The latest Democratic attack on Republicans is that they will repeal ObamaCare. While I agree ObamaCare should be repealed and replaced with something better, that isn’t going to happen.

The Wall Street Journal editors say, “The only election event more predictable than Democrats comparing Donald Trump to Hitler is their resort to scare-mongering about entitlements. They’ve now seized on a vague comment by Speaker Mike Johnson to claim that Republicans in Congress will repeal ObamaCare. Alas, no.”

Speaker Johnson was merely responding to someone in the crowd who was yelling “No ObamaCare!” But he told that person “ObamaCare is so deeply ingrained. We need massive reform to make this work.”

The Speaker later clarified that he doesn’t support repeal, which his comment suggested wouldn’t be possible given how politically entrenched ObamaCare now is. Republicans haven’t been able to cobble together a majority to do almost anything. How could they possibly repeal ObamaCare? Despite their 47-member majority in 2017, House Republicans barely passed a “repeal and replace” bill (217-213). A slimmed-down version of the bill failed in the Senate with Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski voting against it. But don’t let reality interfere with a campaign attack.

“They are determined to end the Affordable Care Act as we know it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Kamala Harris said at a brief press conference Thursday that “health care for all Americans is on the line,” claiming that Republicans would strip coverage from people with “pre-existing conditions,” including breast cancer.

This is classic fear-mongering by the Democrats, much like their claims that Republicans want to eliminate Social Security. Just because you recognize there are problems that need to be addressed to ensure the future solvency of the program doesn’t mean you want to get rid of it. This is true for both ObamaCare and Social Security.

What’s wrong with ObamaCare?

The fundamental flaw in ObamaCare is it mandates a “one size fits all” insurance policy that needlessly raises the cost while failing to provide any additional benefits. Quite simply, men do not need coverage for mammograms and women do not need coverage for prostate exams! Yet ObamaCare bakes in the cost of this coverage for everyone.

There are many other flaws as well. All of these have driven up health premiums on the exchanges such that it’s unaffordable even with the subsidies. That’s why Democrats boosted subsidies in 2021. The Biden Administration then let more workers with families qualify for subsidies even if they’re offered employer coverage.

Now costs are ballooning. Federal spending on ACA subsidies has soared to $129 billion this year from $58 billion in 2020. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts the Medicaid expansion will cost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, and the ACA subsidies another $1.3 trillion—and that assumes the 2021 boost expires next year.

The law’s Medicaid expansion to healthy low-income adults is straining state budgets, which has prompted many to reduce payments for providers. As a result, sick people on Medicaid struggle to find doctors willing to see them. This has always been the flaw in Medicaid – reduced access to healthcare providers. ObamaCare is simply increasing the rolls of Medicaid making the problem much worse.

Who is benefiting from ObamaCare?

The real beneficiaries of ObamaCare are insurance companies because it subsidizes people to buy overpriced products they don’t need. That’s right – taxpayers are subsidizing insurance companies who are selling expensive healthcare insurance to people who don’t need the coverage. What can be done about this?

The WSJ editors say Republicans are discussing these reforms to lower costs and improve care:

• Repeal the law’s medical loss ratio, which requires insurers to spend 80% to 85% of premium dollars on medical claims. This de facto profit cap has reduced the incentive for insurers to control costs and spurred them to raise premiums and acquire pharmacies and provider groups to circumvent the cap, as no less than Elizabeth Warren has pointed out.
• Roll back the Administration’s rules that make it more vulnerable to fraud. A Paragon Health Institute report this summer found that millions of ACA exchange enrollees misreport their incomes and receive more subsidies than they should. Paragon estimated the cost of fraudulent enrollment at between $15 billion and $20 billion this year.
• Expand short-term health plans, which don’t have to provide benefits not all people need, such as pediatric services, maternity care and mental-health treatment. Such plans are much cheaper than the heavily regulated plans on the ACA exchanges.
• Expand access to association health plans to let employers in the same industry or area band together to provide coverage. This would reduce the cost for small employers—say, fast-food franchisees or contractors—of sponsoring plans.
• Shift healthy, lower-income adults from Medicaid to ACA exchanges so states can’t game ObamaCare’s rules to squeeze more money from Washington. This would also improve care for sick Medicaid patients.

