CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.
Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
As CNN notes, “the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage — including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money — but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can’t have.” “If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company’s Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests — you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills” that Congressional leaders have drafted to implement Obama’s plan.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to rush the health-care bill through Congress before most people can even figure out what’s in the bill. That’s how she pushed through Congress the $800 billion stimulus package, which contained hidden provisions that ended welfare reform, and which is now projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” (The stimulus package was supposed to deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, as well as subsidizing welfare and waste.)
The bill may be rewritten at the last moment to provide more giveaways to special interests, like the huge cap-and-trade energy tax that Pelosi recently strong-armed through the House. (As Obama once noted, his version of that tax would make people’s electric bills “skyrocket.”) The energy tax was pushed through before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.
These tax increases are part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.
Obamacare would also apparently restrict resources for end-of-life care for the elderly, and mandate wasteful end-of-life counseling for the elderly (such as lecturing them about the right to hasten their own death by refusing nutrition).
Earlier, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave an honest but “devastating assessment” of the incredibly high cost of the health-care plans backed by Obama, which would cost well over a trillion dollars, to cover just a fraction of the uninsured.
Obama is angry about that truthful conclusion, as well as the CBO’s finding that his wasteful stimulus package will actually reduce the size of the economy “in the long run.” (Obama had claimed that only his stimulus package could save America from “disaster” and “irreversible decline“).
So Obama recently invited CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, a “Democratic appointee,” to the White House to pressure him to reduce his cost estimates.
It is doubtful that Obamacare would live up to any of Obama’s claims. His other legislation hasn’t. His stimulus package has been a fiasco, as much of the public now realizes: just 25% say it has helped the economy.
And his cap-and-trade energy tax, if passed by the Senate, would cost the economy trillions, while doing little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol subsidies, which harm the environment, destroy forests, and cause world hunger. Meanwhile, Obama has undermined nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by wastefully blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent creating it.
Comments
WHO on CNN said these things? Lou dis-information Dobbs, Jim "Waterloo" Diment or Sanjay Gupta? The Examiner's pathetic attempt to borrow credibility from CNN for its highly politicized views only destroys its own.
I guess you could click on the links in the commentary above and find out, "Young Atheart"
Clicking on a link doesn't cost anything.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Isn't there any original reporting on the Examiner?
Is the pay so paltry that most of the examiners copy stories from other sources and then sensationalize them further? Are there real reporters on this site who have experience and training in journalism?
I would like an answer from the high and mighty Obama-hater Hans.
Yeah, Obama has let us down big time.
Im sorry I voted for him, although McCain/Palin might have actually been worse. Just think if McCain died and Palin was president? That would definitely be worse.
Robert Samuelson has an interesting column, "Obama's Misleading Medicine," in the Washington Post today that explores the problems with (and contradictions in) Obamacare.
Once again, A Repub shill spells gloom and doom for the economy. They said all the same things when opposing Medicaid and Social Security after the Great Depression. Just once, I'd like to read about a "conservative" alternative. But there aren't any because they'd all result in immediate economic collapse. I can criticize all day with the best of them... but it's much tougher to provide solutions than point fingers. When right-wingers start offering SOLUTIONS (and I mean REAL, PRACTICAL ones), then I'll listen to them. Until then, it's the 1930's all over again.
Obama is taking the USA down the tubes with no feeling about doing it.Healthcare is a sham and it will destroy our medical pratice.HAving the Gov. tell me who I can see and what procedures I can have and when don't set well with me. All of those who voted for Obama did so because they figured he would take care of them literally...pay for everything. The poor who are on all the entitlements granted to them free of charge..have the cars, cell phones, flat screens and haven't figured out how not to have children and keep the daddy. Perhaps these people need to to volunteer so many hours for each $1 worth of entitlements they get from the GOV. I am tired of paying for everyone to to sit on a couch watching TV while I bust my buitt working and proving for my family and PAY TAXES. Listen to what the health care reform will TAKE AWAY form you...Rationing is about to become REAL in the USA...I fell sorry for our children and our elderly parents....GET EDUCATED-WAKE UP!
