March, 2010:
For those of you who have been deeply immersed, I thought it would be
appropriate to step back and highlight some of the absurdity associated
with this health care legislation that you may have overlooked amid the
minutiae. And for those of you who have ignored the debate... well, this
should be very informative.
My most frequent gesture during this grueling 14-month marathon has been
a slow, morose shaking of my head. The huge and
devastating impact on the best health care system aside, the gymnastics
and verbal atrocities of our legislators has been beyond anything any
fiction writer could dream of. If Tom Clancy submitted this stuff to a
publisher, he would quickly see the heel of a shoe heading toward his
face.
Come on; take a walk down what should be fantasyland -- but is in fact,
sadly true. Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
From the beginning, the president promised that his health care bill
would guarantee universal coverage, save the average family up to $2,500
a year, and be deficit neutral. After 14 months of deliberation, it
is none of those things. Not one.
The president said that any bill he signed would have to include a "public
option." It was a cornerstone of his vision. Is it in the bill that the
president will sign? Have you even heard the term "public option"
mentioned in the last three months? What happened to it? Nobody is
willing to say.
The president wants to, as he put it, extend Medicare to every American.
As popular as Medicare is, it is a financial tsunami; it is
unsustainable. (It is popular only because recipients get out of it far
more than they put into it.) It will go bankrupt within the next decade.
And this is what the president wants for all of us. Folks; I could
not make this stuff up!
The bill is 2,700 pages long -- twice as long as War and Peace.
Members of Congress readily admitted that they would not read the bill
before signing it. Four days before the bill passed the Congress,
President Obama admitted that he did not know what was in the bill.
The president spoke many times about his legislation, the bill he would
send to Congress, his health care legislation. In fact, the president
never sent any health care bill to Congress.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that we must pass the bill so that we can find
out what it in it. Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
Neither the president nor the members of Congress know what is in the
bill because they have not read it; they did not even write
it. Lobbyists and special interest groups wrote the legislation. Only
they know the details of the bill that will control a fifth of the U.S.
economy.
For over a year, Democrats complained that Republicans were
obstructionists; that they were preventing health care legislation from
being passed. But the Democrats held an overwhelming majority in both
houses of Congress as well as the White House. The Democrats could have
passed a bill at any time, and there was nothing that
Republicans could have done to prevent it.
Speaker Pelosi said that a bill could be considered "bipartisan," even if
no Republicans voted for it. Really; she actually said that.
Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
The president said that a bill as large as health care reform should not
be passed by a 1-vote majority. He said that that would be divisive and
unworkable. That is, however, essentially how the legislation passed.
The more the president and the congressmen talked about the bill, the
less the American people supported it. By the time the the bill passed,
less than half the American people were in favor of it. In phone calls
(200,000 every hour on Friday), e-mail messages, letters, and public
demonstrations and protests, the majority of the people said they do not
want it. Yet still, Congress has forced it upon us.
The president said that their bill would prevent insurance companies from
denying coverage. But Medicare, the government-run, government controlled
health insurance program, has a higher denial rate than CIGNA, Aetna,
Humana, or UHC.
The president has said that a government health care option would
increase competition among health care companies. That becomes a moot
point when, as Vice President Joe Biden says that the government is going
to control the insurance companies (see below).
In order to get around the pesky, confining, Constitutional requirement
that all bills sent to the president must have passed by both houses of
Congress, Speaker Pelosi considered invoking an obscure House rule which
allows the House to "deem" that the Senate has passed a bill, even though
it has not. Folks, I could not make this stuff up!
This rule is called the "deem and pass" rule, often referred to -- by
logical, thinking people -- as the "demon-pass" rule. Oh, and the House
member who fist suggested using this rule... her name is Slaughter!
Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
Speaker Pelosi said that she likes the "deem and pass" rule, because that
way her members do not actually have to vote on the health care
legislation. This from the speaker who said that her Congress would be
the most ethical Congress in history.
Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
Near the end of the grueling deliberations, Democratic Congressman Alcee
Hastings says, "When the deal goes down, all this talk about rules, we
make 'em up as we go along" (see below). Folks; I could not make
this stuff up!
You may recall the name Alcee Hastings from another embarrassing episode
in history. For a decade Mr. Hastings was a federal judge in Miami. But
in 1989, he became only the sixth federal judge in history to be
impeached and removed from office by Congress. Today, he is an esteemed
member of that same body.
Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
Despite the president's many promises for transparency, most of the
negotiation on the legislation was done "behind closed doors."
Nobody knows yet the details of the blatant corruption, kickbacks,
payoffs and sweetheart deals that were made. One deal, however,
releases water to farmers in the California valley in exchange for a
vote. So, the government had held water hostage... in the name of health
care.
As structured, the cost of the health care bill for the first 10 years
was over 2 trillion dollars. However, to make it more palatable to the
people, the legislators structured the bill as follows:
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• The government will collect taxes to cover the costs for the full
10 years. But the government-provided benefits will be provided for only
six years and will not kick in until 2014.
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• Compensating payments to doctors (which have been made every year
as part of health care -- called the "doc fix") were removed from the
bill. These payments, which will likely be as much as $300 billion per
year, will be legislated separately, and thus are not included in the
legislation. The taxpayer will pay these costs; but they do not show up
as part of the health care bill.
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• The bill includes a savings of $500 million in "waste, fraud, and
abuse." But it does not specify how the waste, fraud, and abuse will be
identified or prevented.
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• The Speaker attached a government-run student-loan program, which of
course, has nothing to do with health care, but which the Speaker says
will save billions of dollars, thus reducing the cost of the health care
bill.
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Folks; I could not make this stuff up!
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the approval rate of the
Congress sits at 17%, the lowest in history. One must wonder, however,
where did they get the 17%?
