Healthcare bills by the numbers

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

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.