Now that the Obama Healthcare Reform Bill has been posted on the Internet, anyone can read it. It is over one thousand pages long, and its complexity defies any easy understanding. A healthcare system so devilishly complex, run by the same government that owns and operates the public schools, the Post Office, Amtrak, and other notoriously inefficient public enterprises, is guaranteed to be a disaster for the American people.
Since the public schools cripple the minds of American children and produce functional illiterates by the million, which they call education, there is every good reason to believe that a national healthcare system will actually destroy American health rather than improve it.
The new legislation sets up a Health Choices Administration with a Health Choices Commissioner. The bill (Sec. 141) reads:
“There is hereby established an independent agency in the executive branch of the Government, a Health Choices Administration….The Administration shall be headed by a Health Choices Commissioner who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”
His duties will include establishing “qualified health benefit plan standards under this title, including the enforcement of such standards in coordination with State insurance regulators and the Secretaries of Labor and the Treasury.” He will also establish and operate a Health Insurance Exchange, and be in charge of Individual Affordability Credits and determining eligibility for such credits.
For all practical purposes, the Commissioner will have the power of a Czar, or dictator, over the new national healthcare system. The bill also establishes an Office of the Special Inspector General for the Health Insurance Exchange. The Special Inspector General will be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. He will “conduct, supervise, and coordinate audits, evaluations and investigations of the Health Insurance Exchange, as well as the health and welfare of participants in the Exchange.”
The trappings of a police state will come with the law’s enforcement mechanism. It will include “an enforcement process that includes timely investigation of complaints, random audits to ensure compliance, civil monetary and programmatic penalties for non-compliance consistent with existing laws and regulations, and a fair and reasonable appeals process building off of enforcement provisions under this part.”
If you are one of those taxpayers who finds the Internal Revenue Code treacherously complicated, wait until the National Healthcare system is in place. Its regulations and enforcement will create new nightmares for the average American, for no one will be able to escape the net.
The new law will effect everyone every day: average Americans going for routine checkups, doctors and how they practice, nurses, dentists, chiropractors, hospitals, nursing homes, medical schools, dietitians, therapists, employers, employees, pharmaceutical companies, drug distribution, infant inoculations. It will also effect your Social Security payments, your taxes, your retirement plans. And, of course, it will effect the insurance industry big time.
The law will also create a vast new army of government bureaucrats and a data collection system in which every individual American will be registered. In that file will be a complete picture of your life, from birth to death, your diseases, your hospital stays, your family relations, what you eat, your habits, your religion (so they know where to bury you), and to what extent you should be cared for in your old age.
The law will also regulate what hospitals can do to expand their facilities. The law states: “Any increase in the number of operating rooms, procedure rooms, or beds of a hospital pursuant to this paragraph may only occur in facilities on the main campus of the hospital….The Secretary may grant an exception under the process described in subparagraph (A) only to a hospital that is located in a county in which the percentage increase in the population during the most recent 5-year period for which data are available is estimated to be at least 150 percent of the percentage increase in the population growth of the State in which the hospital is located during that period, as estimated by Bureau of the Census and available to the Secretary.”
The Secretary will decide what a hospital can and can’t do. In other words, all hospitals will be nationalized and they will begin to look like hospitals run by the Veterans Administration.
And we haven’t even discussed what all of this is going to cost the taxpayer.
Although I hurriedly scanned this encyclopedic law governing healthcare, I was not able to find the word abortion. The law does not come with an Index. But I did find a section devoted to Family Planning Services. You can be sure that tucked away in that Family Planning section is a provision that will make it mandatory for the government to pay for abortions as medical procedures.
Any nation that voluntarily enacts a law of such far-reaching control over the private lives of its citizens and health facilities, deserves the kind of care it will get. In Canada, the waiting period for medical services endangers lives. That is why many Canadians head south when serious medical attention is needed as soon as possible. They have a shortage of doctors north of the border. Any doctor who wants to excel in his or her profession is not going to have his horizons limited by a government run health system.
There is a good chance that the more people know the details of this horrendous law, it will be rejected by their representatives in Congress. The strong showing of opposition at the town-hall meetings ought to send the right message to members of Congress. Vote for this law and you’re out!
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of nine books on education including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, The Whole Language/OBE Fraud, and The Victims of Dick & Jane and Other Essays. Of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, former U.S. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho said: “Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s columns have appeared in such diverse publications as Reason, The New American, The Chalcedon Report, Insight, Education Digest, Vital Speeches, WorldNetDaily, and others.
