The farce being played out on Capitol Hill is our Republic’s worst nightmare. The overstuffed piece of sausage they’ve jammed into those thousand pages spell disaster for the American public and for the health sector of our economy.
Not only that, but it is a huge broken promise by Campaigner Obama. The man is not just “politics as usual, he is politics squared. We complained when Hillary wanted to change health care behind closed doors, but that is exactly what Obama is doing:
This poisonous mess Obama & Co have massaged into its present creepy form is missing any vital elements it would need to change the delivery of health care for the better. This massive piece of bureaucracy can’t even be understood by the ordinary reader. What’s more it is written that way on purpose. You’re supposed to give up and let the Govermentus Leviathanus roll over you. Hey, one more corpse is one less dollar they have to pay out to keep you well.
Not only is it undecipherable, it is deliberately devoid of innovation.
Just to name a few purposely eliminated ingredients:
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- a system that would unhook health insurance from employment. Your car insurance doesn’t depend on your job, why should your health insurance be linked to it? This plan won’t change that.
- a true overhaul of the current insurance system is not part of the deal. Right now the health insurance industry is over-regulated, can’t be carried from state to state, and is hampered from real innovation by the Big Guys. If this mess is passed, small insurance companies will disappear and only the giants will be left. Guess how much flexibility and choice they’ll offer you? Remember the old saying about Bell Telephone: “we’re The Phone Company. We don’t care because we don’t have to”? Change that to The Big Insurance Company, or maybe Medicaid, and you can recycle some American Soviet humor.
- Big Pharma, with its huge prices on drugs, is being left intact by the Congress and administration. They cut a deal with the administration so the highway robbery prices that are forced on American consumers will continue to underwrite the lower prices they charge European and Canadian health care systems.
- tort reform is dead in the water. These politicians are all lawyers and some of them made their fortunes on malpractice suits. John Edwards is the most infamous of these opportunists.
- doctors are screwed by this system, except for those who are willing to sell their souls for a piece of the pie. The top people who were attracted to medicine in the past because they could use best practices and maintain their independence won’t be in the field in coming generations. The time-servers will show up instead. Those who might have been healers will be doing other things with their lives, the kinds of endeavors which permit them to use their talents for diagnosis and innovative thinking.
This Congress and this administration is a disgrace.
Stay well.