There were angry people yelling out against the healthcare bill at town hall meetings and the House passed it in a rare late night, weekend session of Congress. There were massive protests against the healthcare bill in Washington DC and at every Senator’s local offices all over the country. Despite these protests, the Senate still passed the bill in another late night, weekend session of Congress. The approval rating for the President and the Congress have plummeted in response to those votes and they still vowed to proceed. Democrats lost major elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts with the election of Scott Brown being a clear referendum against the healthcare bill and the President still stood before the nation at the State of the Union Address and said they must push forward on healthcare. The polls in favor of the healthcare bill are an abysmal 37% and now the Senate wants to use the legislative trick of reconciliation to move it through with a simple majority. The real question is why?
If this were a simple matter of providing affordable healthcare for all Americans or just fulfilling the promise to cover the thirty million Americans that reportedly cannot afford healthcare insurance, most of the people trying to move the legislation forward would have given up when the tide of public opinion began to disfavor the bill. Instead, the President and Progressive Democrats have showed an obsessive resolve to pass this massive 2700 page bill even though the American people have made it clear that the 2010 election will be used to punish anyone that votes for it.
The truth is this bill will raise the cost of insurance for everyone that currently has insurance. There are an enormous number of new taxes that will be raised on everything from medical devices to cosmetic surgery; tanning salons to high cost health insurance plans; high wage earners and even additional payroll taxes. There will be a half a billion dollars cut from Medicare not to extend the life of the program, but to fund an expansion of Medicaid to cover millions more that cannot afford healthcare coverage. While our Presidential master of semantics says there are no mandates for business in his compromise plan there will be a fee assessed on any business whose employees receive assistance through the insurance exchange. In fact, if a company has a combined payroll of more than $500,000 and if only one of their employees receive Federal assistance to purchase insurance through the exchange, a fee of up to $750 is assessed for each and every employee of that company.
This isn’t about healthcare coverage or people without insurance; it is about money and control. As we discussed yesterday, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already consume forty percent (40%) of the current Federal budget. The current increases plotted through the near future show that this level of spending cannot be maintained through 2019 without bankrupting the United States. Our government has neither the political will nor the backbone to scale back Federal entitlement spending so they really have only one other option. That option is the healthcare bill.
They couldn’t get the bill through the Senate with the dreaded “public option” so they crafted a plan to create an exchange where people could purchase competing private healthcare plans. Of course they could have just removed the Federal prohibitions that prevent these same companies from competing nationally but then the plan would fall apart. The plan is that the new mandates that will be imposed on private insurance to eliminate restrictions on pre-existing conditions, life time coverage limitations and expanded well care provisions will dramatically increase the cost of private insurance. The government also wants to create a regulatory board that will place limits on how much private insurance can raise the cost of premiums. The combination of mandates and price controls will severely impact private insurance companies driving them out of the exchange or out of business altogether.
Of course you can’t have an exchange if there are no participating insurance companies and the government will just have to create a publically funded national insurance option to fill the gap. As insurance companies are slowly squeezed out of existence this public option will, out of necessity, become the only option and America will have been duped into accepting a European style Universal healthcare system because nothing else will exist. All of the resistance against Universal care will have been neatly euthanized by legislative trickery and Progressive subterfuge.
With the eventual adoption of a Universal healthcare system, all of the money currently spent on private healthcare in the United States would then pass through the Federal entitlement machine first. This new revenue stream will help conceal the depth of imbalance in the government entitlement structure. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were all created by the Progressive movement to do an end run around the Constitution and create the strong central seat of control that the founding fathers had feared. Knowing the dangers of centralized leadership, they specifically denied all but the most basic powers to the Federal government. Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, Progressives have largely ignored those constraints using legislative loopholes and the allure of entitlement largess to coalesce powers the Federal government was never meant to have.
Social Security was targeted at a relatively small segment of the population when it was conceived in 1935 and was sold to America as a minor tax of just over 1% to help provide security for the elderly. We were a compassionate people and who wouldn’t agree to that? Of course we now know that the passage of this Act was just the starting point and that FDR intentionally funded it through weekly payroll contributions rather than a new tax or surcharge, just to give Americans a false sense of ownership; ownership that would prevent future law makers from dismantling Social Security later. Today, Social Security has transformed into a burdensome program that has expanded in cost and scope well beyond what was promised to America to gain support and passage. It was the benign benevolence of Social Security that was used as the shining example to gain passage of Medicare and Medicaid thirty years later and now these programs are being used by Congress to claim the authority to seize control of the entire healthcare industry.
