Democrats have promised Universal Health Care. Sounds good? Think again, it doesn't work. Never has never will. Look at Cuba, Russia or any socialistic state. People will soon figure out that those that produce, have jobs and work for a living will end up paying for those that don't. They will pump in billions in Medicaid and make you pay for it. Now with this new stimulus bill, they will now monitor your health and your medical condition to start doling out healthcare and the older you get, the less you will get. This just goes along with the Democratic philosophy of life and death. If you’re in the womb you’re worthless and if you’re too old, you have outlived your usefulness.
The New Healthcare Bill HR 3962
Healthcare Villains according to the Dems.
Page by page of the healthcare bill
Who Benefits if the Healthcare bill goes through?
Healthcare – Been there done that – it’s been tried and doesn’t work
If Obama is so focused on health care reform, could someone please tell me why there are so many parts of the ObamaCare plan that benefit labor unions and promote unionization? Just another indication that this is not about health care, it's about control --- and paying off your friends.
Max Baucus is determined to have his hands all over this government healthcare plan. And here is his latest brilliant plan: tax workers on their employer-sponsored health insurance in order to pay for government healthcare for the currently uninsured.
Unbelievable.
As of right now, 160 million workers get their health insurance through their employer. It is not taxed as income, and a lot of people say that this leads to workers seeking a more generous benefits package than they might want if it was taxed. As you know, under Democrat rule you aren't allowed to get any benefit from anywhere unless it is taxed. Now its your health care plan. Next will be your parking space and that free coffee in the break room. Come on! Think about it! If you're taxed on the health insurance coverage provided you by your employer .. why not that coffee? Why not the value of those do-nuts your boss brings in every Friday? How far can these tax and spend Democrats go, folks?
Ever heard of imputed income?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574441193211542788.html
ABC's Karen Travers reports from Washington: The Liar and Chief Speaks on Healthcare
President Obama told ABC News’ Charles Gibson in an interview that if Congress does not pass health care legislation that will bring down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”
The president laid out a dire scenario of what will happen if his health care reform effort fails. “If we don't pass it, here's the guarantee….your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you,” he said. “Potentially they're going to drop your coverage, because they just can't afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year. “
The president said that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid are on an “unsustainable” trajectory and if there is no action taken to bring them down, “the federal government will go bankrupt.”
“This actually provides us the best chance of starting to bend the cost curve on the government expenditures in Medicare and Medicaid,” Obama said.
Watch Charlie Gibson’s interview with President Obama tonight on World News and check back on ABCNews.com for the full interview.
Obama told Gibson that anybody who says they are concerned about the rising deficit or worried about tax increases in the future has to support this health care bill.
“Because if we don't do this, nobody argues with the fact that health care costs are going to consume the entire federal budget,” the president said.
Obama is facing an increasingly skeptical American public when it comes to his push for health care reform.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that support for the health care reform package, while never robust, is now at a low ebb and opposition has been steadily growing stronger in intensity.
For the first time, a majority of those surveyed disapproved of the president’s work on health care (53 percent) and oppose the health care reform package making its way through Congress (51 percent, compared to 44 percent approval).
That seven-point margin for opposition is its most to date -- indeed statistically significant for the first time -- and the differential in intensity of sentiment has grown since September.
How can that be? If you prevent somebody from getting a heart attack, aren't you necessarily saving money? The fallacy here is confusing the individual with society. For the individual, catching something early generally reduces later spending for that condition. But, explains Elmendorf, we don't know in advance which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case, "it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway." And this costs society money that would not have been spent otherwise.
Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.
That's a hypothetical case. What's the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, "if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success," the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country's total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't be preventing illness. Of course we should. But in medicine, as in life, there is no free lunch. The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment -- that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them -- is simply nonsense.
Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That's the whole premise of medicine: Treating a heart attack or setting a broken leg also costs society. But we do it because it alleviates human suffering. Preventing a heart attack with statins or breast cancer with mammograms is costly. But we do it because it reduces human suffering.
However, prevention is not, as so widely advertised, healing on the cheap. It is not the magic bullet for health care costs. You will hear some variation of that claim a hundred times in the coming health care debate. Whenever you do, remember: It's nonsense -- empirically demonstrable and CBO-certified.
Republicans are howling about the proposal to expand health coverage and tax greenhouse gas emissions without their input, warning that it could irrevocably damage relations with the new president.
"That would be the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through," said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who briefly considered joining the Obama administration as commerce secretary. "You're talking about the exact opposite of bipartisan. You're talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River."
The shortcut, known as "budget reconciliation," would allow Obama's health and energy proposals to be rolled into a bill that cannot be filibustered, meaning Democrats could push it through the Senate with 51 votes, instead of the usual 60. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both used the tactic to win deficit-reduction packages, while George W. Bush used it to push through his signature tax cuts.
Administration officials say they have not made a final decision about whether to use the maneuver. But White House budget director Peter R. Orszag said yesterday that it is "premature to be taking it off the table." Meanwhile, key administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are pushing for reconciliation instructions in the budget proposal that Democrats are scheduled to unveil next week, congressional sources said.
"I'm aware and the president is aware of the concerns that have been expressed, especially by Republicans, about its use," Orszag told reporters at a luncheon organized by the Christian Science Monitor. "We'd like to avoid it, if possible, but we're not taking it off the table at this point."
House Democratic leaders also are pressing strongly to use reconciliation in hopes of avoiding a repeat of the debate over the economic stimulus package, when a more expansive proposal adopted in the House was modified to appease moderate Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.
