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July 16, 2009
Obama's Socialized Medicine DeathCare ~ It Is NOT About Choice
It's Not An Option
Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.
The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."
What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.
With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.
The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.
Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.
It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.
Congressional Budget Office Chief BASHES Obamacare
Congressional Budget Office Chief Criticizes Democrats' Health Reform Measures
Director Says Proposed Changes Would Increase Health-Care Spending
Thursday, July 16
Instead of saving the federal government from fiscal catastrophe, the health reform measures being drafted by congressional Democrats would increase rather than reduce public spending on health care, potentially worsening an already bleak budget outlook, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said this morning.
Under questioning by members of the Senate Budget Committee, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said bills crafted by House leaders and the Senate health committee do not propose "the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount."
"On the contrary," Elmendorf said, "the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs."
Though President Obama and Democratic leaders have said repeatedly that reining in the skyrocketing growth in spending on government health programs such as Medicaid and Medicare is their top priority, the reform measures put forth so far would not fulfill their pledge to "bend the cost curve" downward, Elmendorf said. Instead, he said, "The curve is being raised."
The CBO is the official arbiter of the costs of legislation, and Elmendorf's stark testimony is certain to undermine support for the measures even as three House panels begin debate and aim to put a bill on the House floor before the August recess. Fiscal conservatives in the House, known as the Blue Dogs, were already threatening to block passage of legislation in the Energy and Commerce Committee, primarily due to concerns about the long-term costs of the House bill.
Cost is also a major issue in the Senate, where some moderate Democrats have joined Republicans in calling on Obama to drop his demand that both chambers approve a bill before the August recess. While the Senate health committee approved its bill on Wednesday with no Republican votes, members of the Senate Finance Committee were still struggling to craft a bipartisan measure that does more to restrain costs.
The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee Kent Conrad, (D-N.D.), has taken a leading role in that effort. This morning, after receiving Elmendorf's testimony on the nation's long-term budget outlook, Conrad turned immediately to questions about the emerging health-care measures.
"I'm going to really put you on the spot," Conrad told Elmendorf. "From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?"
Elmendorf responded: "No, Mr. Chairman."
Sen Roberts: Obamacare Bill includes the end of Medicare and TRICARE
CSPAN
Senator Pat Roberts on CSPAN-Senate channel now. Claims the Obamacare Bill ends both Medicare and TRICARE by making reimbursements so low that no doctor or hospital will be able to afford to provide it through a bill no one has had the time to read. Claims Obamacare will end ALL other health care options by also purposefully and maliciously undercutting all private plans. Pure Stalinist medicine.
It's clear why Obama and Pelosi are freaking-out and trying to get this passed before the end of July. If congresspeople go home and get an earful of their constituents' anger they'd never come back and vote for it.
Roberts: "Wake-up, seniors! Wake up, AARP! Wake up, National Hospital Association! This is your medical care and Obama is taking it away from you!"
American Medical Association backs House health bill
WASHINGTON
The influential American Medical Association on Thursday said it supported the healthcare overhaul legislation moving through committees in the Democratic-led House of Representatives and urged its approval.
"This legislation includes a broad range of provisions that are key to effective, comprehensive health system reform," AMA executive vice president Michael Maves wrote to the House committee leaders.
In particular, he said, the doctors' group backs the insurance market reforms that seek to expand healthcare coverage and the proposed health insurance exchange. In this exchange consumers would choose between private insurers and a public plan.
He also cited the ban on exclusion from coverage for pre-existing conditions and an increased reliance on primary care doctors.
On federal healthcare programs, the AMA said it welcomed the changes in Medicare health care for the elderly which would include a repeal of the sustainable growth rate formula and the expansion of Medicaid for the poor.
"This year, the AMA wants the debate in Washington to conclude with real, long overdue results that will improve the health of America's patients," he wrote.
And the AMA is like saying I support having my dinner poisened tonight?
The AMA represents a small fraction of doctor’s. They are a liberal association.
