HR 3200

Death by a 1,000 cuts?
Number of healthcare reform law waivers climbs above 1,000

The number of temporary healthcare reform waivers granted by the Obama administration to organizations climbed to more than 1,000, according to new numbers disclosed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS posted 126 new waivers on Friday, bringing the total to 1,040 organizations that have been granted a one-year exemption from a new coverage requirement included in the healthcare reform law enacted almost a year ago.

They posted this on Friday, the traditional day to hide news stories. “It took 6 clicks to find out this information on the government’s health care website.”

It’s mayhem,
ObamaCare’s March Madness
After one year as the law of the land, mayhem abounds. (emphasis adeed)

• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has handed out nearly 1,000 waivers to allow select companies, unions and states to escape, at least temporarily, some of the burdensome new insurance rules she has created. This is a continuation of the trend of the “Cornhusker Kickback” and the “Louisiana Purchase” that Senate Democrats used to get the law passed in the first place, and that so disgusted the American people.

• Independent experts have shown that the cost of health insurance will rise faster than it would have without the law. The Congressional Budget Office expects the price of a family policy in the individual market to be $2,100 higher by 2016 than it would have been had the law not passed. In at least 20 states, it’s now impossible to buy child-only health insurance because of Ms. Sebelius’s onerous new rules.

• Seniors are at risk of losing access to physicians and medical care. Medicare actuaries say that the cuts built into the law will force as many as 40% of providers to eventually stop seeing Medicare patients or go bankrupt.

• Many thousands of people are already losing the health insurance they have now as companies are exiting markets for individual, small group and Medicare Advantage coverage.

• The former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, says that the costs of ObamaCare are set to explode when employers opt to drop coverage and send their workers to the new, federally subsidized health exchanges for coverage. He estimates that this will drive up the cost of the law by $1 trillion or more in the first 10 years.

This is a bad law, and it must be defunded now, and repealed as soon as possible.

Health care so good, its supporters don’t want it.

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Instapundit points out that there is no plan, after having read Robert Reich’s column.

Reich’s column, titled How to Fight Health Care Fearmongers and Demagogues, actually asks the question

Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined the same old right-wing broadcast demagogues that have been spewing hate and fear for years, to create a tempest.

But why are they getting away with it? Why aren’t progressives—indeed, why aren’t ordinary citizens—taking the meetings back?

And he has the answer (emphasis added):

Mainly because there’s still no healthcare plan. All we have are some initial markups from several congressional committees, which differ from one another in significant ways. The White House’s is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate before insisting on what it wants, maybe in conference committee.

Liberty Council (via Babalu) has read what is HR3200:

We recently saw an overview of the healthcare bill being debated in Congress (HR 3200). We found the overview so alarming that we doubted its accuracy, so the staff in our D.C. office compared it to the voluminous bill.

What they found astonished us so much that we had to share it with you today. You can read our updated and revised overview of HR 3200 and you will be alarmed, too. (Here are links to the PDF and html versions.)

You can also read the text of HR 3200 – directly from a government website – to see for yourself how dangerous this government healthcare takeover would be.

Of course, it is not enough to be alarmed and do nothing! Congress is going on recess soon, but you can be assured that the liberals behind this bill will not be at rest. They will hold public meetings and try to convince their constituents that government healthcare is the only option.

It is time to visit the Senators and Representatives in their local offices in your state. Take copies of our document on HR 3200 with you so they can understand your concerns.

You can locate your Senators and Representatives offices online.

You can also find more information about this bill online, including voting history and amendments and track its future moves through Congress.

Read more about the consequences of this bill in Matt Barber’s article “Is There a Co-Pay with Forced Abortion?” Barber is Director of Cultural Affairs for Liberty Counsel and Associate Dean with Liberty University School of Law.

Mind you, even after you go through the trouble of reading through all of those links, you still won’t know what’s on the bill because the draft is not final and it’s not the only draft.

The White House itself “is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate”; all the same, the White House wants us to accept whatever, on faith.

Clearly Robert Reich finds nothing wrong with insisting that the public acquiesce docilely to a massive revamping of 1/5 of the American economy involving life and death decisions on their own health, sight unseen.

Instapundit explains it for him,

Reich is admitting that despite all the Administration hoopla, there’s still no plan. Or, possibly, that the White House has a plan, but won’t tell us what it is. And yet the people who don’t want to see a bill — some bill, doing who-knows-what — rammed through in the dead of night are somehow the ones who are ignorant and being manipulated. Right.

Indeed.

And, by the way (in case you missed it in yesterday’s roundup),

Under both the House and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee bills released to the public, the Internal Revenue Service will play a key role in monitoring and enforcing health care mandates against individual taxpayers.

What could possibly go wrong?

Over 1,000 healthcare reform law wavers

Healthcare: There is no plan