It's Not An Option

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 4:20 PM PT


When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law."

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.


IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- It's Not An Option

You may know more about this than me, but I could swear I read somewhere that there's a provision in the bill that would allow Congress to keep their plans as they are now for themselves and their families, and not have to sign up for the government plan. If that's true, its hypocrisy at its finest.

I hear that every member of congress that supports this legislation needs to be fed into a wood chipper feet first.

Hey Dems, Karl Marx called. He wants his ideology back.

That is ture. But does that really shock any of us?

URGENT ACTION NEEDED ON HEALTH CARE


By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann
07.17.2009

In two weeks, Obama’s health care plan is likely to become law, ending medicine as we know it in the United States! Unless we can stop him, our own personal access to medical care will be attenuated (no matter if we can pay for it ourselves) and we will all be subject to bureaucratic rationing.


Seeing his popularity draining away rapidly, President Obama has cynically decided to ram through the complex health care legislation in two weeks, without debate or amendment. He is going to give up the attempt to win sixty votes in the Senate and will use the budget reconciliation procedure - which is only used for budget bills - to push it through with fifty votes.
His plan would:
• Force employers either to offer health insurance to their employees or pay a tax of 8% of their payrolls. This would apply to all with payrolls of $250,000 a year or more (basically every business)
• Reduce medical fees to the Medicare Schedule Plus 5%, driving doctors out of the profession and increasing the need for rationing.
• Raise taxes on all making more than $250,000 a year ($350,000 for a couple) with a surcharge. Rates will go as high as 45%.
• Set up a government owned health care plan to compete with private plans. Getting a subsidy, it will soon put the private plans out of business and we will have a single payer Canadian style system.


The Canadian health care system is a disaster. A cancer death rate 16% higher than in the US. A colon cancer rate 25% higher due to waits for colonoscopies and a death rate that is 41% as opposed to 32% in the US. An eight week wait for cancer radiation therapy.

How can Obama care for fifty million new people without more doctors? By cutting access to care for the elderly. End Medicare as we know it. The government decides who gets hip, knee, or heart surgery. Eight month wait for colonoscopies. In Canada, an eight week wait for cancer radiation. Say no to Obama’s plan. Write Senator Evan Bayh today so you can still see your doctor tomorrow.

I think lobbyists are wasting their time spending money on the politicians. None of them even read the bills they are signing. Seems to me it would be better to spend money on the clerks that are actually writing the thousand page bills that get handed out at midnight the night before the vote. They never read the cap and trade bill or the porkulus bill.

Imagine slipping a 5 or 10 million dollar grant into a 750 billion dollar bill? So long as you give your group a PC sounding name like, "Green Study of Fishing Vessels and their impact on the Intracoastal Waterways and Offshore marine life," they'd never need to know that it was going for you to buy a fleet of fishing boats.

I love how they lose the tape of the moon landing but want all of our health records.

silly government

Let's face it, it's gonna be sh*t. I don't care how bleeding heart "it's for the good of all" the purveyors of this bill are. They are going to sell us up the river for the sake of government control of more and more.

Where is Zartan with all of his wisdom in regards to the communist Obama and his minions?

Older folks like me will be screwed...........they are going to decide who gets procedures/ surgeries and who doesn't. Folks over 50 like myself will be holding the short end of the stick more times than not. Folks over 65 will be left for dead. Pretty scary stuff here.

let us pray

Honestly I don't really have a problem with goverment provided healtcare as long as the private sector didn't totally disappear. There are lots of people out there who can't afford anything and this would be a upgrade for them. Something is usually better than nothing. As long as the option for me and my family to stay on our current health insurance plan was available, I wouldn't mind it. I understand we don't have the money to finance it as a country but we didn't have that money for a bajillion other things either.

We should trade this imperialistic guarding of the world for affordable health care for the low-middle class. We'd probably be able to pay down some of that debt too.

since when is it the governments job to provide healthcare? I was thinking today about how often I hear liberals crying about us "policing the world" and how much it costs, but if anyone ever mentions cutting back on foreign aid, or babysitting all the illegal aliens it really lights their hippy hair on fire. If we are going to be isolationist, we should be totally isolationist, not spending taxpayer money on anyone besides US citizens. "Ending genocide and racial cleansing is not important, condoms for third world countries should definitely take precedence." Besides all that, I don't want to pay for everyone else's health care!

That was either a subtle joke, or you were channeling the spirit of someone who is naive and ignorant on how this thing will play out. I'm hoping for subtlety.