I am simply stunned by the amount of opposition this one piece of legislation, the Health Care Reform bill, is getting from all sides… I am particularly impressed by the Leftist groups that are against this plan. A number of them want the Public Option included in the final bill, but they fail to realize that it is their fellow liberals who have negotiated the Public Option away. This ad by a progressive group catches Obama lying to the American public saying that he will not sign a bill without a public option and he also goes on record slamming individual mandates, something he now supports:

Then we have a union that is opposed to the health care reform bill. A union!!! They are opposed to taxing health care benefits:

The Republican Party has a number of ads; I like this one for its sheer simplicity:

These are just some of the ads that caught my eye. What they illustrate is an across the board rejection of the health care bill but unfortunately, time is running out. The Senate has scheduled a vote for tomorrow, Christmas Eve, as a little present for president Obama and a huge lump of coal for the rest of America. Taxes. Fines. Mandates. Government control of health care. A blue state bonanza of special favors and kickbacks to secure all the votes necessary to pass this bill. $1 trillion price tag, on the conservative side. Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that simply foreshadow their approach: to make cuts in quality for more quantity. Most importantly, playing politics on a law that will affect every American for generations to come in order to pass a bill by the arbitrary timeline of December 24th. But these things we already know…

What we have not thoroughly discussed is what happens afterward. No matter which bill passes, the Senate version or the House version, the outcome will be the same. The first step is that smaller companies will eventually have to accept people with pre-existing conditions, fundamentally making it much more difficult to have a profitable enterprise, leaving mainly the large insurance companies in the market. The second step is that insurance companies, the ones big enough to survive, will use their every resource to blast holes in the bill so that they can deny coverage or reduce the amount of coverage legally. It’s what businesses do in the face of unsustainable regulation, look for loopholes. What more, given that the United States federal government will mandate that every individual must purchase insurance, the remaining insurance giants will stand to make a killing. The only thing standing between these remaining big insurance companies and high profits is the federal government. The third step is that, as occurred with Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and other government-sponsored enterprises, government intervention essentially guarantees health insurance no matter what. This means that if government regulations prove too strict and the companies go under, the government is left controlling everyone’s health insurance and the taxpayer foots the bill (like with the bailouts). If government regulations are not strict enough, then we can expect the remaining insurance giants to form an oligopoly with limited competition, record profits, and higher premiums for consumers (like after the bailouts). Even if there is some middle ground and government for the first time in history is able to regulate the industry effectively, it is the average American who ends up paying on both ends, through taxes and directly through premiums. Of course, since insurance is, effectively, the pooling of risk amongst policyholders and the government has decided to increase that amount of risk by including people with pre-existing conditions while at the same time trying to decrease or hold down prices, because of the adage “there is no free lunch” ultimately something has to give, be it quality of care, direct nationalization, even higher debt/taxes, or something not yet imagined. This is Corporate Socialism 102 (with the Obama Bailouts being C.S. 101) and it results in either direct government control or indirect government control of all of us.

At first I was hopeful that this would not come to be because I knew that there was enough garbage in the mix to garner enough opposition at least on the conservative side, but I now see that Congress and the administration could care less about opposition from every side. Let us hope that some lone, courageous Senator decides to derail this thing tomorrow so we can go back to the drawing board and, at the very least, come up with a plan that is not born out of backroom deals, kickbacks, and just plain-old corruption.

-AG