Political Horse Trading For Senate Health Care Votes

How can anyone believe this urgent, chaotic, political process can improve health care in America?

Our mission at Liberty Works is to promote liberty and oppose government encroachment on the rights, choices and prerogatives of The People, in their businesses and personal lives.  Except for enforcement of laws against fraudulent schemes we oppose all government intervention into health insurance and medical services.  Indeed, the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to provide or regulate medical services or insurance.

The debate over ObamaCare would end before it began if members of the House and Senate remembered the oath they took to defend the Constitution.  They would refuse to even consider a government take-over 18% of the economy.

But unfortunately, the threat of ObamaCare is real because Congress and the President simply ignore the Constitution.  A reporter asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi where in the Constitution the Government is granted the power to require citizens to purchase health insurance, and punish them as criminals with fines and prison time if they don’t.

Speaker Pelosi’s response was:

Are you serious?

We’ll have more on the Constitutionality of government health care schemes tomorrow.  Today we’re talking to those who don’t seem to know or don’t care about Constitutional limits on federal power.

A century of experience with ever expanding government should convince anyone that Congress cannot, by writing a single, oceanic bill that implements bureaucratic supervision and control of every aspect of health insurance and medical service delivery, ensure the idyllic health care outcomes promised by the President and his cheer leaders.

The legislation being considered in the Senate is 2,000 pages of legalese, some of it incomprehensible.  It was written in secret by Majority Leader Harry Reid and a few Senate staffers.  It establishes some 40 new government agencies, bureaucracies and commissions, and it makes hundreds of changes in other laws, including the Social Security Code, and the Tax Code and even the Post Office.  One cannot understand what many of its provisions would do without first consulting other laws and guessing at the effect of the proposed changes to those laws.

At least 55 new commissions, agencies, and bureaucracies will write and enforce thousands of pages of new regulations mandated by the legislation.  None of those bureaucracies will be accountable to doctors or patients.  The President has continuously promised that we can keep our current insurance or Medicare coverage.  But the legislation begins with new mandates and rules that will change every health insurance policy, and funds new entitlements with cuts to Medicare.  So current insurance policies and the current version of Medicare will no longer exist.

Nobody, not even Reid and few Senate staffers who actually wrote the legalese can possibly predict all the consequences as the various programs, mandates, taxes and subsidies are phased in over a seven year period.  Doctors and hospitals will face a Tsunami of new regulations, procedures and paper work.  No doubt a few medical providers will be delighted in with unexpected economic windfalls resulting from bureaucratic development and application of thousands new payment formulae and regulations.  But, by deliberate intent, most will see their revenue cut.

Senator Reid bragged about favorable estimates of the cost to government from the Congressional Budget Office. But he gamed the system to get those estimates.  His bill schedules higher taxes to support new programs several years before program expenses are scheduled to begin. And, the CBO warned that their estimates were “subject to substantial uncertainty.”

Even if one believes the preposterous notion that Senator Reid and his band of genius staffers are capable of building the most complex legislation in American history in a way that culminates in the Utopian results being promised, one is still confronted with the chaotic debate and amendment process now under way in the Senate.

This process has been a lot more “transparent” than the secret process of writing the bill. At least one Senator, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, has been offered hundreds of millions of extra federal dollars for her state in the form of a special provision in the bill.

Nobody denies that Reid is urgently trying to do whatever necessary to persuade sixty Senators to vote Yes.  As of today, he is still a vote or two or three short.  Everyone knows he will agree to any amendment that moves one Senator into the Yes column without driving another Senator out to the No column.  As amendments are proposed, there is no process for predicting the consequences years into the future when the legislation is scheduled to be implemented.

Everyone agrees that time is not on Reid’s side, that with each passing week popular support declines even more.  Democrats are fearful that party activists, from whom health care is agenda item #1 will lose interest and not even bother to vote in 2010 and 2012 unless Congress passes a strong bill that dramatically increases government power.  Senator Reid himself is at risk of losing his job.  The intense party pressure on Democrats to vote Yes, is for many offset by equally intense pressure from home state voters to vote No.

Reid is obviously becoming desperate.  He recently accused Senators who oppose his 2,000 page bill of being like 17th century supporters of slavery.

Again, how can anyone, even one who wants a more powerful government, believe this process will yield anything but bureaucratic bedlam?