My concerns about the Health Care Reform Bill are as follows:
1. The pricetag: The 1st 10 years of the projection has a pricetag of 1 trillion dollars. That is an additional trillion dollars to the already staggering national debt.
2. Another Social Security?: Will this be similar to the flop of Social Security? Just like it was promised in Social Security, you could "opt" to buy in to the program. The problem is that Social Security is essentially run on IOU's. There is supposed to be a separate fund, but there isn't. As soon as the government receives the funds, they spend it with the assurance that the next generation will continue to make money to keep the system alive.
What ended up happening is that it didn't have enough people opting in to the program to subsidize it. It then became a compulsory tax for all working Americans to pay in to, whether you see a dime of it or not. It is a broken system if it will be bankrupt by the time you ever get to the age in where you could use it.
3. Bait and Swtich: The bill states that if you like your insurance provider, you can stay with them. Isn't the inevitiability for companies, which pay out the ass for insurance for their employees, to dump their workers on to the very limited "public option" plan? They say, no, by law companies have to provide you with insurance. The plan would be off-limits to the millions of Americans who get their insurance from employers. The limitation, of course, is meant to prevent the government taking away business from the private sector which, like it or not, the government is completely reliant on. With so few people using the plan, how will it lower health care costs or compete against insurance providers that very cheap insurance?
What then is the point? The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is designed for taxpayers to pay for people who don't work, either by design or circumstance. And even then, the "public option" is so limited (a few thousand dollars a year!), it hardly makes it much of an option anyhow. I just received a bill for an emergency room visit for my daughter that cost over $7,000. Of course, my insurance is picking up the tab, but imagine if I had this highly touted public option? She couldn't get sick for the rest of the year.
4. Threatening other programs: The bill, having to be payed for somehow, threatens other programs in the process. For instance, the "Tricare for Life" program, (which pays for retired military medical benefits) is now seriously effected. This bill only means one thing. Either taxes are going to skyrocket or it has to gut other programs in order to pay for it. Either way this is a big problem.
There are even more issues of great concern over the bill, but this is the meat and potato's.
"Political correctness is tyranny with manners." -- Charlton Heston
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