More on the health care debate
rom Larry Dorgan
Creston
In John Rose’s Aug. 3 letter to the editor he criticized Margaret Turk’s July 27 letter for making so many unverifiable assertions in regard to the health-care reform legislation. It seems to me that he distorts a number of facts in his letter to say the least. As I stated in my letter April 10, there are several favorable provisions in the health-care bill such as adult children up to age 26 being able to receive dependent coverage with all individual and group policies. However, Rose didn’t note that many of the more popular provisions in the health-care bill just happen to take effect a few months before the 2010 elections.
Rose stated the United Kingdom has true socialized medicine and nobody in the Obama
administration came close to advocating their system for the United States. He conveniently forgot to say that a so called “Public Option” was only defeated in the health care bill because of considerable opposition that included some Democrats who would not vote for this option. It is quite clear that many in the present administration would favor a start toward socialized medicine in the U.S.
However, Rose seemed to imply the U.K. would seem to have a decent health-care system. Some facts: 750,000 people are on waiting lists for hospital admission; 40 percent of cancer patients are never able to see an oncologist; there is explicit rationing for services such as kidney dialysis, open heart surgery and care for the terminally ill. Further, minimum waiting times have been instituted to reduce costs. A top-flight hospital like Suffolk Est PCT was ordered to impose a minimum waiting time of at least 122 days before patients could be treated or the hospital would lose a portion of its funding.
It was stated by Rose that ObamaCare would still reduce the federal deficit by $70 billion over 10 years, even if the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $143 billion is 50 percent wrong. ObamaCare will almost certainly increase the budget deficit over the next 10 years. When Medicare went into effect in 1966, the government estimated that their costs would be about $12 billion by 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $107 billion. Great Britain’s National Health Services (NHS) was created in 1948. As with all government programs, bureaucrats underestimated the initial cost projections. First year operating costs of NHS were 52 million pounds higher than original estimates. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman recently stated that the health-care bill is estimated to cost a staggering $526 to $766 million in unfunded mandates for his state.
At least 20 states are suing for the constitutional overthrow of ObamaCare. On Aug. 2, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson denied HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the state of Virginia challenging the new health-care law. His ruling stated that it is far from certain Congress has the authority to compel Americans to buy insurance and penalize those who don’t.
The 2,409-page law is the biggest entitlement program since the Great Society, and it puts one-sixth of our economy in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. Within just a few years, the law creates an astonishing 159 new boards and commissions. Up to 16,000 new IRS agents are authorized to be hired to enforce the reams of new paperwork required of small business and collect new taxes. The massive health-care law says “the HHS secretary shall make approximately 1,300 decisions on provisions in the law, everything from the smallest detail to defining what constitutes essential health care.” It is estimated that this will add an expected 30,000 to 50,000 pages of regulations to the health-care law.
A small section (conveniently slipped into the health-care bill that nobody actually read prior to voting on it) requires all businesses, starting in 2012, to report to the IRS, via Form 1099, all payments that total more than $600 for services or merchandise. This requirement threatens to cause a wave of paperwork chaos across the entire U.S. economy, stifling the operations of small businesses and driving more jobs overseas.
It should be obvious to Rose that ObamaCare was cobbled together in secret (what happened to the “transparency” rhetoric), passed by the Senate largely or totally unread, on a party-line vote literally in the dead of night on last Christmas Eve. He stated in his letter that the health-care bill “deserves to be tried, not repealed.” Realistically, at least parts of the bill need to be repealed as the legislation appears to have far more negatives than positives. Recent polls show that 60 percent of the U. S. citizens oppose the legislation as written.
