Washington 'Shall' Control Your Healthcare By David Harsanyi The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton's Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages. Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi's new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages. So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey and just dive in. But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles ("1984" was only 268 pages!) like the "Health Choices Commissioner" or "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration." You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending . . . ." It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees. The word "shall" - as in "must" or "required to" - appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase "mind our own freaking business." Not once. To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is "revenue neutral," or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol. Real competition, as far as anyone can tell, is antithetical to the authors of this bill. Remember, you can purchase oranges from Florida and whiskey from Kentucky, yet you're prohibited from buying health insurance from anywhere outside your state . . . so sayeth Nancy Pelosi. Instead of creating a new market with interstate trade, what we get is the institution of the pleasant-sounding "Health Insurance Exchange," which exists, it seems, only to accommodate a non-competitive, government-run insurance option. Now, finding a name for a state-run program without offending the lingering capitalistic sensibilities of bourgeoisie has been problematic. So Pelosi went with the innocuous "consumer option" - known for a fleeting moment as the "competitive option" and popularly as the "public option." Whatever your preference is, it's the option that leads to a single-payer insurance program. Democrats say we can save billions by funding a plan that uses billions of wasted tax dollars from another public plan that we already supplement with billions. Make sense? In actuality, we pay for all this by "cost sharing," or "sharing the cost" of insuring everyone through higher prices and taxes. But no fear. The legislation taxes "the rich." The bill doesn't index the tax to inflation so more of you will be on the hook as inflation rises due to the tragically irresponsible behavior of Congress and the White House. The rich - many of them small-business owners - are already set to see their rates go up in 2010. Hey, who needs those jerks to create real jobs when we have Washington pretending to do it? All of this, as Madame Speaker says, constitutes a "a historic moment for our nation and families." True. No legislation in modern American history compares when in comes to injecting itself into the everyday decisions of the citizen. And few can compete with its deception. The bill's intentions are cloaked in euphemisms and it is teeming with ulterior motives, all cobbled together in closed-door meetings where industry payoffs are offered using taxpayer dollars to facilitate a power grab of unprecedented cost. All of it, rolled right into a neat 1,900 pages.
*shrug* The rules for dungeons and dragons, with expansions, probably come to thousands of pages. And it's just a game. Unfair comparison? No shit! These things are huge because they anticipate crafty human beings, left, right, center, and unaligned, will try to game the system.
Given the billions in fraud in other government <s>run</s> ruined programs, sounds like it needs to be 199,000 pages long then.
Given the trillions in undetected fraud in business, sounds like 1900 pages is fantastically concise.
A point that eluded both of you is that Medicare has too much of an unfunded liability (read: biggest hole in future budgets, about 70% of projected deficit will come from Medicare). Medicare is a LOT more expensive than this proposed plan, which is revenue neutral or slightly positive in projected savings.
Just face it. This bill is a mess. If you think healthcare is bad now, wait until this bill passes. You are going to need a team of 6 lawyers and 2 MDs to know what the hell is going on. We all know the Congress is filled with lawyers. Now think for a minute, who benefits the most from having an overly complex healthcare system. Lawyers do. They did the same thing with the tax code. They made the damn thing so complicated that they made a whole new industry for lawyers and CPAs. I wonder why.