Feeling the Heat on Health Care Plan
- Aug 18, 2009 - 1 -
For a month typically welcomed by Congress, many lawmakers who support President Obama’s massive government plan to overhaul health care have been feeling nothing but heat this August. Outraged constituents are applying the heat over the health care plan at town hall meetings in districts throughout the country. This is anything but manufactured anger.
But while some onlookers now point to signs of a meltdown, the liberal left’s stated commitment to a government-run, abortion-covering plan should be reason enough for opponents not to cool off.
A possible sign of weakening is the Obama administration’s expressed willingness to drop the public option from the plan. This assertion made Sunday by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius comes as a welcome, though not entirely believable, shift. For months, the president and congressional Democratic leadership have expressed an unwavering commitment to a public option one way or another.
As the ERLC’s analysis (280 KB PDF) of the House health care plan notes, rationing of care would still likely result even if the public option is scuttled. Private insurers would face mandates to provide essential benefits and to cut costs. It’s a case of the proverbial camel in the tent: Once the government’s nose gains access into the health care tent, private insurance plans will be forced out and the government plan will be in.
History offers a few valuable lessons. Consider some results of England’s 60-year experiment with government-run health care. Compared to the United States, breast cancer mortality in Britain is 88 percent higher and prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher. Long waiting lines and rationed care help to explain these figures. Or consider Canada’s system with bureaucrats controlling health care. Due to a shortage of doctors, some Canadian towns have resorted to lotteries to ration medical care. Dr. Anne Doig, incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, recently described the Canadian system as “not sustainable,” adding that “[w]e all agree that the system is imploding.”
Even closer to home, consider Tennessee’s experiment. In 1994, the Volunteer state enacted a sweeping public plan—TennCare—which quickly provided coverage to an additional 500,000 people. But the end results have been disastrous. As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, 45 percent of Tennesseans dropped their employer-provided coverage in exchange for the state public option. It’s the crowd out principle in effect. Further, as the Journal noted, the plan “nearly bankrupted the state” and forced the state by 2005 to drop coverage for many individuals. We should expect similar results with the House public plan, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and others contend, a plan that tracks closely with the Tennessee venture.
Still, other problems remain with the health care proposals on the table. The House bill (H.R. 3200) explicitly permits coverage of abortion under a public health care plan, and efforts to exclude abortion coverage have been beaten back at every turn. In a town hall meeting last week, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) stated in no uncertain terms that “abortion will be covered as a benefit by one or more of the health care plans available to Americans, and I think it should be.” Counsel on end-of-life decisions, a slippery slope to euthanasia, also remains in the bill.
The ERLC’s analysis highlights another dangerous foothold, or “dirty secret” as actor and conservative commentator Chuck Norris calls it, in the proposed health care plan: government access to homes to educate parents on parenting skills. Such staff, according to section 440 of the House bill, would “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices,” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”
We must ask ourselves: Is the government better suited than parents to know what’s best for their children? We have already witnessed the government’s radical ideology in the classroom. So-called comprehensive sex education as well as homosexuality as an acceptable, normal lifestyle are just two such dogmas taught in many public schools.
Our current health care system is not flawless, but it is a marked success compared to government-run plans tested in other nations. While most agree that reform is needed, a plan that could include taxpayer-funded abortion, education encouraging euthanasia, rationed care, higher costs, and a public option is the wrong choice for America.
If you agree, please continue to voice your concerns, in a civil and respectable manner, to your congressman and two senators in town hall meetings and in their local and state offices.
Download the ERLC’s analysis of the House health care reform bill (H.R. 3200) here (280 KB PDF).
Download the House health care reform bill (H.R. 3200) in its entirety here (1.8 MB PDF).
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1 On Aug 21st, 2009, at 7:59am, peterclarke wrote:
Any honest Senator, House Member, lawyer or lay person who has truly read the proposed health bill, can only reach one conclusion. Bill HR3200 is NOT a health care reform piece of legislation.
It is however, clearly a federal government power grab to control health benefits and treatments under private or public plans.
It will take away responsibilities concerning our health from the local State Governments, doctors and private insurance companies and put this power and decisions into the hands of an UN-elected health Commissioner (SEC. 123). Health care is not a constitutional right.
As currently written, it is a power grab by the Federal Government too further control your life style, treatment and health benefits through unelected bureaucrats and czars making treatment or benefit decisions for us based on the cheapest available drug or health procedures? Like, Obama’s one blue pill fits all approach (section 141)!