It’s funny - a month ago when the AMA had reservations about the public plan, the Democrats attacked them and said they “don’t speak for most doctors”. Now they are trumpeting this endorsement?
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Wild Thing's comment........
Excellent article by Investor's Business Daily.
DeathCare brought to you by the Muslim Messiah and the US Congress and the MSM! If you’re over 60, kiss your rear goodbye. All they want is power over your life and death. Obama's agenda is the destruction of the America he hates.
THIS is the federal government eliminating an industry. This is a law to make all private health insurance illegal. Obama is going to kill this country in less than a year with his policies including that farce Cap & Trade.
This Bill ends both Medicare and TRICARE by making reimbursements so low that no doctor or hospital will be able to afford to provide it through a bill few have taken the time to read. Roberts speaking said Obamacare will end ALL other health care options by also purposefully and maliciously undercutting all private plans. Pure Stalinist medicine.
Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity both sounded the alarm about this on their radio shows today.
We are witnessing the end our Republic if this passes.
Posted by Wild Thing at July 16, 2009 06:55 PM
Comments
obama is a pure Marxist. He, along with a majority Democrat Congress, want to totally control every aspect of our lives including life and death medical decisions.
We Americans have done it to ourselves by being uninformed and taking the easiest sounding road in the voting booth. I just wonder if it is possible to reverse this course or if the legislative actions in the next few weeks will doom us forever.
Posted by: TomR at July 16, 2009 09:36 PM
On Beck tonight they were discussing Universal No care at all. What was said, that companies who have a bottomline are the best for Health Care. There has to be a profit motive for the thing to work right. This creates competition and competition is what generates new ideas, new life saving machines.
On the contrary no bottom line , no motive, no new inventions, no new ideas, same old boring stuff. No competition to be the best because after all Doctors are paid the same, about 42 % of what they make now. But they still have to have the same Malpractice insurance but with 58 % less money. There will be no incentive. Good Doctors will find other avenues of making a living beside medicine.
This will be the biggest casualty in this whole debacle called Universal Health Care. And who suffers , WE do, In Town just across the border from the State of Washington, in Canada, they have a lottery every month, if you win the lottery you get to pick a Doctor. This type of scenario is coming to a town near you.
There is good news. There is something called the 'Blue Dog Democrats' who do not support Pilosi's plan they're 52 of them. This plan can't win if 32 of them don't vote her way. So there is hope for this one. So far none of the Blue Dogs support this. But we shall see. Time to call my Rep again.
Posted by: Mark at July 16, 2009 09:56 PM
Tom, I think if it gets voted it then it
cannot be reversed but I am not sure.
Right now there is a ray of hope that
enough of the dems will see the light
and not vote for it.
Posted by: Wild Thing at July 17, 2009 12:24 AM
Mark, thank you for the information about
the 'Blue Dog Democrats'.
Posted by: Wild Thing at July 17, 2009 12:26 AM
We are doomed under this administration with those in charge. They are all crooks and follow their socialist idealogy.
Posted by: Roger Ingram at July 17, 2009 02:26 AM
As a retiree who is at present unemployed. I got laid off in February from Hawker Beechcraft. I did not buy the coverage offered by the company and stayed with TriCare. The deductibles and copays were within 10 to 20 bucks of each other and I had no out of pocket premium. And in an air Force town, it worked.
Seems to me that when I first enlisted some 36 years ago, I was told that if I stayed in for 20 years, my Country would take care of me in certain respects. That TriCare coverage is one of those things.
So, not only does the obambozo, pelousy, ferret face reid and company despise the active forces they are out to get the retirees. God only knows what they will try and do the Veterans Affairs department.
Lousy goddamned traitors, each and everyone of them.
Posted by: Glenn Cassel AMH1(AW) USN RET at July 17, 2009 07:06 AM
Chrissie - This is a 60 second Add against socialised medicine....I hope you find it informative.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWxcv0Dummk&feature=player_embedded
Posted by: Lynette in Australia at July 18, 2009 06:38 AM
