Sarah Palin has weighed in on the health “reform” bill recently passed by the Senate Finance Committee, and she doesn’t seem quite as clueless or hysterical as her critics keep claiming. In fact, she demonstrates a better command of the facts than many of the people who will be voting for this bill in Congress.
The Senate Finance bill is effectively a middle class tax increase and … according to the Joint Committee on Taxation those making less than $200,000 will be hit hardest.
She elaborates as follows:
The plan will impose heavy taxes on insurers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and clinical labs. The result of all of these taxes is clear. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin noted in the Wall Street Journal, these new taxes ‘will be passed on to consumers by either directly raising insurance premiums, or by fueling higher health-care costs that inevitably lead to higher premiums.’
And adds this about the bill’s effect on wages:
Unfortunately, it will lead to lower wages too, as employees will have to sacrifice a greater percentage of their paychecks to cover these higher premiums.
She also has bad news for Medicare patients and union members:
The Senate Finance bill will be paid for by cutting Medicare by nearly half a trillion dollars and by taxing the so-called “Cadillac� health care plans enjoyed by many union members.
Finally, she points out that the Baucus bill will inevitably exacerbate our already out-of-control deficit situation, and that we can’t expect the President to protect us from this insanity:
The president has promised that he won’t sign a health care bill if it ‘adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade.’ But his administration also promised that his nearly trillion dollar stimulus plan would keep the unemployment rate below 8%. Last month, our unemployment rate was 9.8%, the highest it’s been in 26 years.
Palin covers a lot more in her thousand-word post, but the basic point is that passage of the Baucus boondoggle would be disastrous for the country in general and for health care in particular. She suggests an alternative:
Instead of working contrary to the free market, let’s embrace the free market. Instead of going to war with certain private sector companies, let’s embrace real private-sector competition and allow consumers to purchase plans across state lines. Instead of taxing the so-called “Cadillac� plans that people get through their employers, let’s give individuals who purchase their own health care the same tax benefits we currently give employer-provided health care recipients. Instead of crippling Medicare, let’s reform it by providing recipients with vouchers so that they can purchase their own coverage.
Let the free market work? It’s so crazy that it just might work.
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