A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve

Little-Acorn

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Senate Democrats have been making wholesale changes to the Senate Health Care bill in an attempt to get the votes of the last few liberal Democrat holdouts. On the longest, darkest night of the year, they apparently threw out the entire bill, and replaced it with something called the "Managers' Amendment", which has been cobbled together over the last several days. Though few people have even seen this new plan for taking over 1/6 of the nation's economy and radically changing the country's Health Care industry, a vote is now scheduled for Christmas eve.

Many are wondering what's in it, and why so much secrecy and stealth is necessary for a bill that will have so much impact, fundamentally altering the nation's health care and the way the government will run it.

Those in the know in the Senate (that is, three people) seem to feel it is vital that Senators vote on, and pass, this bill BEFORE they go home to face their constituents over the Christmas break. Apparently they fear that, once the Senators hear what their constituents have to say about this bizarre and secret process for imposing radical change on the country, some of the 60 votes in favor of it, will evaporate. Senate leaders are determined to prevent that, at all costs.

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http://opinionjournal.com

Change Nobody Believes In

A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve

DECEMBER 21, 2009, 5:13 P.M. ET.

And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.

***
• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.

The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.

These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like "community rating" because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.

As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed "waste," even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. "The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice," the Stanford professor wrote.

• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.

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.This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.

Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."

With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington's hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, "our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all," as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.

"The Senate isn't hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day," Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."


(Full text of the article can be read at the above URL)
 
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Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

What a travesty. Vote buying and arm twisting their own party to get the 60 votes. Really it's quite pathetic. What a bunch of losers.

Harry Reid being the biggest loser of them all. He's going to lose his seat. He's down double digits in his state senate race.

I just don't know why the republicans don't sling some mud while this is going on. It's not like it will hurt them any if they call it like they see it. A sham!!
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

Such a big bag of malarkey!:D

Your nose is growing as we speak. The Dems clearly said that whenever the Republicants ran out of obstructionist time they would then vote on the Bill.

Maybe you obstructionists should stop pouring more of your garbage on the floor and just grab a mop!

But that's not what you do. You make messes and then bash those willing to work on a problem.


 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

(The usual leftist insults and namecalling deleted)

You make messes and then bash those willing to work on a problem.

Imposing a secret socialist program into place isn't "working on a problem". It's creating a far worse problem while doing nothing to help the original.

The Republicans are doing the country a favor by stopping it. And if by chance they succeed in killing the socialist progam completely, the country will owe them huge thanks.

And at that point (with an assist from sensible voters in Nov. 2010), they can start working on the actual problem: Govt intrusion that was far too excessive even before the socialists started trying to take over the entire Health Care industry. The Republican health care bills that have been bottled up by the Democrats without discussion or votes, can finally see the light of day, and start us on the right path to solving our problems with Health Care.
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

at least the dems will own this bill

I hope no republican votes for it so when the people get their pitchforks they only poke out the eyes of dems
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

Must be some seriously thick newspapers, the bill is over 2000 pages.

Guess what, no paper was going to publish the whole thing, ever, no matter how long we wait...so whats your point...The Detials are what is important and what is being reported...

nice try though
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

at least the dems will own this bill

I hope no republican votes for it so when the people get their pitchforks they only poke out the eyes of dems


I hope a few smart ones join, but if not, does not matter the more important issue is that I hope the Bill works and gives more coverage to people, lowers the Debt over 10 years, and lowers cost for the people....now do you hope it does that?
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

I hope a few smart ones join, but if not, does not matter the more important issue is that I hope the Bill works and gives more coverage to people, lowers the Debt over 10 years, and lowers cost for the people....now do you hope it does that?

Conspicuous by its absence is, of course, any hope that the bill will conform to the Constitution and/or preserve the freedom of Americans that document was designed to protect.

But, what the hey. What could be wrong with sacrificing a few essential liberties for the sake of gaining some safety, however temporary?
________________________________

How appropriate. This is post #666 for me.
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

Conspicuous by its absence is, of course, any hope that the bill will conform to the Constitution and/or preserve the freedom of Americans that document was designed to protect.

But, what the hey. What could be wrong with sacrificing a few essential liberties for the sake of gaining some safety, however temporary?
________________________________

How appropriate. This is post #666 for me.

well so far the Supreme court has been against you for many many years now...so I will take my chances on that.
 
Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

I hope a few smart ones join, but if not, does not matter the more important issue is that I hope the Bill works and gives more coverage to people, lowers the Debt over 10 years, and lowers cost for the people....now do you hope it does that?

Well I would not mind if the mccains types joined in. They are really just democrats anyway for the most part and they need to go just as much as the crazies on the left.
 
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Re: A bill so reckless it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas ev

As we look at the falsehood absurdity of the title of this thread...

and we all know it was nothing NOTHING but the JUST SAY NO, draw everything out, OBSTRUCTIONIST REPUBLICANTS, even to the despicable point of saying on the floor of the US Senate that they should pray that a Democrat wouldn't be able to make it to this vote obviously referring the the 92 year old Democrat Senator, Senator Byrd... after all of this...

At 7:15 am this morning... just a few short minutes ago... the United States Senate PASSED the Health Insurance Reform Bill! Just as I had predicted long long ago when those on the Right were busy buying tea bags saying it will never happen.

Now we wait for the know nothing, fix nothing, complain when someone else tries and actually gets something done crowd to start a new thread. It will no doubt read...

A bill so reckless they made people get up & go to work at 7 o'clock in the morning to vote on it.:rolleyes:


This my friends is what's called CHANGE... CHANGE is fighting to get something done until it is done. Great day for America... and on Christmas eve no less.;)

One of my favorite clips. It really shows what eventually happens when you try to game the system & obstruct. It only brings the other side together.


 
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