Mark Twain famously observed that the United States has no permanent criminal class except Congress. Well, the Senate’s health care “reform” legislation confirms Twain’s wisdom. It demonstrates that, under the control of the Democrats, our national legislature has been transformed into a criminal association of grifters and confidence men.
Political sleight-of-hand has replaced every election-year pledge made by the Democrats, including those of the President, with cheap gimmicks that produce the opposite of what the voters thought they were going to get from health reform. One of the most obvious switch-outs has been ”universal” coverage. As health policy expert John Goodman points out:
At best it will insure only half the uninsured and this estimate is probably too optimistic, given the very fluid nature of uninsurance.
And what of the promise to allow people to keep their coverage if they like it?
Up to one out of every four seniors will either lose the plan they now have or experience cutbacks in benefits; and millions of nonseniors will be pushed out of their employer plans and into either Medicaid or a government-regulated health insurance exchange.
And what about that pledge that reform won’t add to the deficit? Well, the public option “compromise” reached in the Senate is to expand Medicare, a program that already has a gigantic unfunded liability. As Philip Klein puts it in the American Spectator:
The agreement would expand Medicare to Americans over the age of 55, and thus potentially add millions of people to a system that is already on course to bankrupt the country, with a long-term deficit of $38 trillion (or as high as $89 trillion by some measurements).
The list goes on and on. Breaking one of the President’s most frequently repeated campaign pledges, the bill includes a provision requiring Americans to buy a government-approved insurance plan. Just as bad, the bill’s coverage mandates will raise the cost of family coverage, breaking another oft-repeated Democrat promise. And the various hidden taxes—-don’t even get me started.
The Senate health care bill is, like its counterpart in the House, a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the country by a group of people that Twain accurately labeled a “criminal class.”
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