In a despicable betrayal of the people of Virginia, Senators Warner and Webb recently voted for the monstrosity of a health care bill in the U.S. Senate. This bill will be a total disaster for the best medical care in the world that we currently have here in America, and this bill is a real slap in he face to the people of Virginia.
This bill is ostensibly for the purpose of reducing health care costs nationwide. But the government has never run a program, any program, in a cost effective manner, because the government wasn’t designed to be efficient. It just doesn’t think that way. Look at the Postal Service, where in my lifetime the cost of a stamp has gone from three cents to forty-four cents, a 1367% increase, or at Social Security, which everyone acknowledges will go bankrupt at some point, despite the many social security tax increases over the years. What about Medicare, which is $37 billion underfunded because costs are out of control.
The Congressional Budget office says the Senate health care bill will cost $2.5 trillion over the next ten years. Let me make sure I understand this: We must spend $2.5 trillion more on health care than we are now in order to bring costs down?
Aside from the cost issue, there is the matter of rationing. There will be rationing of health care under this bill, as there is in every government health care system in the world. In Great Britain, there is a board of bureaucrats that was set up for this specific purpose.
Our very own government run health care for seniors, Medicare, already rations care in many ways. Here is just one example. National Coverage Decisions (NCD’s) are issued by Medicare’s medical staff; these NCD’s define who is and is not eligible for new and often expensive treatments. You and your doctor don’t decide that; the Medicare bureaucrats do.
But the Senate health care bill doesn’t include a government option, we are told. Well, I say that if it looks like a duck and it waddles like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. When the government passes a 2100 page law covering every conceivable aspect of health care, such as the Senate bill, then that’s government run health care.
In any event, the Democrats pushing for the government take-over of health care know that it can’t be done in one fell swoop. They have to first get the camel’s nose in the tent, and that’s what this bill does. The liberal Democrats fully admit that this is just a start on the road to a complete take-ever of health care by the government. They have said many times that universal government-run health care is their goal.
The promoters of this scheme will say that insurance companies ration health care now, so what’s wrong with the government doing it. The very significant difference is that you can change insurance companies if you’re not satisfied with the one you have, but you can’t switch to a different set of bureaucrats if you don’t like what they are doing.
Oh, and what about the death panels we have been told repeatedly will not come to be? Guess what: They are already at work, a la the government mammogram report that told women not to have a mammogram until age fifty instead of starting at age forty because starting earlier resulted in “too may procedures”. That is, it cost too much to start at age forty, never mind that it unquestionably saves lives. This report was withdrawn after a public firestorm broke out over it, but expect more such reports in the future if we get expanded government run health care.
Something as important as health care, which represents one-sixth of our total economy and which affects us all in a very personal and direct way, should be given due consideration, for as long as it takes. Why does a 2100 page bill have to be passed tomorrow? The reason is that the liberal Democrats don’t want you to have time to find out what is really in all of those 2100 pages, and how dramatically it will affect you.
The latest Rasmussen poll shows that, nationwide, 56% of the people oppose any sort of a government health care bill, and only 40% approve. Why is Congress in a wild panic trying to ram and jam something through that most people don’t want? Maybe Congress thinks they know better how to run our lives than we do. Maybe they just don’t care what the people think.
But the most outrageous aspect of this bill is that some Senators from states such as Nebraska, Louisiana, and Vermont put their votes up for sale. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada then eagerly bought their votes by putting special provisions in the bill that benefit only those Senators’ states. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana bragged that she was able to extort $300 million for her state from Harry Reid. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska held out to the last moment in order to get the juiciest deal possible for Nebraska.
If all of this outright corruption in the U.S. Senate wasn’t enough, our two Senators approved of it all by voting for the bill. It gets worse. Since all of those billions of your taxpayer dollars will be funneled to other states in special programs for those states only, you will pay even higher taxes than you otherwise would under this health care bill if those special provisions were not there. That’s right, Virginians will pay even higher taxes under this bill so that people in Nebraska and Louisiana and Vermont can be shielded from the ultra high cost of the bill.
Senators Webb and Warner agreed to all of this.
Jessee Ring
Dec. 23, 2009
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