Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year "grace period" to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you'll have less time.
And as soon as anything changes in your contract -- such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year -- you'll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).
When you file your taxes, if you can't prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you'll be fined thousands of dollars -- as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size -- and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).
No one with any political sense believed Obama about that anyway. Government is not a "free market competitor" as ObamAlinsky claimed. It is an instrument of force and that is how it functions.
One of the more sinister passages of this bill involves bureaucrats "advising" older folks on life and death decisions:
One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and "the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration."
This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues?
Are you starting to see where some of the cost savings may occur? The bill shows no other potential for reducing costs, so isn't if fair to assume that pushing our senior citizens toward the light more quickly could be the "cash cow" for reducing health costs? Rationing of care is implemented in most every country with national health care. In most cases, it involves a pecking order in which the elderly (and sometimes middle-aged) are denied or placed at the end of the line until treatment becomes a moot point.
So, Mr. or Mrs. Leftist-Liberal-Progressive, are you comfortable with a committee of federal bureaucrats deciding when your parents or grandparents have lived long enough? When that someday comes and D.C. pencil pushers decide that your loved one is a year past their treatment being a sound public investment, think back to the "bad old days" when we had the freedom to make our own health care choices.
The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (June 21) finds that 83 percent of Americans are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their health care, and 81 percent are similarly satisfied with their health insurance.
They have good reason to be. If you're diagnosed with cancer, you have a better chance of surviving it in the United States than anywhere else, according to the Concord Five Continent Study. And the World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients' needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors.
Eighty-three percent of folks are satisfied, but we have a "health care" crisis that requires throwing that away for a government program? We have the most responsive health care system in the world and we need to gut it and turn it over to Barry Obama and the radical Left? These people are insane, but they are powerful and well-financed by folks that understand controlling people's health is a huge step toward controlling the people.
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