Health Care Vote Possilbe on Saturday

There are rumors that there will be a vote on the 1900 page health care bill tomorrow. I wonder how many of them have even read it? If they have read it, do they completely understand it? Can they explain it to their constituents? Somehow I doubt many could.

And what about the tremendous debt it will leave for our children?




Then there is the funding of abortion. Jill Stanek has a great article about this and how the bill creates a federal program that directly funds abortions. Sorry about how the graphic gets cropped. You can click on it to read the whole thing.



I urge you to voice your concerns to your elected representatives.

111 New Bureaucracies

Someone at GOP.gov has come up with a list of 111 new bureaucracies that would come into effect if the latest health care bill goes into effect. The list includes page numbers in case you think they are making this up. Some caught my eye.

4. Program of administrative simplification (Section 115, p. 76) Are they kidding? Has the federal government ever simplified anything?

15. Ombudsman for "Public Health Insurance Option" (Section 321(d), p. 213) So I'm thinking, "What the stuff is an ombudsman?" Dictionary.com to the rescue: a government official who hears and investigates complaints by private citizens against other officials or government agencies. Somehow I envision 53 pages of paperwork to file this complaint.

60. Grant program to support the operation of school-based health clinics (Section 2511, p. 1352) I wonder if my homeschooled kids would be eligible to go to these clinics? Granted, even if they were, I probably wouldn't take them.

65. Healthy Teen Initiative grant program regarding teen pregnancy (Section 2526, p. 1398) Somehow I don't imagine this being an abstinence program.

I seriously hope this bill does not pass.

Last Night's Elections

Shane at Caffeinated Thoughts has a great summary of the political events of last night. While I was glad of the GOP victories, the thing that gave me more hope was "gay marriage" being defeated in Maine by 53% of the voters. I mean Maine is not a bastion of conservatism, yet they see the value of marriage being one man and one woman. One quote from the article mentioned above struck me.

Five other states have legalized gay marriage -- starting with Massachusetts in 2004, and followed by Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Iowa -- but all did so through legislation or court rulings, not by popular vote. In contrast, constitutional amendments banning gay marriage have been approved in all 30 states where they have been on the ballot.

How far away from the people of these states are the courts and law-makers? I don't know, but it would be interesting to see all of these states put the question to a vote.

I still want to see if red-light cameras have been banned in College Station.

Medical Care Costs

Thomas Sowell has written another great article. In it, he discusses the fact that just because you pay less at the doctor's office doesn't mean the actual cost of your medical care is lower. The cost has just been shuffled over to taxes or some other gotcha. He likens it to the pea in the shell game that you might see at a carnival. He then goes into reducing costs via cutting salaries.

Britain has had a government-run medical system for more than half a century and it has to import doctors, including some from Third World countries where the medical training may not be the best. In short, reducing doctors' income is not reducing the cost of medical care, it is refusing to pay those costs. Like other ways of refusing to pay costs, it has consequences.

Ah consequences. That is what Americans lack: the ability to accept and give out consequences. We want everything to consequence free. We want to sleep around AND not have to worry about STDs and pregnancy. We want to ditch our kids in day care AND have a great relationship with our kids. We want to have the best medical care in the world AND not pay for it.

And are we really so stupid to believe that the government is capable of doing ANYTHING efficiently? Are we really so gullible to believe that red tape and bureaucrats can give us more for less? Good grief.

He ends with a section on ways to get the cost of health care lower without craziness.

The high costs of "defensive medicine"-- expensive tests, medications and procedures required to protect doctors and hospitals from ruinous lawsuits, rather than to help the patients-- could be reduced by not letting lawyers get away with filing frivolous lawsuits.

If a court of law determines that the claims made in such lawsuits are bogus, then those who filed those claims could be forced to reimburse those who have been sued for all their expenses, including their attorneys' fees and the lost time of people who have other things to do. But politicians who get huge campaign contributions from lawyers are not about to pass laws to do this.

I like his plan a lot better than the government take over.