The health care "reform" lie

Health care "reform" is all a lie you know. What Congress is promising is to "fix" is what it was responsible for breaking in the first place, beginning many years ago. As proposed, health care "reform" will be fatal to the US economy and fatal to many Americans who once could count on getting medical care when they needed it. I continue to suspect that this is really about finding a way of whittling down the "baby boomer" generation as they start looking to draw their promised entitlements from Government. Of course, the system has no money. Congress has been spending that money like drunken sailors since LBJ was President. Congress has refused to address the issue for years. They didn't want the voter to notice that if they were not in Congress, what they were doing was outright theft and in the rest of America, a jail-able offense. What better way to reduce the future demand on the system than pass a bill that effectively initiates a pogrom against old people? It was not a major surprise when the House passed the "reform" bill. With the very real prospect of the Senate passing a "health care reform" bill too, we will complete the cycle of lies about health care that we have been hearing for so long from the politicians that many of us accept them without question. You know like I do, until we get these folks out of office, this is not going to quit. For a majority in Congress, "success" is defined as passing laws, whether they are needed or affordable or not. That is the only reason they could claim to believe the Senate's health care bill will extend coverage to 31 million Americans while cutting deficits by $127 billion over 10 years. It would be the first profitable entitlement ever! Can they spell H-O-A-X? When Senator Reid and Senate Democrats announced they will file cloture on the motion to proceed regarding ObamaCare it was evident we are entering the final scene of this Congressional health care Kabuki dance. Reid will go to the floor for cloture on the motion to proceed to a House-passed tax bill, to begin the Senate debate on ObamaCare. The motion for cloture requires 60 votes and will likely occur Saturday. While several Senate Democrats say now they will not vote for the bill, remember how the system of special interest and pay-offs really works in Congress.

"Want my vote Senator Reid? Then give me a huge piece of pork for my constituents or promise to throw the party support behind some zany and probably unconstitutional bill I want to pass."

Do not be surprised if many Senators have a sudden change of heart over the bill. Cloture is a three day process - file on day one, day two is an intervening day for arm twisting and making promises and the vote occurs on day three.

Here are some of the "features" of Senate "reform" bill:

• Hides the $1.8 Trillion price tag by not accounting for actual costs.

• Implements major reductions in Medicare befits to seniors.

• Implements major tax increases on every American to pay for the "reform."

• Increases the Medicare payroll tax.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are rabidly attacking this bill. They propose "their" version of health care "reform" instead. In other words, lets have Republican rules and legislation instead of Democratic rules and regulations. In either case the end loser is the American taxpayer. The situation was best described in, "A Republican government takeover of health care" which summed it up like this.

Unfortunately, in health care and elsewhere the conservative/Republican leadership is really the followership of the left. Proposals like this one highlight that they have no genuine understanding of what free markets are or why they are good, whether in health care or anywhere else. Like liberals, they hold the statist view that government is morally and practically obliged to feed and nurture the population. In modern conservative/Republican lingo, a “free market” is one that is controlled slightly less than whatever the liberals happen to want at the moment (and usually more controlled than the one the liberals used to want). Witness that in the 1960s, the Republicans opposed Medicare — our biggest government takeoever of medicine — as inimical to a free market; today, they are fierce defenders of this entitlement program, which they proudly expanded earlier this decade to include prescription drugs.

What they do to us Saturday will be irreversible without a revolution at the ballot box in 2010. Unfortunately for all of us, there really are very few alternatives between the two main political parties in America. Until there are, we will continue to see more erosion of individual liberty and freedom and some government bureaucrat in charge of how you live and when and how you die.