Despite the 1965 assurances that the cost of Medicare and Medicaid would remain a relatively low portion of the Federal budget, these programs have assumed massive proportions and threaten to consume most of the Federal budget within the next 10 years. Federal meddling in the free market has created a monster that has disrupted the normal flow of healthcare dollars. As the government sheds more of the fiscal responsibility it promised to seniors and the poor on to the doctors and hospitals that must provide that care, those providers then shift the cost to private insurance and to those that can afford a fee for service.
Our law makers are not pushing this hard for healthcare reform because of a sense of duty to the average American, they are pushing because it is the Federal government that created the crisis and they need this legislation to provide them with the financial cushion they hope will give them a little more time to figure out what to do about it. Like a drug addict, Congress doesn’t believe their habit is the problem; it is the lack of money to feed their habit that is the problem. Only the United States government could be bold enough to say that the solution to out of control spending is even more spending; that the problem wouldn’t exist if they started with a larger program than what we have today.
Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Saturday that this was too important to let fail and that members of Congress would have to show the same “courage” used to pass Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In essence, she was asking members of her own Party to sacrifice their careers for this “noble cause’. To Progressives, this is critical. They have been on a slow march to total control over the lives and actions of America’s citizens for the past hundred years. They had nearly achieved their goals through healthcare reform and cap and trade but now both are crumbling before their eyes.
The healthcare bill represented more that money to them; it represented an unprecedented amount of government control over your life. So many things could be done under the guise of healthcare from directing diet, exercise and even gun control. Don’t forget, that Progressives believe that only the elite can make informed decisions and the average American is ill equipped to make those choices for themselves and needs to be nudged and guided to a better life. The key to government control is in buying the apathy of the American people. As long as most believe they are getting something for nothing, anything is possible.
Even if this bill fails, beware. Progressives have never taken no for an answer. Just as the EPA is threatening to enact key provisions of cap and trade through regulatory action without the consent of Congress, key provisions of the healthcare bill will be tucked away and hidden inside other spending bills and future budgets. Expect that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration will try to do the same with healthcare. If they can’t get this through the front door, they will try to sneak it in piece by piece through the window if we are not vigilant. Unfortunately, a free society cannot coexist with the socialization of basic needs. For any government to state that medicine, food and housing are all rights that must be provided for, they must first assume enough control to make all of those choices for you. So the real question is….is this the America you want to leave to your children?
Paul
If this were a simple matter of providing affordable healthcare for all Americans or just fulfilling the promise to cover the thirty million Americans that reportedly cannot afford healthcare insurance, most of the people trying to move the legislation forward would have given up when the tide of public opinion began to disfavor the bill. Instead, the President and Progressive Democrats have showed an obsessive resolve to pass this massive 2700 page bill even though the American people have made it clear that the 2010 election will be used to punish anyone that votes for it.
The truth is this bill will raise the cost of insurance for everyone that currently has insurance. There are an enormous number of new taxes that will be raised on everything from medical devices to cosmetic surgery; tanning salons to high cost health insurance plans; high wage earners and even additional payroll taxes. There will be a half a billion dollars cut from Medicare not to extend the life of the program, but to fund an expansion of Medicaid to cover millions more that cannot afford healthcare coverage. While our Presidential master of semantics says there are no mandates for business in his compromise plan there will be a fee assessed on any business whose employees receive assistance through the insurance exchange. In fact, if a company has a combined payroll of more than $500,000 and if only one of their employees receive Federal assistance to purchase insurance through the exchange, a fee of up to $750 is assessed for each and every employee of that company.
This isn’t about healthcare coverage or people without insurance; it is about money and control. As we discussed yesterday, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already consume forty percent (40%) of the current Federal budget. The current increases plotted through the near future show that this level of spending cannot be maintained through 2019 without bankrupting the United States. Our government has neither the political will nor the backbone to scale back Federal entitlement spending so they really have only one other option. That option is the healthcare bill.
They couldn’t get the bill through the Senate with the dreaded “public option” so they crafted a plan to create an exchange where people could purchase competing private healthcare plans. Of course they could have just removed the Federal prohibitions that prevent these same companies from competing nationally but then the plan would fall apart. The plan is that the new mandates that will be imposed on private insurance to eliminate restrictions on pre-existing conditions, life time coverage limitations and expanded well care provisions will dramatically increase the cost of private insurance. The government also wants to create a regulatory board that will place limits on how much private insurance can raise the cost of premiums. The combination of mandates and price controls will severely impact private insurance companies driving them out of the exchange or out of business altogether.