 

The WSJ editors conclude: “These ideas aren’t radical, and they would be good for patients and taxpayers. Democrats are trying to scare voters about an ObamaCare repeal because their real goal is to put government slowly but surely in charge of all health insurance. Too bad Republicans are so inept at talking about healthcare.”

 

When I was a little boy, I thought my mother might be addicted to our home phone. She spent a lot of time on the phone, talking to people from our church who needed someone to listen to their problems. She wasn’t really addicted to the phone, just to helping people, but to a little boy who wanted her attention, it seemed like the same thing.

Are you addicted to your phone? Your cell phone, I mean. If you pull out your phone in the presence of others to avoid conversation; if you get nervous when you haven’t checked your emails or scrolled through your social media platforms in the last hour; if you’d rather read your phone than read a book – you may have a problem.

Gregory Jantz, Ph.D. is the founder and director of the mental health clinic, The Center: A Place of Hope in Edmonds, Washington. He writes in The Epoch Times about a very familiar scene: You’re dining out at your favorite restaurant, and you look around the room to see most of the people at other tables sitting in silence, scrolling through their cell phones. (I’ve had this very same experience many times!) Or you notice drivers cruising down the highway at high speed while tapping their phone screen – Yikes! Or you pass a bus stop with a dozen kids who aren’t talking or joking together, but instead quietly and individually staring at their phones. That’s just not normal!

He tells of recently attending a Seattle Mariners baseball game and finding himself surrounded by row after row of people whose heads were bowed – not in prayer, but for incessantly scrolling through pages on their phones. “Why pay high ticket prices to look at your phone instead of looking at the action on the field?” he asks.

Phone Addiction Science

Phone addiction refers to an unhealthy and compulsive dependence on mobile devices, similar to behavioral addictions such as gambling or shopping. Though it has not yet found its way into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, many experts consider it a form of addiction due to its patterns of compulsive use and its negative effects on mental, physical, and emotional health.

Phone addiction is not solely about excessive usage. Another sign of it is the inability to control how much time is spent on the device. Modern smartphones are designed to be addictive, with apps and social media platforms employing psychological tactics to keep users engaged for extended periods.

Dr. Jantz and his team of therapists have noticed a consistent pattern in people with phone addiction. When clients must give up their cell phones during extended treatment, by the next day most begin to exhibit classic signs of physical withdrawal from an addictive substance. Almost all become irritable and agitated, sometimes developing sweaty palms and an elevated heart rate. Their bodies are responding to the loss of connection via their devices in ways remarkably similar to people who quit drugs or alcohol “cold turkey.”

The neuroscience of phone addiction reveals that our brains are wired to seek out novelty and instant gratification – two things that smartphones provide in abundance. Every time we receive a notification or scroll through a social media feed, our brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. This chemical reward system strengthens our compulsion to keep using the phone, even when we know it’s distracting us from important tasks or affecting our relationships. We can reach a dopamine dependency, as the regular release of this feel-good brain chemical reinforces the need to check the phone continually.

(Note: For more on phone addiction, see Part II of this series next time.)

 

(Author’s note: The state of Florida has an amendment to the constitution on the ballot this Election Day that tries to legalize recreational marijuana. This amendment is being pushed by the marijuana commercial industry for obvious reasons, but is promoted by claiming it will reduce crime, increase school education funding, and make use of marijuana safer. To educate voters about the truth concerning marijuana usage, I am re-publishing a two-part blog from earlier this year.)

 

The Biden Administration wants to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug – on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with Codeine. The reason they want to do this is quite transparent – they want to buy the votes of young people in the next election. But is this good for these young people and the country?

