There are signs that the Democrats have more than a little problem with their health care agenda. In fact, they look like they are flailing wildly, caught in the same quicksand they fell into when Hillary Clinton tried to ram health care “reform” down the throats of an unwilling electorate.
Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation’s healthcare system.
Despite having a popular president in the White House and comfortable majorities in Congress, the Democratic rollout on healthcare reform has encountered significant bumps in the road.
A cost estimate hanging a $1 trillion price tag on an incomplete bill, salvos from powerful interest groups and great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation that moves through Congress have emboldened Republican critics.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee postponed the markup of its healthcare reform bill by one day, to Wednesday. On the eve of that markup, the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce publicly ripped the bill.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) initially planned to release his bill Wednesday, but he has pushed back his timetable because of cost estimate concerns.
According to the CBO figures, total tax revenues for the US this year will be in the range of $2 trillion. And the Democrats want to hang an additional $1 trillion in spending on us? Any thinking person has got to realize that taxes are going to skyrocket. On top of that, the CBO estimates that some 23 million Americans will LOSE health care coverage under the Democrat’s scheme:
The attached table summarizes our preliminary assessment of the proposal’s budgetary effects and its likely impact on insurance coverage. According to that assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. Once the proposal was fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million.
Got that? 23 million of us will actually lose coverage, not gain it. You will lose the employer-backed health care you have, lose your choices in your health care and become a ward of whatever leftovers the government allows you to have.
Do you really think Washington can manage your health care better than you and your doctor can?
Are you really sure you will not be one of the 23 million that lose in this particular lottery?
You could win the trifecta here, folks: Higher taxes, loss of insurance and dependency on the government.
That’s some kind of hope and a heck of a lot of change.
None of it good.
Now you know why they are flailing. They are trying to find enough paint to cover up this debacle. But they will face the voters in 2010.
To finance this insurance-stripping bill, they want to limit deductions, tax existing health benefits, hike existing taxes and raise a lot of all-new novelty taxes, if one can just cite a few of the trial balloons they have launched.
Hang onto your wallets, folks. Washington is coming to “help” you with your health care. And take your existing insurance away.
Via Memeorandum
I hope they flail around enough that they fail.
I’m wondering if it passes, wouldn’t some healthcare professionals just start doing “free lance”, outside the system.
A good question, Mockingbird. You just might have a lot of doctors setting themselves up as ‘concierge doctors’ treating those who can afford it without resorting to health care insurance of any kind – the very rich. Obama keeps saying he wants to ‘level the playing field’ and ‘close the gap’ between the rich and the poor. What he’s likely to end up doing is creating an even greater gap and steeper playing field at a horrendous cost to all of us. The problem is, he is trying to deliver on promises he made during the campaign that he had no idea how to make a reality. He won the election by promising the moon and the stars when he isn’t even able to deliver a bus ticket to the next county without massive tax increases. And the voters believed him. Now we’re stuck with this useless demagogue in the White House for another 3.5 years.