Pelosi's Health Care Bill: The Problem...

Mickey Kaus repeats something I've been hearing since Sunday morning. The real problem facing Democrats in Congress is very simple: With a growing majority of Americans who oppose ALL of the health care legislation presently before Congress, Dems fear that they won't have the large majority that they presently hold in BOTH houses of Congress.

The problem facing health care reform, as Dick Morris and others have been arguing for months, isn't these tediously subtle legislative complications. They're what we see on the surface. The problem is the crude, primal politics underneath them--the legislature's' "id." It's the fear, among power-lusting Democratic Congresspersons, that if they vote for health care they won't be Congresspersons much past November, 2010 (or that even if they win, they will no longer be in the majority party). They're not worried about Cadillac plans. They're worried about castration.

If the House plan is passed through the Senate and then signed by Mr. Obama, I firmly believe that the present 60/40 split in the Senate will become 63 Republicans/Independents-37 Dems/Independents. Furthermore, I think that the Dems will lose at least 100 seats in the house.

I think that the Democratic leadership in the White House and Congress are under-estimating the genuine anger that many moderate (& or fiscally conservative) voters feel. Mr. Obama's reference on Saturday's pep-talk to Democrats in the house that called those who oppose his agenda "tea-baggers" will come back to bite him on his fundament...next November. More importantly Mr. Obama hinted that by supporting his seizure of the health care industry, his (now plunging) popularity will shield those who support him. On the other hand, Kaus makes this huge point:

"[Y]ou should get behind his plan and benefit from the from the political cover he'll work to give those who support him," Dickerson has Obama saying. You mean like the cover he gave Jon Corzine in New Jersey? ...

I for one, was genuinely shocked when Corzine lost last week. I thought that he would win with 2-4%...by those who supported Dagget during the campaign (as a protest) but who would actually vote for the incumbent...I don't think that our "elite" leadership in Wash, DC can under estimate voter anger at incumbent politicians. Nor do I think that this anger will soften over the next 12 months.

What Will Dems in Congress Gain or Lose by Ramming Through Health Insurance Reform

Personally, I think that they way Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid have gone about this they already "own" Heath Care/Insurance Reform. A majority of Americans (54% in a recent Rasmussen Poll) already oppose all of the various bills being tossed about in Congress. Those bills were fashioned behind closed doors by the most liberal members of both the Senate and the House. None included any Republican proposals. So, once these monstrosities are enacted and go into effect, and are shown to be the debacle that they look to be now, the Dems will face huge losses in the polls.

I think that by 2016, once the various plans are expected to be fully implemented, they will be disastrous to America...and America will, to put it mildly, be pissed off in a way that's not been seen in 234 years...mark my words it will be ugly.

Health Insurance Reform Now Even Less Popular than Before

In middle America, the idea of Congress seizing health insurance and forcing everyone to get it or pay larges "fines" (i.e. taxes) is dropping in popularity. Rasmussen is reporting that 54% now firmly oppose the government taking over health insurance, while only 42% loosely support the idea. Yet, Congress, will flout the desires of America in order to force millions onto the public option.

In Massachusetts, the only state who has similar measures, insurance rates for private insurance have nearly doubled...in only 2 years. Additionally, the bureaucrats have continued to "move the goalposts" back. What was, originally, permitted now is not.

Massachusetts resident Wendy Williams, writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, told how new state rules made her bare-bones policy unacceptable. She and her husband were told to buy a pricier policy or pay $1,000. “We hadn’t imposed our health care costs on anyone else,” she wrote, “yet we were being fined.”

Yet, this is what Democrats in Congress has in store for our country. First a "Public Option" to be the camel's nose under the tent. Within a few years, as unelected public bean counters change the regulations of what is permitted coverage, most people with private coverage will be forced to much more expensive plans or fined (or taxed for Cadillac plans) until EVERYONE is at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats who will literally have the power of life and death. Think about it...please.

This is the Face of Government Run Health Care

This photograph from from the ridiculously long Flu Shot line in Milwaukee. (Via Gateway Pundit). Mark Tapscott comments,

“President Obama’s late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis – The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare.”

So, this is what Government Run Health Care will look like. I firmly think that it will be a disaster the like of which this country has never been forced to endure. But what truly enrages me is that Congress has excluded itself from ALL of the provisions in all the bills that are being considered. Additionally, they are excluding all federal employees and those who are employed by the executive branch. If this legislation is good enough for US, it's damn sure good enough for them.

Health Insurance Reform: State Failures

In the past 20 years, eight states have passed individual mandates that require insurance to be purchased by every person residing in the state. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis envisioned using the various states as experimental test areas prior to inflicting those programs on the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, in none of those states have the experiments in health insurance reform been very successful.

Reform measures in other states have proven to be expensive duds. Maine's 2003 reform plan, Dirigo Health, included a government insurance option resembling the public option included in the House health-care bill. This public plan, "DirigoChoice," was supposed to expand care to all 128,000 of Maine's uninsured by 2009. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2007 uninsured rate remained roughly 10%—essentially unchanged. DirigoChoice's individual insurance premiums increased by 74% over its first four years—to $499 a month from $287 a month—according to an analysis of Dirigo data by the Maine Heritage Policy Center. The cost of DirigoHealth to taxpayers so far has been $155 million.

In 1993, New York passed an idividual mandate that prohibited insurers from excluding "pre existing conditions". That mandate was an attempt to make health insurance available to all at a reasonable price. Regrettably, it has been an object failure in containing costs. In 1994 there were roughly 752,000 people enrolled in individual insurance plans, or 4.7% of the nonelderly population. This put New York in the zone as the rest of the states. As of today, that figure has fallen significantly to just 0.2% of the state's nonelderly population. That number deviates tremendouly from the national average in which over the 13 year period of 1994-2007, the number of people insured by individual plan in the U.S. rose to 5.5% from 4.5%. The sharp decline in people registered in individual plans is blamed on the sharp rise in premiums. It has been etimated that 42% could be cut from the costs of premiums by eliminating community rating system and guaranteed issue provisions.

A 2008 analysis by Kaiser Permanente's Patricia Lynch published by Health Affairs noted that in addition to Washington and New York, the individual insurance markets in Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Vermont "deteriorated" after the enactment of guaranteed issue. Individual insurance became significantly more expensive and there was no significant decrease in the number of uninsured

.
Additionally, Massachusetts, the most recent state to implemented an individual mandate in 2007, suggests what will happen on a national scale. Health-insurance premiums there have risen much faster than in the rest of the country. According to the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health foundation those costs are now $13,788, the most expensive in the nation. Furthermore, those few insurance companies that are permitted to operate within Massachusetts are planning additional double-digit hikes. This is expected to force most companies to shift those added costs onto workers, according to the Boston Globe.

And health-care costs have continued to grow rapidly. According to a Rand Corporation study this year, the growth now exceeds state GDP by 8%. The Boston Globe recently reported that state health-insurance commissioners are now worried that medical spending could push both employers and patients into bankruptcy, and may even threaten the system's continued existence.

In the mean time, data from the Massachusetts Medical Society shows that many primary care physicians are getting squeezed financially, and are no longer accepting new patients. Additionally, wait times for care are increasing. This is merely a preface to what will happen on a much larger scale if these same programs are implemented on the much larger national scale.