Fausta’s Blog

• Senate Bill:  2,074 pages
• House Bill:  2,014 pages
• 118 new boards, commissions, and programs
• $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency

Charles Krauthammer says Kill the Bill:

You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.

You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.

You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.

Krauthammer proposes that real healthcare reform should include tort reform, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines, and tax employer-provided health insurance.

Of course, of these three actions the only thing the politicians might go along with is taxing employer-provided benefits. Why not? After all, they’re taxing everything else.

And so it goes in Shreveport has the organizational chart of the House’s Democrat Health Care Plan. It’s a doozy.

(h/t Instapundit.)

UPDATE
Paul Mirengoff asks, Is insuring the uninsured a moral imperative? Paul says it’s not, and I agree.

There very very few moral imperatives. Medical insurance is not one of them.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Congress, health care, healthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.