MMR: All Praise Be to Obama!

Good news! You can now get affordable, mandated, government run health care! All praise be to St. Obama for giving all Americans free health care while at the same time increasing quality of care and lowering the defecit through spending more! A miracle, indeed!



Before the vote, our esteemed Speaker of the House (and known St. Obama lackey) Nancy Pelosi, had this to say on why we needed to pass the health care legislation:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. [emphasis added]

Yes, that's right, we needed to pass the bill SO WE COULD FINALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT THE FUCK ITS ACTUALLY GOING TO DO!!! A ringing endorsement if I've ever heard one.

Then, on the night of the vote, in her final address to Congress before this abomination of a bill passed, she said the following:

"We all know, and it's been said over and over again, that our economy needs something, a jolt and I believe that this legislation will unleash tremendous entrepreneurial power to our economy," Pelosi said. "Imagine a society and an economy where a person could change jobs without losing health insurance, where they could be self-employed or start a small business. Imagine an economy where people could follow their passions or their talent and without having to worry that their children would not have health insurance."

Pelosi pledged the new legislation would create hundreds of thousands of jobs and save $1.2 trillion in its second 10 years, numbers predicated on unlikely scenarios, including Congress' withholding its authority to make discretionary spending changes to the bill and future Medicare savings.

Oh, ok, now I get it. We're passing health care to save jobs! And to reduce the debt! It actually has nothing to do with getting people health care! Yeah, that makes perfect sense!

Listen, ultimately, we have no idea exactly what this bill will do. Mainly this is because, despite his campaign pledge to make changes in the open and in a transparent manner, the Democrats ran back behind their closed doors to make shady deals to get this bill passes as soon as it became apparent that a large majority of Americans actually did not want this bill to pass! No one actually knows what this bill is actually going to do.

We have the following claims from liberals (thanks to Ross Douthat):

~Health care reform will save tens of thousands of lives every year. Not some lives, on the margins, in hard-to-measure ways that may or may not justify the bill’s price tag. Tens of thousands every year.

~Likewise, liberals are convinced that reform will cut the deficit, rather than increase it. This conviction depends on two big assumptions: that Congress will actually slash Medicare payments, no matter the howls of outrage that ensue, and that the “Cadillac tax” on high-value plans, currently postponed till 2018, won’t end up being put off again, again and again into eternity.

~It will create 400,000 new jobs “almost immediately,”

The liberals also claim the following won't happen, despite all projections showing otherwise:

We’ll find out if the bill makes premiums skyrocket. We’ll find out if it creates doctor shortages. We’ll find out if the array of new taxes destroys more jobs than the new spending creates. We’ll find out if the fiscally essential firewall between the new, heavily subsidized exchanges and the old, less-subsidized employer-based system holds up. And in the (only slightly) longer run, we’ll find out if tacking an entitlement to comprehensive health insurance atop a groaning system speeds America’s rendezvous with a bankrupt, Californian future.

We know the claims both sides of the aisle are making. And we know the holes in them. Republicans are just opposing everything Democrats throw out there. Democrats are trying to pass anything that looks like change after a rather inept first year of Obama's (and the super-majority Democratic Congress's) term. Democrats are spending us into debt and bankruptcy, the Republicans want things to go poorly so they can win some elections. We've heard it all. But now the bill is going to be law (once Obama signs it on Tuesday), so its time to look past partisan bickering and look at how this new piece of government bureaucracy affects us.

Well, it appears immediately that parents will be allowed to keep their kids on health care until they are 26. Which should at least help my sister once she graduates someday from college. I'm not sure how the government can mandate how a private company runs their business, but so be it. Also, apparently there will be no lifetime limits on coverage, which is a wonderful way to say that we can spend as much of the insurance company's money as we want! Once again, not sure how the government can mandate how private companies run their shit, but whatevs.

The bill will require new plans to have provisions where preventative care has no copayment and does not count against the deductable. I like this one, but, once again, why is the government telling private companies how to run their business?

There's also a pool being created for those with pre-existing conditions, which is good. We need to get rid of pre-existing conditions keeping people from being insured.

Overall, there are some fine ideas in here, but it feels both lacking, and somewhat expensive. Either its going to run up some huge debts, or we're going to have to be taxed out the wazoo. Neither of which sound too appealing to me.

I found a few PDFs that looked interesting enough. HERE is the one that talks about the immediate provisions being enacted. HERE is the one that talks about the timeline for everything in the bill. Useful enough.

Anyways, I'm not against health care reform. I definately agree with the need for something to be done. What I am not in favor of, though, is passing something just for the sake of passing it. If we're going to have sweeping health care reforms, spend time to make sure its the right kind of reform, and that it addresses all problems.

First, you cannot legislate how private businesses handle their shit. Well, I guess you can make laws about it, but its incringing on the free market. Second, its expensive and creates more government bureaucracy, which we definately don't need. The government is already too big for its own good. Third, and this is the key, if you want to lower health care costs across the board, you HAVE TO attack frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits. You have to! Costs are so high because malpractice insurance is so expensive, because any time something goes wrong, even a minor, unintentional slip, or an unavoidable crash, the doctor is getting sued. To try and prevent this, on top of their high insurance rates, doctors also order every test and scan known to man "just to be safe." These tests are super expensive, and mostly unnecessary. But you don't want to get sued, and the insurance companies are footing the bill for the patients, so go for it! This has to be stopped if we have any chance of lowering the cost of practicing medicine.

Even one of the good points, not allowing companies from "discriminating against" preexisting conditions, is highly flawed. The bill doesn't allow companies to charge more for people with preexisting conditions! Basically, this leaves open a loophole where people can just get insurance when they are sick! Why pay when you are healthy if they can't stop you from buying it at the same price when you are sick? It'd be cheaper to pay the $750 fine (they may or may not enforce), and just grab some insurance when I need it rather than pay for it all along! Premiums will just skyrocket across the board to cover this, and everyone gets screwed. People with preexisting conditions should be allowed to get healthcare...just not at the same price. That's just bad business policy.

So the current bill seems to have a few good points, a lot of excess, and will cost way too much. I have a feeling that if you got some smart people in a room together, you know, people who actually know anything about health care in this country at all and not politicians, they could have come up with something far more doable that this current monstrocity. Hell, make it a single payer system and get businesses out of providing health insurance to their employees. Then people can shop around and buy the insurance that fits their needs/budget. Let people under the age of 65 opt into Medicare, but at the same time they'll also be opting themselves into a new tax bracket. I dunno, something has to be better than mandating insurance companies change the way they do business, ignoring the main underlying problem our health care system has, and adding in huge government bureaucracy and costs that will run up the debt to heights where it will never be paid off.

Sigh. Soon enough we'll be paying 50% of our paychecks to the government. I just hope I see something back from the government when they take all my money, and they aren't just giving it away to people too lazy to work...