority of Canadians support it.


I am not talking about an "every man for himself" national policy. Clearly, the federal government should provide responsible and effective safety nets for Americans who cannot provide for themselves. Nobody should live under a bridge, nobody should die for lack of a doctor. But government assistance should be well thought out and delivered in a targeted, disciplined way. So far, that has not been case, not only in Medicaid, but in most "Great Society" programs.

The fact is that in our country many people do live under bridges and many more, including middle class people, die for lack of proper medical care. If someone is uninsured and lacking the necessary financial reserves, who is going to provide them with chemotherapy or bypass surgery or any of a number of medical procedures or medications necessary for their survival? It is unconscionable that the America of the twenty-first century does not have a system guaranteeing all of its citizens basic, affordable health care.Anyone looking for anything well thought out needs to steer clear of Bill O’Reilly.


Rampant entitlements have bankrupted Germany and France and the high taxation that fuels these programs has made it impossible for the German and French economies to grow. More entitlements and higher taxation in the USA would lead to the same situation. We have been warned.

So why is the Euro so strong in relation to the dollar? The present health system in the U.S. is far more wasteful than those in Europe and far more costly. There are too many insurance company and HMO bureaucracies, many of which exist mainly to deny doctor mandated treatments. Does anyone really think we deliver medical care efficiently?A single payer system would be far more efficient than the bloated, top-heavy system we have now.


It must be galling to the left-wing columnists at The New York Times that their own newspaper has illustrated the economic dangers of massive entitlement programs. People like Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman envision a quasi-socialist paradise where the feds provide you with everything from tranquilizers to a colonoscopy. And judging from the exposition of out-of-control Medicare fraud in New York State, the colonoscopy reference is disturbingly appropriate.

Facing the truth never galls Liberals and they always welcome intelligent debate. What does gall them is when mindless talking points are substituted for reasoned discourse. Of course corruption must be rooted out and punished. God knows there is plenty of that in the present medical system. There is also plenty of corruption in this administration and its relations with its large donors, who will no doubt continue spending huge amounts of money to lie, distort and frighten people into maintaining our present, broken health care system.