Sunday, March 21, 2010

"To Your Health!"

Well, it's all over but the celebrating. The Healthcare Bill from Hell is about to become law, and we will have to live with it. I'm feeling about the most depressed right now than I can ever remember. When I think of all of the upcoming media attention that this is going to get, I just want to put my head out the door and toss some cookies. We are going to hear ad nausaem
about a couple of wonderful things the bill does, "Cut the deficit by X amount of dollars", "Insure 30 million more unfortunates", "Coverage can't be cancelled", "No pre-existing conditions restrictions", and a couple more. Even before they had all the votes bought up, the White House had circulated a memo that if anyone did a media appearance, they should only talk about cutting the deficit and insuring 30 million more people. They were admonished not to talk about the nuts and bolts. In other words, "Spin!!" Sure enough, that is all you got on the Sunday news shows last week, and that is all you are getting right now, on the brink of the disaster.

Here are a couple of things you won't hear from them. Basic math tells you that to reduce the deficit, you have to raise taxes enough to pay for the bill and have enough money left over to pay against the deficit. The CBO says the bill will cost 940 billion dollars, and the bill calls for raising 500-600 billion dollars in new taxes. Am I missing something here?? Off the top of my head, this seems like we would be adding 300-400 billion dollars to the deficit. Oh, yeah, they are going to cut Medicare spending by 500 billion dollars - that should do it. Don't hold your breath. They could have cut Medicare spending at any time during the last several administrations without having to pass major legislation, and nobody did it. Their answer is to cut the rate of reimbursement to doctors and hospitals even below the present level. A survey that I saw last week said that more than 40% of doctors would consider retiring early or leaving their profession if they were forced to accept lower reimbursements. But, there is a thing called the "Doctors' Fix" which slips the doctors some extra money to help keep them in the program. The cost of doing this amounts to about 200 billion dollars, and is not included in the 940B figure above. And, yes, that would raise the deficit by about that much. Forget the math for a minute. How are you going to get along if you end up with fewer doctors having to take care of 30 million more patients? Right, you have to ration services. In case you didn't know, there is a provision in the bill that sets up a panel to evaluate the care to be provided (rationing). Everyone will be required to have an insurance policy, subject to a fine if they don't comply. Under certain conditions, employers would be fined if they didn't provide health insurance. Obama said that this bill would create jobs. Here is what he means. The bill provides for the IRS to hire 13,000 new people to do the police work. The IRS, for crying out loud! And the IRS has to share information with the Health and Human Services people, for the sake of coordination. That has to be a comforting bit of information for you - your government having all your tax and health records at their disposal to do with as they deem fit. Now you know why they had to put this together behind closed doors - it could not survive the light of day.

We have been played for fools. The very people we hired to represent us have treated us as if we are too stupid to figure out what is happening. Well, I've got news - we aren't that stupid. And we won't forget what happened here.

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