A business colleague of mine commented recently that he supported Communism. He stated it would be fine if he were at the top and thus in control of money and decisions. He mentioned Fidel Castro’s supposed $6 billion that he has in foreign bank accounts. This gentleman understands that not everyone has the same results under Communism.

I make this point to show that the goals of a communistic government were not to solve the problems of the masses as much as to shift control from the existing leaders to the new leaders of the country. The leaders of the former communist countries were not living under the same rules as those they were ruling.

This same principle applies to what we are experiencing in the debate about health insurance reform. The leaders of the movement who want the current bills in Congress to quickly pass are individuals who have a greater interest in shifting control of the health care system than they do in improving the health care system. As proof of this I would like to offer three simple points. Understanding these points makes clear what are the real objectives of the proposed reforms:

1. The fact that only a small portion of the uninsured will be covered by the new bill. Those campaigning for health insurance reform regularly cite that there are more than 45 million uninsured Americans. However, the plans in front of Congress will only insure about 15 million of those. Despite that there is no explanation of how the others will be covered.

2. The proponents say the plan saves money, but in reality it will cost $150 billion a year. It simply must baffle people that this reform is being pitched as getting health care costs under control, but it will increase the deficit by an estimated $150 billion per year over the next ten years. How does that add up? Actually, the head of the Congressional Budget Office (a Democrat) believes the negative impact will be higher. History tells us costs are underestimated at the inception of almost every new government program. When politicians state they are going to control costs by rooting out waste and fraud, you must begin to worry.

3. The proposed bill is 1018 pages. I just finished Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton that was close to an 800 pages. It was challenging to read, but comprehensible. Take this book and put it in the terminology that was used in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and you have the bill approved by the House Committee. This is over a thousand pages of legalese that would definitely challenge almost all who read it -- if anyone would actually commit to do so. In his press conference this past week our President stated this was not about politics. How can a bill over 1,000 pages not be about politics? At the beginning of the press conference he listed goals for the reform of health care. Since almost none of those goals are in the existing bill, Mr. Obama clearly has not read this behemoth either.

Combine these three factors; it will cost us a tremendous amount of money to cover only a relatively small portion of the uninsured in a bill that very few if any comprehend. The average American begins to ask why we are doing this. The answer can only be one thing: the current leaders want to take over the health care system.

The people who are attempting to ram this albatross down our throats have little clue of our circumstances. Most of the drafters have never been an employer or even an employee. They are government wonks who crave power and think they know better than the rest of us. For example, Henry Waxman has spent virtually his entire career as a U.S. Congressman and State Assemblyman. He has had superior government-provided health insurance with little cost to him and thus no concerns. Yet he feels he is eminently qualified to draft and dictate a policy on this issue. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy who has no sense of the struggles of the common man is the main designer of their bill. Continued...