Now that the healthcare bill has cleared the house (barely), I have been receiving a number of messages from the Democratic National Committee trying to drum up support for the bill in the Senate. On Tuesday, Tim Kaine sent a request for letters to be written to local newspapers and today I received a call to action from Jen O’Malley encouraging phone calls to Republican Senators to demand that they vote in favor of the legislation.
That’s strange? I thought it was the Republican Party and corporate America that were secretly manufacturing opposition to Healthcare. Nancy Pelosi actually referred to Tea Party opposition to the bill as inconsequential because it was not a legitimate grass roots movement but merely “Astroturf”, which was bought and paid for by Republicans and special interest. I’ve never heard from the Republicans on this but the Democrats have been shamefully trying to stack the deck in favor of this bill from the start.
I have received a lot of information on the healthcare debate from a myriad of sources and it’s true that most of it was very negative. What I find curious is that the opposition to this bill printed their objections and then did something odd. They actually provided a location where one could download the bill in PDF format and then provided the page and section numbers associated with their claims so that anyone could look up the information for themselves. That is hardly a strategy you would expect from them if what they were saying were not true.
The Democratic National Committee, the House and Senate leadership and even the President have only refuted these claims by saying they are lies. In all of the ads, comments and appearances by those in favor of this measure have you seen even one of them offer proof of their claims in black and white? Have they provided links to the bill and page numbers that prove the opposition is lying to us? No they haven’t and the reason is, because they can’t. The only thing they have done is to try to silence the opposition when what we are really asking them to do is answer the damned questions.
Democrats continue to play a game of semantics. They claim the bill will not cover illegal immigrants because you can not find one reference to coverage for illegal’s in the bill. What they do not tell you is that since the bill says “all Americans”, by law that includes anyone that is here. Without definitive language excluding illegal immigrants, it would be unlawful for them to deny coverage to anyone under this legislation. Democrats have refused to put that language in the bill since this debate began.
They claim that if you like your existing insurance plan you can keep it. Again, there is nothing written into the bill that eliminates private insurance. Of course, what they do not tell you is that every major analysis of this bill (excluding the ones funded by the DNC and Congress) say that private insurance cannot compete against a federally subsidized “public option”. In fact, the bill as written provides every incentive for businesses to eliminate their employee’s private insurance benefits as a matter of fiscal policy.
The tax imposed on businesses with more than 100 employees under this bill, is far less than the cost of providing care. That offers a quick boost to the bottom line for employers that dump private insurance and what business owner wouldn’t take that? Under this bill, businesses with less than 100 employees face no penalties for not providing care so those that do not, have no compelling reason to do so now. Those small businesses that do offer benefits will most likely drop that coverage now that their employees have a public option to turn to. Why would they continue to provide care benefits when they can eliminate the expensive premiums of small group health insurance plans and perhaps offer to pay a portion of the public option premium at a fraction of what it cost them to provide coverage in the past?
A better question is how many medium sized companies with 110 or 120 employees will downsize to eliminate the mandate and tax penalty to provide insurance, especially if they do not provide insurance now? Medium sized companies whose specialty is in labor intensive manufacturing ordinarily do not provide healthcare insurance. Not because they are evil but because they cannot afford to. Independent analysis reports this bill will cost the American economy more than 5 million jobs as medium sized companies struggle with the new taxes placed on them.
They say there are no death panels in the bill and that is also true. There is nothing written in the bill that explicitly says that bureaucrats will ration care or determine benefits based on age or health condition. Many of the opponents have also gotten this one wrong by citing the provisions for end of life counseling for people age 65 and over. The end of life counseling is merely meant to offer advice on things like how to construct a living will and how to appoint family members or others to act on your behalf if you are incapacitated.
The real death panel is hidden in the Health Benefits board created by the bill. The board is comprised of a total of twenty-seven appointees that will determine the benefit levels offered under the plan. It’s amazing that actual health benefits or the criteria for delivering that care is not already spelled out but instead, is being left up to a board that will determine that later so in essence, we are being asked to trust them again.
