Posted on 09/14/2009 11:31:29 AM PDT by tobyhill
Senators worked Monday toward unveiling health-care legislation that one lawmaker said would cost "below $880 billion."
A bipartisan group of six members of the Senate Finance Committee held a meeting Monday to discuss the legislation, which Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., suggested could be made public as soon as Tuesday.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a key senator in the negotiating group, said the bill would cost less than $880 billion. Baucus confirmed that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office told the group the overall price tag for the proposal was lower than earlier estimated, but said that it is "still moving a bit."
The group, which includes three Republicans and three Democrats, discussed an array of issues. Senators said they were working toward agreement on provisions to keep illegal immigrants from receiving benefits under the bill, reduce the financial burden on states from expanding the low-income Medicaid program, and lowering health-care costs stemming from medical malpractice lawsuits.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I thought it was supposed to SAVE money. I thought it was supposed to be ‘revenue neutral’.
lol once they wrapped their mouths around that trillion word the think they can please us all by saying spending for something is under a trillion.. WE DONT HAVE ANY MONEY....IF WE DONT HAVE IT WE CANT SPEND IT....NO MORE SPENDING....
REALLY?!?! Oh, WHAT a BARGAIN!!!
A whooping $20 billion drop from the $900 billion espoused....wonderful that we live in when a reduction of $20 billion equates to a “savings”......
Just like AMTRAK
As they say at the car dealer, add tax title licenses and drive-a-way costs for this commie clunker are over a trillion.
Will the printing presses last?
That $880 billion ads up to a whole lotta rationin’. And the rule-of-thumb on these programs is that they will cost 20 times more than estimated.
Read this carefully friends ....
The Truth About the Health Care Bills - Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney 08.24.09
Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.
To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.
The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.
However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.
The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.
This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.
If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.
So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment that provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.
I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation” to support the Constitution . If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.
For those who might doubt the nature of this threat I suggest they consult the source. Here is a link to the Constitution: http://www.archives.gov/ex hibits/charters/constituti on_transcript.html
And another to the Bill of Rights: http://www.archives.gov/ex hibits/charters/bill_of_ri ghts_transcript.html
There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us if we allow this bill to be passed.
Michael Connelly
Retired attorney,
Constitutional Law Instructor
Bump
You two want to brings facts into the matter? You must be racists. ;-)
That camel has one big nose.
And that is in the first year.
“According to Obama, he will veto any bill that adds one dime to the deficit now or in the future”
TennCare was sold as a health plan that would cover nearly all of Tennessee’s uninsured (up to 400% of poverty) at no additional cost to taxpayers. In reality, it cost far more than ever predicted by its proponents and took less than 10 years to unravel.
LBJ got Medicare enacted only by deliberately low-balling its true expected costs. Political scientists who defend Medicare now concede that had Congress been given truthful estimates of Medicare’s expected cost, it never would have been enacted.
Taxpayers need to be deeply skeptical of any politician promising that a new entitlement program will be deficit-neutral. Health care reform will be the largest entitlement increase since the New Deal. We’d have to be delusional to think that “this time” government forecasters finally will get it right when it comes to accurately estimating costs and revenues for a program whose size is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.
And what happens after the first ten years. This is all smoke and mirrors. We would be adding another entitlement program twice the size of Medicare. And Medicare is bankrupt. By 2014 45% of all Medicare outlays will be funded by the General Fund.
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