Use you imagination: Can anyone create or describe a plan to destroy the US economy that would be more effective than what Obama is trying to do? You are witnessing the intentional bankrupting of America. Yes I said intentional. If you are an Obama groupie you won't be able to grasp this concept - so don't even try. Your programming will overide any individual thought processes, and your understanding of the US constitution is far too limited to comprehend his path of destruction. But just for fun: check out some history books and find out why socialism failed everywhere it was tried. For the Reader's Digest version read up on Sweden 1932 to 1992. It will take us a generation to undo the harm is is wreaking on us. Get ready for a revolution and/or possible dissolution of the US.
To Frank: The U.S. had a trillion dollar deficit before Obama stepped into office and suddenly his "socialist" agenda is bankrupting the country? Despite giving hundreds of billions to his closest friends, the economy was bleeding jobs under Bush and supply-side economics had proven as useful as a foam hammer. Why don't you develop a basic grasp of economics before you spout your sad conspiracy theories?
Labeling every legislative proposal "Obamacare" acknowledges that the GOP has no substantive proposals of their own.
The costs of the current system are rising at 3 times wages because everyone has their hands in the re-imbursement cookie jar.
For employer funded care it is a cartel of insurers that aggressively deny coverage while reporting record profits in a tanking economy.
* See testimony of Wendell Potter who left Cigna to become a whistle blower
www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html
For Medicare, it is fee-for-service that encourages hospitals to run tests, not get results
* news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8137085.stm
For the un-insured, it is getting "free" care at the ER at hundreds of of times the cost of preventive care - paid for by taxes
All the bills contain provisions to fix these problems. Why are conservatives trying to block them?
Obamacare just makes things worse. If the big problem is a "cartel" of insurers -- as "Young Atheart" says -- then why is Obama trying to reinforce the cartel?
You can't buy health insurance across state lines, the way you can buy almost anything else.
That's largely because of an outdated federal law that Obama & Biden love.
So Blue Cross ends up with 80-90 percent of the market in states like Alabama.
The Obamacare bills in Congress make things worse, by subjecting even employer health insurance plans which are currently exempt from this nonsense to such outmoded restrictions.
Say bye-bye to your employer-sponsored health care plan.
a majority of the freedoms described above are transparent. choosing doctors is generally a fradulent level of control as most procedures are the same doctors rarely differ in overall treatment policies. furthermore healthy living is problematic- if anything was so restrictive to theeconomy, it's health living. in other words helthy living is subjective- not smoking does not matter much if you down a double cheeseburger every day for lunch. thus the only way healthy living is viable, is if every part of one's life is fully scrutinized: dietary habits, exersise, sex life etc. this would be a major invasion of privacy, if it were possible even. as for the freedom to keep exisiting plans, there is nothing in the bill that mandates giving up old health care, however as critics point out, there is conmcern about the penalties that private insurance companies incur. however comparativly, most of the nenefits from private insurerers are untrue as doctors calls guarentee the best treatment.
IF YOU DONT THINK THE HEALTHCARE SAYS YOU " WILL BE REQUIRED TO DISCUSS END OF LIFE DECISIONS" READ THE BILL-- IT IS THERE
I put Hans Bader in the same boat as Glenn Beck.
youngatheart says: "All the bills contain provisions to fix these problems. Why are conservatives trying to block them?"
Because of all the other nonsense loaded into the bill and the cost of it all. Better to slow down, think it out, and do a better job than this proposed nightmare.
THIS IS YOUR JACKET, WEAR IT DUMBACRATS.
For James in case you bother to see who comments about your post.
Democare flaws.
1. Lower premiums for individuals who currently have private insurance. (False)
Healthcare Pools lower healthcare cost! Correct!
1b. The government will offer a cheaper solution
1b. very Individual will be able to take part in the "National Exchange!"
1c. Those three things you have zero way to argue about.
Given those two facts!
If individuals in the National Healthcare Exchange pay less than those who individuals who join the health care exchange will pay less than those who pay for private insurance. This will in turn give other individuals who are paying for private insurance more incintive to drop there current insurance and switch over to the National Healthcare Exchange. If this happens than the health care pools in Private Insurance will shrink; Therfore the private healthcare insurance will become more expensive! So please explain to me how this bill is going to reduce my cost?
everyone refuses to hear what the conservatives offer as a real solution, free market solutions!! instead we turn to more government to fix our problems. look at all our other social programs and see how well that has turned out
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