I certainly don’t pretend that I can understand all of what’s in any and all proposed health care bills that have been proposed on Capital Hill. What should alarm us all is that nobody on the Hill seems too willing to reveal what their bills will mean for each of us as individuals and families. Why is that? Do they have something to hide? I would suspect so.
The first thing we need to realize is that we should consider only what comes out of the mouths of politicians as nothing but lies. The second thing is whatever we are being told is being presented as a bill is not – far from it. For example, the Finance Committee led by Chairman Max Baucus of Montana sent a proposed health care bill to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis. Whether we can believe anybody or not remains to be seen but we have been told by the House Minority Leader, John Boehner, that from the time that the proposal was sent to the CBO and the analysis came back, over 70 amendments were added to the proposal. We have also been told that many of those amendments came from members of that committee and the amendments were exemptions for their constituencies.
If only one amendment was added to the proposed bill then how much stock can we put into the CBO’s analysis?
Bearing this all in mind, let’s look at the letter that the Chairman of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas W. Elmendorf, sent to Max Baucus in response to Baucus’ proposed health care bill. Feel free to read the letter and examine the numbers. You may see things differently than I do.
But here’s one example that I find very scary and upsetting. According to the way I understand this proposal, if a family of four earns around $100,000 annually and they opt for the governments “low cost”, “silver plan”, they would have to pay out just about 20% of their income each year just for health care coverage.
If you feel smug and content that this won’t affect you because your employer is paying 80% of your health care premiums, you might want to reconsider. The other day I was listening to a man who owns his own business. He said that currently he pays out about $9,000 per month in health care insurance premiums for his employees. He said that he has taken the information given him about Obamacare and crunched the numbers. Doing so, his monthly cost to continue providing the same coverage to his employees would jump to $92,000.00 per month.
In his assessment he said this would force him onto the government health plan or force him out of business.
But what is more scary than trying to figure out how much money Obamacare is going to cost you and I, is the fact that our own elected officials, as well as President Obama and his administration, have no intention of submitting any “finished” bill to public scrutiny before a vote is taken.
There once was a day when we readily referred to the United States of America as a country of “we the people”. Now we the people are treated like a bunch of ignorance subjects. This must change. You can change this if you care. It has to be done at the ballot box. Our representatives have publicly proclaimed that they don’t read bill before they vote on them. The say they are too difficult to understand. That may be so for them but just because they are stupid and lazy doesn’t mean all of us are.
How does that old adage go? Lead, follow or get out of the way!
Tom Remington
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