According to Boehner’s blog entry that same day, Representative Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and House Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee led the GOP effort to create the chart, which is reproduced below. (For a PDF of the chart, click here.)
Boehner wrote that the chart outlines “the bureaucratic nightmare of the House Democrats’ $1.5 trillion healthcare plan that relies on massive tax hikes on small businesses and job creators in the midst of a deepening economic recession.” He mentioned that the plan will also “cause as many as 114 million Americans to lose their current coverage.”
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The GOP chart reflects the complexity of “at least 31 new federal programs, agencies, commissions and mandates that accompany the unprecedented government takeover of health care in America.” Lesser known aspects of the Democrats’ plan are revealed by the chart, exposing big government’s burning desire to micromanage and impose its will. Federal mandates for website design will be imposed on the states, and “cultural & linguistic competence training” will be given to healthcare providers.
Speaking at the July 15 press briefing, Boehner said: “Now if anybody thinks that all of this bureaucracy is needed to fix our healthcare system, I would politely disagree. What this is going to do is ration care, limit the choices that patients and doctors have, and really decrease the quality of our healthcare system.” Republicans are concerned that the House Democrats’ reform plan, coming in the midst of one of America’s worst recessions, would devastate the nation’s small businesses, hurt the economy, break the federal budget, and not significantly improve healthcare. A Fox News reporter at the White House on the day of the briefing described the Republicans as “coming out, guns blazing, basically saying this deal is bad for America.”
Now there will always be some degree of opposition between Democrats and Republicans based on politics. But, in this case, the Democrats are only trying to implement President Obama’s healthcare reform proposals. As the president himself said at an AFL-CIO gathering in 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer, universal healthcare plan…. That’s what I’d like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” No wonder the Democrats proposals all move in that direction, a direction bringing with it the consequences outlined by the GOP.
It is intentional that the federal healthcare bureaucracy would experience cancerous growth under the House Democrats’ proposal. The GOP chart looks complicated because the Democrats are gathering everything needed to realize the president’s dream, sort of like Igor collecting body parts for Dr. Frankenstein. When the time is right, just like it was for America’s financial and automotive industries, the president will once again claim he doesn’t want to run banks, car makers, insurance companies, or hospitals, but that won’t stop him from throwing the switch. “Dr. Obama” will gladly give life to the Frankenstein-monster-like amalgamation of government bureaucracies that is single-payer, socialized medicine.
