National Government Run Health Care

NetRight Nation ^ | June 22, 2009 | Bill Smith

[NetRight Nation]

A headline in today’s edition of Roll Call summarizes the health care debate this week: “More Hurdles for Health Care.” Democrats struggled with their various health care proposals last week in the wake of inconvenient reports that the two health care bills in the Senate would likely cost in excess of $1 trillion and would fail to cover all uninsured Americans. This week, more problems are surfacing as Americans get a better look at what President Obama and Democrats are proposing to do.

First, Democrats may have problems with each other when they attempt to merge bills being written in the Senate’s Finance and HELP committees. Roll Call notes, “last week, it was increasingly apparent that these two Senate committees are working on separate, and conflicting, tracks.” While the HELP bill includes a government-run insurance plan that could cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, the Finance bill does not include one. But the Finance bill is estimated to cost $1 trillion, and Democrats are now hastily rewriting it to lower the cost, widening the gap with the HELP bill. Not only that, the lead Democrat legislators on the committees seem to have different goals in mind. On Thursday, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who is writing the HELP bill said, “my goal is not bipartisanship,” and also dismissed cost projections for it. Yet Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, said, “I think it’s very important to get a good, bipartisan bill” and is quite concerned with reducing cost projections for his bill.

Indeed, the cost of these health care reforms, and particularly that of government-run health plans, has become a key issue. The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt sees the writing on the wall, pointing out, “it is quite likely that any legislation that emerges will create a hugely expensive...

[Trust but Verify]

If they somehow manage to sell the American people on this plan by convincing them it will SAVE money, then this country is too far gone to salavage.