Of course you can’t have an exchange if there are no participating insurance companies and the government will just have to create a publically funded national insurance option to fill the gap. As insurance companies are slowly squeezed out of existence this public option will, out of necessity, become the only option and America will have been duped into accepting a European style Universal healthcare system because nothing else will exist. All of the resistance against Universal care will have been neatly euthanized by legislative trickery and Progressive subterfuge.
With the eventual adoption of a Universal healthcare system, all of the money currently spent on private healthcare in the United States would then pass through the Federal entitlement machine first. This new revenue stream will help conceal the depth of imbalance in the government entitlement structure. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were all created by the Progressive movement to do an end run around the Constitution and create the strong central seat of control that the founding fathers had feared. Knowing the dangers of centralized leadership, they specifically denied all but the most basic powers to the Federal government. Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, Progressives have largely ignored those constraints using legislative loopholes and the allure of entitlement largess to coalesce powers the Federal government was never meant to have.
Social Security was targeted at a relatively small segment of the population when it was conceived in 1935 and was sold to America as a minor tax of just over 1% to help provide security for the elderly. We were a compassionate people and who wouldn’t agree to that? Of course we now know that the passage of this Act was just the starting point and that FDR intentionally funded it through weekly payroll contributions rather than a new tax or surcharge, just to give Americans a false sense of ownership; ownership that would prevent future law makers from dismantling Social Security later. Today, Social Security has transformed into a burdensome program that has expanded in cost and scope well beyond what was promised to America to gain support and passage. It was the benign benevolence of Social Security that was used as the shining example to gain passage of Medicare and Medicaid thirty years later and now these programs are being used by Congress to claim the authority to seize control of the entire healthcare industry.
Despite the 1965 assurances that the cost of Medicare and Medicaid would remain a relatively low portion of the Federal budget, these programs have assumed massive proportions and threaten to consume most of the Federal budget within the next 10 years. Federal meddling in the free market has created a monster that has disrupted the normal flow of healthcare dollars. As the government sheds more of the fiscal responsibility it promised to seniors and the poor on to the doctors and hospitals that must provide that care, those providers then shift the cost to private insurance and to those that can afford a fee for service.
Our law makers are not pushing this hard for healthcare reform because of a sense of duty to the average American, they are pushing because it is the Federal government that created the crisis and they need this legislation to provide them with the financial cushion they hope will give them a little more time to figure out what to do about it. Like a drug addict, Congress doesn’t believe their habit is the problem; it is the lack of money to feed their habit that is the problem. Only the United States government could be bold enough to say that the solution to out of control spending is even more spending; that the problem wouldn’t exist if they started with a larger program than what we have today.
Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Saturday that this was too important to let fail and that members of Congress would have to show the same “courage” used to pass Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In essence, she was asking members of her own Party to sacrifice their careers for this “noble cause’. To Progressives, this is critical. They have been on a slow march to total control over the lives and actions of America’s citizens for the past hundred years. They had nearly achieved their goals through healthcare reform and cap and trade but now both are crumbling before their eyes.
The healthcare bill represented more that money to them; it represented an unprecedented amount of government control over your life. So many things could be done under the guise of healthcare from directing diet, exercise and even gun control. Don’t forget, that Progressives believe that only the elite can make informed decisions and the average American is ill equipped to make those choices for themselves and needs to be nudged and guided to a better life. The key to government control is in buying the apathy of the American people. As long as most believe they are getting something for nothing, anything is possible.
Even if this bill fails, beware. Progressives have never taken no for an answer. Just as the EPA is threatening to enact key provisions of cap and trade through regulatory action without the consent of Congress, key provisions of the healthcare bill will be tucked away and hidden inside other spending bills and future budgets. Expect that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Social Security Administration will try to do the same with healthcare. If they can’t get this through the front door, they will try to sneak it in piece by piece through the window if we are not vigilant. Unfortunately, a free society cannot coexist with the socialization of basic needs. For any government to state that medicine, food and housing are all rights that must be provided for, they must first assume enough control to make all of those choices for you. So the real question is….is this the America you want to leave to your children?
Paul
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