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Well, for the second time in recent memory the Democrats are trying to foist government-run healthcare on the American public. When the Clintons tried, it died a horrible death in the press and in the Congress due to its prohibitive costs and attempts to ration healthcare to control costs. Now, the Obama Administration is pushing a similar proposal which promises healthcare rationing to an even greater extent than the Clinton plan, and will cost many trillions of dollars more than they’re telling us.

Hoping to make history, the Senate set off on its major overhaul of the nation’s health care system Wednesday, but its first steps were quickly overtaken by fresh cost concerns and partisan anger.

An ambitious timetable that called for completing committee action in early summer seemed in danger of slipping away.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee began work on a bill encompassing President Barack Obama’s top legislative priority. It marked the first time since President Bill Clinton’s ill-starred attempt in the early 1990s that Congress was tackling such a broad overhaul.

But the more important Senate Finance Committee announced it would delay action, as senators sought to retool their proposals to slash the cost by more than one-third, from an intial $1.6 trillion over 10 years, to less than $1 trillion. Of the five major panels working on health care, Finance has the best odds of coming up with a bipartisan proposal that could overcome gathering opposition.

Lobbyists representing every nook and cranny of the economy were on high alert – even if they were on their best behavior.

Majority Democrats running the Finance Committee have told lobbyists that their views will be taken into account as long as their groups don’t mount public campaigns against the legislation, numerous lobbyists say. So far, health industry groups have not launched aggressive attacks against Democrats’ emerging plans.

The costs of this whole proposal are staggering, but that’s not the worst part:

The measure before Kennedy’s committee would cost about $1 trillion over 10 years, but leave 37 million people uninsured, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Parts of the draft bill have yet to be finalized, so its true costs and benefits are not fully understood.

So, $1 Trillion dollars will still leave 37 million people without coverage under the current proposal. Obama has promised to cover absolutely everybody, so you can do the math to estimate the costs.

Then, there is this: One cost that the Administration is not factoring into all of this is the cost of insuring all of the people who will lose their healthcare benefits once companies and corporations drop their benefits and the associated costs. Companies and corporations are in business to make a profit, and if the government is going to offer healthcare benefits employers will no longer feel that they will have to offer them. Thus, Obama’s mantra of, “If you want to keep your current healthcare plan, you can” is a false promise. You can’t keep something which is no longer available.

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Also being discussed is whether or not to tax your healthcare benefits as if they were income. Seems like Obama can’t do anything without reaching into the taxpayer’s wallet first.

Finally, let’s look at how the US Government does when it runs something really big and that costs a whole lot of cash; healthcare for our Veterans and military personnel. Veterans have been complaining about almost every facet of the healthcare they receive from the Veteran’s Administration for as long as I can remember. Hospitals in disrepair, massive delays in getting doctor’s appointments and routine diagnostic procedures,and cost overruns have been the norm for years. What makes Obama think that he’s going to be able to do any better when we’re talking about many millions more people and many trillions more dollars? He can’t do any better, and chances are he would do a lot worse.

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Even with all of its flaws, the American healthcare system is the envy of the world. People fly here from around the world to get care that they cannot get anywhere else. People who live in countrys which have government run healthcare come here to get treatment which is either denied them by their government or is not available in a reasonable time frame. Now, Obama wants to scrap the whole thing, spend trillions and trillions of dollars, and set up a government-run system which shows all of the promise of a world-class disaster in the making. All of this, and we have not even touched on what this proposal will do to the doctors and nurses out there. Suffice to say, most of them are not happy with this proposal.

This proposal must fail in order for America to survive and prosper. As proposed, this whole thing is going to destroy what little is left of the economy, while dragging the healthcare and insurance indistries down at the same time. If you do nothing else, please do whatever you can to defeat this.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 5:01 pm by Nick, and is filed under Bad Ideas, Government, Health Stuff, Politics, taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.