Don’t forget that it wasn’t all that long ago in Oregon, where they have both a state run public option healthcare plan and have allowed doctor assisted suicide, that death panels became a reality. A cancer patient in Oregon received a letter from the state run health plan stating that they would not cover the cancer drugs prescribed by her doctor but would instead cover “comfort care” and “doctor aid-in-dying”. If you want to know the purpose of a heath benefits board and the compassion of a government run health system you would be wise to look to Oregon for the example. Oregon has both and they are doing now what a national system will do later if this bill ever becomes law. By the way, despite distribution of that infamous letter to the media, Oregon heath plan officials still deny the existence of “death panels” in their health system.
Just as Oregon denies what is painfully obvious to anyone that investigates what they will and will not cover, Democrats continue to deny the most disturbing provisions in their own plan for healthcare overhaul. There are few progressive Democrats that have not been caught on film at one time or another calling the public option an important first step on the road to a single payer, government run system. Even the President admitted in an interview filmed as recently as 2007 that they will not be able to eliminate private healthcare insurance immediately and there would necessarily be a “transition” period to achieve universal care. Even though so many Democrats have said that universal care is their ultimate goal, they still publically deny that this bill is a Trojan horse to bring us to that reality.
I’m sorry. I just don’t trust them. Not because I am a cynic at heart (I am) but rather, I do not trust them for very tangible reasons. They have never offered black and white guarantees in the legislation that would prevent these things from becoming reality. Instead they say, “Trust us”. They have never offered the page numbers and excerpts from the actual bill that would refute their critic’s charges. Instead they say, “Trust us”. In fact, they didn’t even want to put the bill on line for us to see. Dripping with condescendence, they insisted that the legal language in the bill would be too complicated insinuating that the average American peasant is far too ignorant to make sense of it and that we would be far better off just trusting the people we sent to Congress to do what is best for us.
Well, all the trust we placed in Congress in the past has brought us to a twelve-trillion dollar national debt, one-hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for our current social programs, more than ten percent unemployment and the loss of not just jobs, but entire industries because of bad treaties and confiscatory taxation. This is not only a bad bill; it is in fact damaging to the economic future of this nation and will jeopardize the quality of the healthcare we currently receive.
Paul
That’s strange? I thought it was the Republican Party and corporate America that were secretly manufacturing opposition to Healthcare. Nancy Pelosi actually referred to Tea Party opposition to the bill as inconsequential because it was not a legitimate grass roots movement but merely “Astroturf”, which was bought and paid for by Republicans and special interest. I’ve never heard from the Republicans on this but the Democrats have been shamefully trying to stack the deck in favor of this bill from the start.
I have received a lot of information on the healthcare debate from a myriad of sources and it’s true that most of it was very negative. What I find curious is that the opposition to this bill printed their objections and then did something odd. They actually provided a location where one could download the bill in PDF format and then provided the page and section numbers associated with their claims so that anyone could look up the information for themselves. That is hardly a strategy you would expect from them if what they were saying were not true.
The Democratic National Committee, the House and Senate leadership and even the President have only refuted these claims by saying they are lies. In all of the ads, comments and appearances by those in favor of this measure have you seen even one of them offer proof of their claims in black and white? Have they provided links to the bill and page numbers that prove the opposition is lying to us? No they haven’t and the reason is, because they can’t. The only thing they have done is to try to silence the opposition when what we are really asking them to do is answer the damned questions.
Democrats continue to play a game of semantics. They claim the bill will not cover illegal immigrants because you can not find one reference to coverage for illegal’s in the bill. What they do not tell you is that since the bill says “all Americans”, by law that includes anyone that is here. Without definitive language excluding illegal immigrants, it would be unlawful for them to deny coverage to anyone under this legislation. Democrats have refused to put that language in the bill since this debate began.
They claim that if you like your existing insurance plan you can keep it. Again, there is nothing written into the bill that eliminates private insurance. Of course, what they do not tell you is that every major analysis of this bill (excluding the ones funded by the DNC and Congress) say that private insurance cannot compete against a federally subsidized “public option”. In fact, the bill as written provides every incentive for businesses to eliminate their employee’s private insurance benefits as a matter of fiscal policy.
