Health Care Watch for Tuesday, November 3 - "Worst Bill Ever"
Posted by Scott "The Piper" St. Clair - November 03, 2009House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health care bill has been dubbed the "Worst Bill Ever" by The Wall Street Journal.
Ranking it up there with the Depression-causing Smoot-Hawley Tariff that Herbert Hoover signed and the Depression-compounding National Industrial Recovery Act of Franklin Roosevelt, here's how the WSJ described it:
Ranking it up there with the Depression-causing Smoot-Hawley Tariff that Herbert Hoover signed and the Depression-compounding National Industrial Recovery Act of Franklin Roosevelt, here's how the WSJ described it:"The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a 'critical milestone,' may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics."
Why do they regard it so? What do you expect when the thing is filled with spending surges, obviously phony accounting tricks, massive new bureaucracies, implicit rationing of health care services, and lots more. The WSJ piece is important - please read it.Speaking of new bureaucracies, how many will be created? According to this piece at Fox News, House Republicans claim 111 new federal agencies, departments, bureaus, and what not will blossom like measles on a nine-year old as a result of Nancy Pelosi's bill. Admittedly, the Republican caucus isn't unbiased and non-partisan, so let's discount their number by 50 percent and then take one-quarter of that. What you still get is a massive growth in government.
And for what? We're told it's necessary because millions of Americans have no health care coverage and can't avail themselves of it, hence we MUST have a government option health plan in order to beat up on greedy and evil insurance companies.
Oh? According to this piece in the Huffington Post, only two percent of Americans under age 65 will sign up for government-option insurance. Two percent equates to about 6 million people.
While the purpose of the HuffPo article is to pooh-pooh the significance of the government option in the overall
scheme of things, it ends up being too clever by half since the net, net, net of the Pelosi Bill will have the government option swallowing all the others over time. That's letting the government fox inside the private hen house - he's not there to play ping pong. He's there intentionally to take everything he can after eating his fill.
scheme of things, it ends up being too clever by half since the net, net, net of the Pelosi Bill will have the government option swallowing all the others over time. That's letting the government fox inside the private hen house - he's not there to play ping pong. He's there intentionally to take everything he can after eating his fill.Is this what the American people want? Not according to new polling data from Rasmussen Reports. Only 42 percent of Americans support the Pelosi bill. What's more, the data reveals, 68 percent of Americans who have coverage like what they have and don't want to lose it. Strong majorities don't believe the current proposal will reduce costs or expand coverage - just the opposite; they believe the numbers will go the other way and do so strongly.
These numbers have remained constant for weeks, varying only a few percentage points over time.
At what cost? According to this, numbers being leaked by Democrats who favor the bill have the tab at $1.2 trillion and probably heading north of that.
That's from those who favor the bill! And that's just a few billion dollars shy of the current deficit number of $1.4 trillion.
Some math: We're going to spend $1.2 trillion to provide government-option health care to 6 million people (creating dozens of new bureaucracies in the process), which works out to $200,000 per person, with this idea opposed by better-than-landslide-numbers of the American people.
Would someone - anyone - please explain this to me? Then again...it's all in the Worst Bill Ever.
The Piper
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