With 58 Senate seats, Democrats need the support of at least two Republicans to block a filibuster. But they could pass a reconciliation bill without any Republican votes -- and without the support of troublesome moderates in their own party.
Some moderate Democrats are arguing that reconciliation would empower their party's liberal wing while undermining a critical aspect of Obama's popular appeal -- his promise to work across the aisle.
Just yesterday, in promoting his budget request, Obama said he was open to a healthy debate and invited Republicans to offer alternatives to his proposals. "With the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, what we need in Washington are not more political tactics, we need more good ideas," he said. "We don't need more point-scoring, we need more problem-solving."
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) said reconciliation would send the opposite message, creating "kind of a divisive atmosphere." Lincoln, a member of the Senate Finance Committee who has been working for months with GOP colleagues to lay the foundation for health-care reform, said circumventing that painstaking process "would just be sticking them in the eye."
Lincoln is one of seven Democrats who last week joined 21 Republican senators in declaring their opposition to using reconciliation to expedite Obama's plan to auction off permits for the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, a proposal known as cap and trade. That legislation "is likely to influence nearly every feature of the U.S. economy," the letter says, adding that any move to put it on a fast track or to limit debate "would be inconsistent with the administration's stated goals of bipartisanship, cooperation, and openness."
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which is handling health care, also has spoken against reconciliation, arguing that he would rather have a health-care plan that can win broad, bipartisan support than a narrowly drawn proposal passed only by Democrats. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has argued against reconciliation as well.
"There are many more problems with using reconciliation than is commonly appreciated," Conrad said yesterday, after he and House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.) met with Obama at the White House. The topic of reconciliation came up "in passing," Conrad said, but no decisions were made.
One big problem, Conrad said, is that reconciliation was conceived as a way to force hard budget choices, such as tax increases or spending cuts, not as a means to advance substantive legislation.
Clinton, for example, rejected reconciliation for his own ill-fated health-care proposal, as did Republican congressional leaders when they enacted a Medicare prescription drug benefit, in part because reconciliation is permitted only for spending and revenue provisions. All the administrative language necessary to create a new health-care program or a new cap-and-trade regime could be cut, leaving major initiatives looking like "Swiss cheese," Conrad said.
G. William Hoagland, a former budget aide to Senate Republican leaders, said measures enacted through reconciliation also are temporary, which is one reason the Bush tax cuts will expire in 2010. "Do you really want to set up a new health-care system just to have it expire?" he said.
Jim Horney, a budget analyst at the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, agreed that those rules create obstacles to using reconciliation for Obama's initiatives. But he said reconciliation is hardly a declaration of war on Republicans.
Several past reconciliation bills, including a student-loan measure in 2007, won bipartisan support, Horney said. He added that it's "a little odd that Republicans who thought it was hunky-dory to push through the Bush tax cuts now find it unbelievably offensive that you might use reconciliation, even as a backup."
Republicans argue that changing the tax rate is very different from adopting a sweeping reform of health care or energy policy.
"This is a game-changer for how the nation's economy relates to energy," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), the senior Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, said of the cap-and-trade proposal. "If we do it quickly, shame on us."
Unless They Have 2 Lawyers to Interpret It for Them. CNSNews.com) - During his speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), questioned the point of lawmakers reading the health care bill. “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”
"This is not only about the health of individuals in our country, which will be justification enough ... It's about the competitiveness of our businesses to make them globally competitive because they are competing with companies and countries where the federal government -- their governments -- pay for health care. They don't have to bear those health care costs."
Hey .. Nancy .. newsflash. It is not the government that will be paying for this healthcare. The government does not generate an income to pay for healthcare. It seizes money from its taxpayers. Money that was earned by the taxpayers. So if the taxpayers have earned the money, and the government seizes it to pay for Democrat dreams and schemes like healthcare .. then the taxpayers are really the ones "bearing those healthcare costs" now aren't then?
Over the weekend, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said in a C-SPAN interview that he does not expect a health reform bill to pass Congress in 2009 and prefers to see the issue dealt with “incrementally.” House Democrats are already taking “incremental steps” toward health reform, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly wrote in an e-mail before suggesting more sweeping action in the near future.
The House already passed an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and is working on an economic stimulus bill that includes provisions to shore up the Medicaid program, facilitate displaced workers maintaining their private insurance benefits and allocate funding to other healthcare priorities, Daly noted.
“There are some incremental steps that we are taking — first we did SCHIP, then in our economic recovery package, we have money to help stem the tide of people losing health insurance — coverage for Medicaid and COBRA. There is also money for quality, Health IT, comparative effectiveness and wellness, and money for prevention,” Daly wrote.
“And we will take a major step forward this year to increase the number of people who have healthcare coverage,” Daly wrote.
“Incremental” is an unwelcome and loaded term among would-be health reformers.
Barack Obama is not being truthful about McCain's health care plan. McCain would provide a refundable tax credit of $5,000 to all families, and $2,500 for single workers, to be used to help buy health insurance. On October 4, Obama said in Newport News, VA, "Senator McCain would pay for his plan, in part, by taxing your health care benefits for the first time in history. And this tax would come out of your paycheck. But the new tax credit he is proposing? That wouldn't go to you. It would go directly to your insurance company -- not your bank account."
Obama here is practicing one of the Rules for Radicals he learned from the works of the openly socialist revolutionary Saul Alinsky during Obama's community organizer days: There is no need to be truthful when you are fighting for social justice. Make wild charges against your opponent and let him be stuck trying to explain the confusing details. LINK