The tax imposed on businesses with more than 100 employees under this bill, is far less than the cost of providing care. That offers a quick boost to the bottom line for employers that dump private insurance and what business owner wouldn’t take that? Under this bill, businesses with less than 100 employees face no penalties for not providing care so those that do not, have no compelling reason to do so now. Those small businesses that do offer benefits will most likely drop that coverage now that their employees have a public option to turn to. Why would they continue to provide care benefits when they can eliminate the expensive premiums of small group health insurance plans and perhaps offer to pay a portion of the public option premium at a fraction of what it cost them to provide coverage in the past?
A better question is how many medium sized companies with 110 or 120 employees will downsize to eliminate the mandate and tax penalty to provide insurance, especially if they do not provide insurance now? Medium sized companies whose specialty is in labor intensive manufacturing ordinarily do not provide healthcare insurance. Not because they are evil but because they cannot afford to. Independent analysis reports this bill will cost the American economy more than 5 million jobs as medium sized companies struggle with the new taxes placed on them.
They say there are no death panels in the bill and that is also true. There is nothing written in the bill that explicitly says that bureaucrats will ration care or determine benefits based on age or health condition. Many of the opponents have also gotten this one wrong by citing the provisions for end of life counseling for people age 65 and over. The end of life counseling is merely meant to offer advice on things like how to construct a living will and how to appoint family members or others to act on your behalf if you are incapacitated.
The real death panel is hidden in the Health Benefits board created by the bill. The board is comprised of a total of twenty-seven appointees that will determine the benefit levels offered under the plan. It’s amazing that actual health benefits or the criteria for delivering that care is not already spelled out but instead, is being left up to a board that will determine that later so in essence, we are being asked to trust them again.
Don’t forget that it wasn’t all that long ago in Oregon, where they have both a state run public option healthcare plan and have allowed doctor assisted suicide, that death panels became a reality. A cancer patient in Oregon received a letter from the state run health plan stating that they would not cover the cancer drugs prescribed by her doctor but would instead cover “comfort care” and “doctor aid-in-dying”. If you want to know the purpose of a heath benefits board and the compassion of a government run health system you would be wise to look to Oregon for the example. Oregon has both and they are doing now what a national system will do later if this bill ever becomes law. By the way, despite distribution of that infamous letter to the media, Oregon heath plan officials still deny the existence of “death panels” in their health system.
Just as Oregon denies what is painfully obvious to anyone that investigates what they will and will not cover, Democrats continue to deny the most disturbing provisions in their own plan for healthcare overhaul. There are few progressive Democrats that have not been caught on film at one time or another calling the public option an important first step on the road to a single payer, government run system. Even the President admitted in an interview filmed as recently as 2007 that they will not be able to eliminate private healthcare insurance immediately and there would necessarily be a “transition” period to achieve universal care. Even though so many Democrats have said that universal care is their ultimate goal, they still publically deny that this bill is a Trojan horse to bring us to that reality.
I’m sorry. I just don’t trust them. Not because I am a cynic at heart (I am) but rather, I do not trust them for very tangible reasons. They have never offered black and white guarantees in the legislation that would prevent these things from becoming reality. Instead they say, “Trust us”. They have never offered the page numbers and excerpts from the actual bill that would refute their critic’s charges. Instead they say, “Trust us”. In fact, they didn’t even want to put the bill on line for us to see. Dripping with condescendence, they insisted that the legal language in the bill would be too complicated insinuating that the average American peasant is far too ignorant to make sense of it and that we would be far better off just trusting the people we sent to Congress to do what is best for us.
Well, all the trust we placed in Congress in the past has brought us to a twelve-trillion dollar national debt, one-hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for our current social programs, more than ten percent unemployment and the loss of not just jobs, but entire industries because of bad treaties and confiscatory taxation. This is not only a bad bill; it is in fact damaging to the economic future of this nation and will jeopardize the quality of the healthcare we currently receive.
Paul
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