--Obama says his plan is not socialized medicine because he's just providing a "public option" to make the private insurers more competitive. Well, he's stacking the deck with mandated coverage -- which, by definition, reduces competition -- and subsidizing the public option. He would provide incentives to businesses to move employees to the public plan. Also, once you lose your insurance, your coverage choices would no longer be grandfathered, and you'd be forced to buy a plan that includes Big Brother's mandates -- meaning most would gravitate toward the government plan. A single-payer system is virtually inevitable.
--The plan is being sold as a necessary element of reviving the economy. No one, including the Congressional Budget Office, believes this bill would improve our economy, and most believe it would exacerbate our problems. The bill, with its taxes on successful small businesses and its Draconian regulations, would destroy job creation, as would increases to the deficit and debt the bill would cause.
--Health care costs would not be reduced, but increased -- and shifted. Studies show that preventive care measures would not reduce costs. More importantly, the CBO says that even with the planned confiscatory taxes on higher-income earners (which no one can deny constitute real costs to them) and the penalties on employers who don't provide coverage, the plan would fall $239 billion short of covering its initial cost estimates of $1 trillion. And that's assuming everything goes well. But cost estimates for government programs are always understated. The actual costs for Medicare Part A were $67 billion, seven times higher than the government's 1965 projections of $9 billion. Even worse, the Medicaid special hospitals subsidy was $11 billion, more than 100 times the government's projection of $100 million in 1987, just years earlier. The only efforts at cost containment would come from artificial price controls, which would result in rationing -- most likely for the elderly.
--The quality of socialized health care would not be improved as promised, but would necessarily deteriorate, as it has in all countries that have tried it and in our own government-run experiments of veterans care, Medicaid and Medicare. It's inescapably true -- as noted by Dr. Thomas Sowell -- that price controls would reduce quality care because they would reduce the incentive to provide quality.
--Health care choices would not be expanded, but essentially eliminated, by government mandate. The White House isn't even denying it would force taxpayer-subsidized abortions.
The apathetic and complacent among us must understand that once this anti-American outrage is passed, it will be enormously difficult to reverse legislatively, even with decisive Republican congressional victories in 2010 -- a task made more difficult with ACORN's stimulus-fed election fraud operation firmly in place and an ever-growing dependency class voting itself money from the public trough. It will likely require supermajorities in both houses.
The time for action -- to stop this bill and institute much-needed market reforms -- is now!