Everything you need to know about Pelosi-care, in one sentence*.
I have said it before and I will say it again. If you think health care reform is about providing better medical care, or reducing the obscene cost of those services, you need to wake up. It is all about controlling the citizenry and making them dependent on an ever more powerful nanny state. It will enable them to control what you eat and drink, and what you weigh and how much you exercise, all under the guise of increasing your well-being, but mostly as a way to ration health care. An administration that was serious about containing costs would do two things. Remove restrictions on interstate insurance policies, allowing true national competition amongst providers. Secondly, they would enact tort reform to prevent ridiculous lawsuits that drive up costs and cause many thousands of tests to be done, mostly pre-emptive CYA procedures designed to thwart potential lawsuits.
We know that Democrats will do nothing to upset their good friends in the legal profession, especially as they account for a large portion of their fund-raising, as Ed Morrissey at Hot Air reports,
No one should be the least bit surprised that the same Democratic Party that takes in over 80% of political donations from trial lawyers has attempted to kneecap tort-reform pilot programs in ObamaCare. It’s about as surprising as Barack Obama putting Kathleen Sebelius in charge of these pilot programs in the first place — the same Kathleen Sebelius who represented trial lawyers in their lobbying group before becoming governor of Kansas. Maybe they should just call themselves the Ambulance Chasers Party and be done with it.
Lest you are not totally convinced, please recall that in a recent unguarded moment of actual candor, Howard Dean admitted as much, as seen in the Washington Examiner,
Asked by an audience member why the legislation does nothing to cap medical malpractice class-action lawsuits against doctors and medical institutions (aka “Tort reform”), Dean responded by saying: “The reason tort reform is not in the [health care] bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on.  And that’s the plain and simple truth,â€
Wow! In order to obtain that unprecedented level of honesty from a politician, it is usually necessary to get Slow Joe “God bless you” Biden in the vicinity of a microphone. That he thinks is off. But I digress. The final piece of evidence revealing the weaselly cowardice that infests DC can be found hidden away in Pelosi’s monstrous almost 2000 page bill, as we see from Jazz Shaw, with regard to states that enact an “alternative medical liability law”,
(4) CONTENTS OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICAL LIABILITY LAW. – The contents of an alternative liability law are in accordance with this paragraph if -
(A) the litigation alternatives contained in the law consist of certificate of merit, early offer, or both; and
(B)* the law does not limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.
Did you catch that part? So the federal government will be offering incentive payments to states who engage in tort reform, providing they don’t actually… you know, reform anything to do with the real problem.
Business as usual for the shysters. It is a pretty sad indictment of the state of politics today, that I am not in the least bit surprised to discover that language tucked away in the bill. Disgusted, but not surprised. Call your senators. Call your congresscritters. Remind them that we will not forget this debacle in 2010, and in every election thereafter. And don’t forget, if this is such a dire emergency, as we are constantly told, why does the program not begin until 2013. Firstly, because they want Barry to at least have an even shot at re-election and this plan would definitely put the kibosh on that. Also, the very notion that this pile of dog poop is “deficit neutral” is based on the trickery of collecting taxes to pay for it over a 10 year period (2010-2020) but only dispensing health care over a 7 year period (2013-2020). Yes, they are that brazenly dishonest about it, and you can read about it here.
More skulduggery revealed over at Big Government, Dingy Harry Reid style.
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October 31, 2009
Tags: Health care, Nancy Pelosi Posted in: Politics
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