printWhat else do you need to know about the hulking Health Care Bill Senate slime balls are preparing to pass, other than that the botax is now a tax on tanning beds? It’s hard to tell. I have only just located the Bill online for the first time. H. R. 3590 is 2074 pages long.
I’d say something rude about the abortion compromise (“The legislation also includes a proposal that would limit insurance coverage of abortion,” thus protecting future Harry Reids from being aborted), about which I don’t give a tinker’s toss, but I had better not. The fealty for fetuses not their own shared by Republicans and conservative Dems touches me deeply (NOT).
For crying out loud, the entire Fannie Med bill is immoral and unconstitutional. (LEONARD PEIKOFF is still the best at arguing against the enslavement of doctors.)
NYT: “To get the 60 votes needed to pass their bill, Democrats scrapped the idea of a government-run public insurance plan, cherished by liberals, and replaced it with a proposal for nationwide health plans, which would be offered by private insurers under contract with the government.
Of particular interest for its blatant unconstitutionality is the healthcare-conscription mandate:
“Under the bill, most Americans would be required to have insurance. The penalty for violating this requirement could be as high as 2 percent of a taxpayer’s household income. Penalties would total $15 billion over 10 years, up from $8 billion under Mr. Reid’s original proposal, the Congressional Budget Office said.
In the next 10 years, the government would also collect $28 billion in penalties from employers who did not offer health benefits to employees.”
Update (Dec. 21): CASH FOR CLOTURE has passed. After all the fuss he made, Joe Lieberman joined to vote “Yes,” as did Sen. holdout Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who had “agreed to support the bill in return for compromise language on federal funding for abortion and more money for his state.” CNN: “The vote split on partisan lines in the 60 to 40 vote. With Republicans unanimously opposed.”
WHAT LIES AHEAD? The NYT: The “60 to 40 tally … is expected to be repeated four times as further procedural hurdles are cleared in the days ahead, and then once more in a dramatic, if predictable, finale tentatively scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.”
AP: “The House has already passed legislation, and attempts to work out a compromise are expected to begin in the days after Christmas.”
As I once noted, “The Democrat is open about his devilishness – he finds the idea of a constitutional government with narrowly delimited powers as repellent as Dracula finds garlic. Modern-day conservatives, on the other hand, are less up front about their aversion to a Jeffersonian republic. In a sense, Republicans are the drag queens of politics. Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either, what economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann-Hoppe calls ‘neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats.’ Or, conversely, national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and a support for the very welfare infrastructure which is at the root of social rot.”
Duly, Democrats never concealed that they reject the natural-rights foundation of the republic, discussed on BAB a few days back. “Health care in America ought to be a right, not a privilege,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. “Since the time of Harry Truman, every Congress, Republican and Democrat, every president, Democrat and Republican, have at least thought about doing this. Some actually tried.” (Via the NYT.)
Fair enough. Democrats declared forthrightly their intentions to reshape the country (which is already disfigured by statism), and proceeded to so do.
Lacking any first principles, Republicans cried for partisanship, griped about procedural problems, length of Bill, lack of transparency and time to come to grips with this legislative monstrosity; and generally tinkered around the margins. There’s not much else a principles-bereft opposition can do, is there?!
er…do the terms Nazism, Communism, or Socialism ring a bell?? They’re really all the same ya’ know.
AHHHHHHH! Strangely, I see the letters N-U-L-L-I-F-C-A-T-I-O-N and S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N in my waking mind. I hope and pray state legislatures who have passed sovereignty bills can see the same thing!
For those who think a supposed G.O.P. comeback in 2010 will save this nation from continuing collectivism, that two-headed beast called the two-party system will never yield nor pull in its claws from the neo-cons, the mystics with the abortion litmus test nor the mis-labeled “progressives”. Only a third party composed of tea-baggers, libertarians and Objectivists can do that. But, it will take individuals within such a party that can both comprehend and articulate man’s natural rights in unambiguous terms to others.
I enjoyed reading Ostrowski’s alternative pledge of allegiance. Also great is Napolitano on the “living” (e.g. dead) Constitution and its abuse by the Republicrat/Demoplican Warfare-Welfare power hungry statists.
I also enjoyed Leonard Piekoff on the enslavement of doctors. However, although the Doctor’s AMA “asks for it” when they insist on medical licensing and other monopolistic laws. For example, Fred Reed gets amoxicillin for his wife’s earache in Mexico for$ 6. While here in the USA, the Fairfax Hospital ran up $ 800 for 2 hrs and paperwork to give me a $10 prescription plus additional administrative and insurance costs for Blue Cross insurance company and the Federal Employee’s “FSAFEDS” tax deductible savings… – for what is $ 6 in Mexico:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Damocles.shtml
Like making sausage, this “Health Care Reform” put all the lobbyists up front getting their share of the imaginary financial pie – Big Pharma, Big Insurance, AMA, AARP, and all the other multiletter whorehouses are getting their cut up front. Any real savings, innovation, or cost cutting in health-care (like evil “Canadian drugs”) will be strictly prohibited.
This will all end tragically when the Federal Government DEFAULTS – here one day, gone the next. After that – who knows?
Presumably not everyone can afford medical insurance which is why many chose not to buy it. The solution (if you can call it that) will be “means testing.” In other words, a government bureaucrat will invade your privacy, go over your income and expenditures and make an arbitrary decision as to whether or not you can afford to buy insurance.
People don’t feel, on any meaningful level, that when something is unconstitutional it is illegal.
When the rules don’t fit, change the rules.
Everybody’s up in arms over this travesty. The blatant hypocrisy and corruption of the system are on display. The bad thing is all we have to fight this system is the Republican party. I learned when I voted for George Wallace and then figured out that I nearly helped elect Hubert Humphrey that third parties are no good. No tea party or libertarian or anything else will accomplish anything but keep the democrats in perpetual power. Right now the democrat power structure is probably weeping with joy at the thought of a third party for “patriotic” Americans. All we can do is hope we can get the Republican party to act like the men they’re supposed to be. In times past in this very blog I have mentioned, more than once, that we’re headed for a new “dark age”. I think we are there now.
With the increasing balkanization of these United States, the only things holding the shards together are physical force and attachments to the federal teat. In my view, this recent “health care” travesty is not an attempt to nationalize medicine, but is rather a desperate attempt to cement the mess together for a while longer. If secession is proposed, there will be objections that the public will lose their socialist security payments, medicare coverage, and the like. With the current U.S. budget deficits pushing the boundaries of the funding capabilities of the global financial system, default is probably on the horizon, but forcing dependence on the feds for medical care, may forestall the dissolution a bit longer, though it also will speed up the financial default at the same time. I remains to be seen if an overstretched military will be capable of supplying the necessary force to maintain cohesion, too.