The opening line of
H.R. 3200, like any other in a congressional bill describes what it’s intent is
at the time of proposal. This bill is no different. This is the
introductory statement from H.R. 3200:
H. R. 3200
To provide affordable,
quality health care for all Americans and reduce
the growth in health
care spending, and for other purposes.
The biggest problem I
have for that is the last few words. “…and for other purposes.”
What other purposes
could there be? It’s a freaking health care bill! I read through
the one thousand plus page bill with Wikipedia and the library of congress on
other windows.
When I look at famous
documents in history, I notice that the most long lasting and sustaining of
them are often the ones that are the most simply written. The Magna Carta
was written in 1215. For over 710 years it has influenced legal documents
all across the world. It is 2500 words long, and easy to translate and
easy to understand.
It helped to establish
the rule of constitutional law over European and western style democracies.
It influenced the entire English-speaking world, including the United States
Constitution. The US Constitution is just 4,300 words, and is considered
to be one of the most easy-to-read documents in political history. The framers
of the constitution wanted it to be easy to read so that it would be hard to
misinterpret its meaning and intent.
In stark contrast, the
failed recent European Constitution was over 60,000 words long. It was
long, bloviated, and full of jargon that no one could understand. It
failed because people saw freedoms and liberties being sucked away through
legislation carefully hidden away. This brings us back to H.R. 3200.
This bill is 1,017 pages long and cannot be decoded unless you have two
doctors, a law firm and the Rosetta stone. I do not know what half of it
still means. I believe it was written like this on purpose. It was
written so that no one would be able understand it. This was no accident.
If I was a lawmaker in
Washington and wanted to get a bill passed, I would make sure that it was easy
to read and comprehend so that people would see how good an idea it was!
That sounds simple enough, right? However if I was trying to sneak
something in that I did not want anyone to know about, all I would have to do
would be to hide it in plain sight.
Page 58 talked about
the need for a Health ID Card:
“…including whether
the individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at
a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health
plan beneficiary identification card;”
Now this does not say
it is going to be something like the scary RFID chip card or anything like
that. This is stating that a card issued to you, much like the card given
by most health care providers today, might be outfitted with a code that can be
scanned by a machine. I want to ask a very simple question. Isn’t
it possible that this could be perverted into something other than what its
stated purpose here is? Isn’t it possible, from the country that brought
you forced sterilizations and internment camps, that this could someday be
used to carry all of your information, not just that of your health care
provider? Can anyone say that such a thing could be maintained without
the temptation for abuse?
On page 102 of the
bill, it says this:
AUTOMATIC ENROLLMENT
OF MEDICAID ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS INTO MEDICAID.—The Commissioner shall provide
for a process under which an individual who is described in section 202(d)(3)
and has not elected to enroll in an Exchange-participating health benefits plan
is automatically enrolled under Medicaid.
It is true that
Medicaid is already a government ran facet of our health care system.
This to me is another option, another choice being made for you.
Page 124:
(f) LIMITATIONS
ON REVIEW.—There shall be no administrative or judicial review of a payment
rate or methodology established under this section or under section 224.
This page is
describing how no one could sue the government for the pay it sets up for
doctors and hospitals under the ‘public option’ insurance plan. My guess
is the pay would be substantially lower than the norm. Personally, I’m ok
with a neurosurgeon making 2 million dollars a year. It’s one of the
hardest jobs on earth. I want them to be getting paid well so they
continue to do well!
On page 167, we come
to Title IV. It reads as the following:
TITLE IV—AMENDMENTS TO
INTERNAL REVENUE CODE OF 1986
Subtitle A—Shared
Responsibility
PART 1—INDIVIDUAL
RESPONSIBILITY
SEC. 401. TAX ON
INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE
HEALTH CARE COVERAGE.
Pay attention to
section 401 there. It goes on to describe a tax of 2.5% of your yearly
income if you do not have acceptable health insurance. This means, the
public option. If you opt out, do not sign up, or stay on a private plan,
you will face a penalty tax at the end of the year. I should say it also
says this, and it doesn’t matter if you sign up mid-year either. The
exact language reads like this:
‘‘(a) TAX
IMPOSED.—In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of
subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a
tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of— ‘‘(1) the taxpayer’s modified
adjusted gross in- come for the taxable year, over ‘‘(2) the amount of gross
income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer.
Thanks guys. You can
choose to go it alone or sign up mid-year, and you will be taxed still.
There are other
references to paying up to 8% of your income if you are a business owner.
Other parts say a 6% tax. I’m not going to read the entire bill for you.
I would ask that everyone go and download it so that they may see for
themselves. This bill is scary to me. I personally believe that it
was written in such a manner on purpose. There are things here that
people do not want to you or I to see. They want everyone to idly go by
and not take notice. The contents of this bill were leaked out and people
went bonkers. They would call us extremists for not wanting it, but I
would prefer to say we are the ones who now hold the cards of common sense.
Given that the closest
advisors to President Obama are Ezekiel Emanuel, John Holdren, Cass Sunstein,
and up until Sunday, Van Jones (yippee!) can we afford to truly think this bill
was not written with the minds of progressives? I hope you read my
previous blog, where I discussed how the modern health care debate can resonate
with echoes of the progressive-pushed disasters of the past.
It can still happen.
Cass Sunstein wrote a book called “Nudge.” Take him at his word.
Radical ideas do not happen overnight. They are nudged along, slowly but
surely. One stone to the next they are pushed along until one day you
stand back and say ‘this is no longer the country I was born into!’
These are the most patient
people in the world. This bill is another step, just like Cap and Trade,
and the stimulus bill. We must work to defeat them, so that they do not
defeat us.