In Part I , we learned about an interview of Bertha Madras, marijuana expert from Harvard Medical School, by Allysia Finley of The Wall Street Journal. She discussed her great concerns for this change since marijuana has significant side effects and causes more lasting damage to the brain than alcohol. Today we will read more about the dangers of marijuana usage:

Marijuana and Violence

Marijuana has also been associated with violent behavior, including in a study published this week in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Data from observational studies are inadequate to demonstrate causal relationships, but Ms. Madras says that the link between marijuana and schizophrenia fits all six criteria that scientists use to determine causality, including the strength of the association and its consistency.

Ms. Madras says at the beginning of the interview that she was operating on three hours of sleep after crashing on scientific projects. Yet she is impressively lucid and energized. She peppers her explanations with citations of studies and is generous in crediting other researchers’ work.

Marijuana and Pregnancy

Another cause for concern, she notes, is that more pregnant women are using pot, which has been linked to increased preterm deliveries, admissions of newborns into neonatal intensive care units, lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences. THC crosses the placenta and mimics molecules that our bodies naturally produce that regulate brain development.

“What happens when you examine kids who have been exposed during that critical period?” Ms. Madras asks. During adolescence, she answers, they show an increased incidence of aggressive behavior, cognitive dysfunction, and symptoms of ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorders. They have reduced white and gray matter.

A drug that carries so many serious side effects would be required by the Food and Drug Administration to carry a black-box warning, the highest-level alert for drugs with severe safety risks. Marijuana doesn’t—but only because the FDA hasn’t cleared it.

The agency has selectively approved cannabis compounds for the treatment of seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut or Dravet syndrome, nausea associated with chemotherapy for cancer, and anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients. But these approved products are prescribed at significantly less potent doses than the pot being sold in dispensaries that are legal under state law.

Marijuana and Medicinal Benefits

What about medicinal benefits? Ms. Madras says she has reviewed “every single case of therapeutic indication for marijuana—and there are over 100 now that people have claimed—and I frankly found that the only one that came close to having some evidence from randomized controlled trials was the neuropathic pain studies.” That’s “a very specific type of pain, which involves damage to nerve endings like in diabetes or where there’s poor blood supply,” she explains.

For other types of pain, and for all other conditions, there is no strong evidence from high-quality randomized trials to support its use. When researchers did a “challenge test on normal people where they induce pain and tried to see whether or not marijuana reduces the pain, it was ineffective.”

Ms. Madras sees parallels between the marketing of pot now and of opioids a few decades ago. “The benefits have been exaggerated, the risks have been minimized, and skeptics in the scientific community have been ignored,” she says. “The playbook is always to say it’s safe and effective and nonaddictive in people.”

Advocates of legalization assert that cannabis can’t be properly studied unless the federal government removes it from Schedule I. Bunk, Ms. Madras says: “I have been able to study THC in my research program.” It requires more paperwork, but “I did all the paperwork. . . . It’s not too difficult.”

Instead of bankrolling ballot initiatives to legalize pot, she says, George Soros and other wealthy donors who “catalyzed this whole movement” should be funding rigorous research: “If these folks, these billionaires, had just taken that money and put it into clinical trials, I would have been at peace.”

It’s a travesty, Ms. Madras adds, that the “FDA has decided that they’re going to listen to that movement rather than to what the science says.” While the reclassification wouldn’t make recreational marijuana legal under federal law, dispensaries and growers would be able to deduct their business expenses on their taxes. The rescheduling would also send a cultural signal that marijuana use is normal.

Ms. Madras worries that “it sets a precedent for the future.” She points to the movement in states to legalize psychedelic substances, for whose medicinal benefits there also isn’t strong scientific evidence. Meantime, she says it makes no sense that politicians continuously urge more spending on addiction treatment and harm reduction while weakening laws that prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.

Her rejoinder to critics who say the war on drugs was a failure? “This is not a war on drugs. It’s a defense of the human brain at every possible age from in utero to old age.”