Health care that's guaranteed to make you sick

As if the pain and suffering they are trying to inflict upon us aren't enough, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP - no irony there) Committee, has taken a peek at the fine print in the legislation...and is not pleased.

“The Kennedy-Dodd bill will pave sidewalks, build jungle gyms, and open grocery stores, but it won’t bring down health care costs or make quality coverage more affordable,” Enzi said. “In a time of record debt and deficits, how can Democrats justify the wasteful spending in this bill?

“We need to root out the waste, fraud and abuse that is driving up health care costs – not create a whole slew of new wasteful programs,” said Enzi, the only Senator to serve on the HELP, Finance and Budget Committees, which share jurisdiction over health care reform.

The HELP Committee Democrats’ bill would:

 Establish a “Community Makeover Program” to spend billions to beautify streets, up to $10 per person in selected communities;

 Fund a federal government program to build new sidewalks and bike paths, and put up street lights;

 Finance new grocery stores and farmers’ markets;

 Revoke employers rights to provide free wellness benefits to employees;

 Mandate that a new Washington health police bureaucracy dictate what local restaurants can offer their customers; and,

 Subsidize community projects like building jungle gyms in parks.

“Some of these programs may have value, but this is the wrong bill at the wrong time,” Enzi said. “With our nation’s health and economy at stake, this bill must not turn into a Christmas list for every partisan interest group in Washington.”

The good news is that opposition is mounting...in the business world:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is convening business groups on Friday to plot strategy as alarm grows over the direction of Democratic health care overhaul proposals.

A chamber vice president, Randy Johnson, told The Associated Press in an interview that though business groups have been largely restrained to date about voicing opposition, it might be time for that to change. The purpose of the meeting is to determine a strategy to express opposition.

Johnson spoke after testifying at a Senate hearing where he expressed strong opposition to Democratic proposals to require employers to purchase health care for their employees.

Business opposition was instrumental in sinking health overhaul efforts during the Clinton administration.

...and in the medical profession:

As the health care debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which President Obama and many other Democrats see as an essential element of legislation to remake the health care system.

The opposition, which comes as Mr. Obama prepares to address the powerful doctors’ group on Monday in Chicago, could be a major hurdle for advocates of a public insurance plan. The A.M.A., with about 250,000 members, is America’s largest physician organization.

While committed to the goal of affordable health insurance for all, the association had said in a general statement of principles that health services should be “provided through private markets, as they are currently.” It is now reacting, for the first time, to specific legislative proposals being drafted by Congress.

The medical "entitlements" we already have are bankrupting the country according to a new study from the National Center for Policy Analysis.

The 2009 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports show the combined unfunded liability of these two programs has reached nearly $107 trillion in today's dollars! That is about seven times the size of the U.S. economy and 10 times the size of the outstanding national debt.

The unfunded liability is the difference between the benefits that have been promised to current and future retirees and what will be collected in dedicated taxes and Medicare premiums. Last year alone, this debt rose by $5 trillion. If no other reform is enacted, this funding gap can only be closed in future years by substantial tax increases, large benefit cuts or both.

Social Security versus Medicare. Politi­cians and the media focus on Social Security's financial health, but Medicare's future liabilities are far more ominous, at more than $89 trillion. Medicare's total unfunded liability is more than five times larger than that of Social Security. In fact, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted in 2006 (Part D) alone adds some $17 trillion to the projected Medicare shortfall - an amount greater than all of Social Security's unfunded obligations.

Looking forward, the share of federal revenues that will be consumed by these entitlements is absolutely unsustainable.



With or without the pork, this country cannot afford any more entitlements.