If you’re like me, you get junk emails daily. You know the kind I mean. They’re the ones warning you about everything from online cremations to One-Man-Rule-of-the-Earth.
I got one through You Tube concerning the health care bill. Actually over the last few years, I’ve received several. Now since I oppose a large part of the bill, I was curious about the video.
Have no doubt in your mind that I do believe we need reform in health care. I can tell you more than one instance when six, that’s right SIX pills cost almost $300. Now, you can’t tell me that isn’t outrageous. Somebody is making a killing, and it ain’t the American public.
This video was unbelievable even to someone like me who opposes the bill. Whoever put it must be the one putting out many of the truth-deficient presidential videos for it is toxic with deliberate falsehoods.
Here are a few examples of how both sides are manipulating the contents of this bill.
First, the video states the government will audit all books of all individuals who are self-insured.
I looked that up in the bill myself. The words ‘audit all employers’ isn’t in that section. All that section talks about is studying markets to make sure all are conforming to the law.
Now, we can get picky on the meaning of ‘audit’ and ‘study’. Either one will reveal deficiencies in a company’s plan. I oppose it because it smacks of BIG BROTHER looking over every self-employed individual’s shoulder, which in my estimation is too intrusive.
Another misrepresentation in the video is that illegals receive health care. On page 129 of the bill, it states ‘Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payment for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.’
Now, you tell me. WHO determines ‘lawfully’? Executive orders pouring out of the White House in recent months have been mighty forgiving of illegals, bending rules to fit the present administration’s desires.
This next one has generated much discussion, i.e. ‘the dreaded ‘committee’.
Yes there will be a committee comprised of the U.S. Surgeon General and primarily private medical and other experts selected by the president and the comptroller general. This committee will only have power to ‘recommend’ benefits included in the various insurance packages. It will have no power to decide what treatments folks get.
Three expressions in this paragraph concern me and should concern you, ‘other experts’,‘selected by president and the comptroller general’, and ‘recommend’
In my way of thinking, anytime committees have the freedom to recommend benefits, such suggestions it makes are often colored by the unspoken but well-recognized attitudes of those who appointed members of said committee. Again, you tell me. How many of those recommendations will turn into requirements?
If the committee recommends one treatment, then what do you think will become law?
Some sources claim Medicare services will be cut.
One of the many items to be trimmed is the fee doctors are paid as the result of a Medicare patient.
Now, if you stop and think about it, if a doctor makes less per patient through Medicare, there is always the possibility that he will see more patients to make up the difference. And most doctors I know are swamped anyway. If they try to see more, that means they’ll have to fit them in an already packed schedule. Such a result has to lead to a decline in service to each one.
That would never happen with the doctors I know, but as unpleasant as it might be to recognize such a fact, there are those out there pad and fabricate Medicare invoices.
There are many more misleading criticisms of the health bill floating around in cyberspace.
And deservedly so.
Have you ever tried to read any legal contract from top to bottom? That is how this bill, all 2700 pages, is written—in a legalese to be interpreted by committees appointed by the president. And on purpose so it can be interpreted however those in charge wish.
It my estimation, it is too long, too convoluted, too vague, too all-encompassing, and too demanding.
From it will spring hundreds of new bureaucracies, that dreaded government organization that creates paperwork just to have something to do, and at taxpayer expense.
To illustrate the government’s insatiable thirst for power, just this last May, according to Liveleak.com,, when questioned by Congressman Trey Gowdy about the contraceptive and abortion mandate in Obamacare, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she had not taken into account any of the Supreme Court's standard tests for balancing religious liberties against government power, nor could she cite any legal memo written by her lawyers that shows that HHS or the Obama administration considered the constitutionality of the mandate.
If there had been a robust exchange of ideas on this bill, many of the problems that will be haunting us in the future could have been avoided.
And no, I don’t blame one party; I blame both. Government is there to help its citizens, not set up sheer walls of partisanship that prevents exchange of ideas.
This one-sided bill is too long, too vague, too controlling. Give us simple explanations that offer clear outcomes. That’s what the U.S. citizen deserves.
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