It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
Here is the bill so you can read the area in question for yourself, page 16 of the PDF file.
With unemployment officially heading toward 10 percent and in many states this number is much higher, almost anyone could lose their job and insurance and would be forced... forced into the public plan and forbidden from going back to a private insurer.
As the IBDeditorial article states "The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny."
Yes, we should.
We do have some hope though and that is the fact that the Blue Dog Democrats aka Centrist Democrats in the House Energy and Commerce Committee are not on board with this bill as is.
Via The Hill:
Seven Blue Dogs on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have banded together to draft amendments that they’ll co-sponsor in the committee markup, which starts Thursday. Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), the Blue Dogs’ point man on healthcare, says if those changes aren’t accepted, they’ll vote down the bill.
“We cannot support the current bill,” Ross said. “Last time I checked, it took seven Democrats to stop a bill in Energy and Commerce.”
Ross knows of three additional Democrats on the committee who won’t support the bill in its current form, creating a base of 10 Democratic opponents. The committee has 59 members: 23 Republicans and 36 Democrats.
And so it goes in Shreveport and Malkin gives us the contact information for those Centrists, to let them know they need to stop this bill before the government forces people to accept socialized medicine.
We can help them make up their minds.
This is who you need to call:Capitol switchboard is
Reps. John Barrow (D-Ga.) Fax: 202-225-3377202-224-3121
:
Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) Fax: 202-225-6887
Baron Hill (D-Ind.) Fax: 202-226-6866
Jim Matheson (D-Utah) Fax: 202-225-5638
Charlie Melancon (D-La.) Fax: 202-226-3944
Mike Ross (D-Ark.) Fax: 202-225-1314
Zack Space (D-Ohio) Fax: 202-225-3394
To be clear here, this is a uphill battle because healthcare is not perfect, many people are not covered at all and no one claims those figures are acceptable, but with socialized medicine, a country runs into problems sustaining the system, which has been proven by countries who have already socialized their medicine and are now backtracking because it is not affordable, and countries that cannot treat the sick because there are not enough doctors, beds or time so they go on massively long waiting lists, even for life threatening illnesses.
Perhaps the best example of the mindset that follows up on a country socializing their medicine and forcing their public to accept government run healthcare, is a recent piece of trash in the New York Times, written by Peter Singer.
The title itself should give you a clue as to how dangerous this path to Obamacare really is "Why We Must Ration Health Care."
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
If you can afford it, you probably would pay that much, or more, to live longer, even if your quality of life wasn’t going to be good. But suppose it’s not you with the cancer but a stranger covered by your health-insurance fund. If the insurer provides this man — and everyone else like him — with Sutent, your premiums will increase. Do you still think the drug is a good value? Suppose the treatment cost a million dollars. Would it be worth it then? Ten million? Is there any limit to how much you would want your insurer to pay for a drug that adds six months to someone’s life? If there is any point at which you say, “No, an extra six months isn’t worth that much,” then you think that health care should be rationed.
No, healthcare should not be rationed. Life is precious and if anything at any cost can sustain that life for even one more day and the sick person wishes to live that extra day, every attempt, every resource and every dollar should be spent to give him or her that extra day.
To make matters worse, that isn't just some sick man's opinion, he is using an actual case matter, from a country that has already socialized their medicine.
Last year Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence gave a preliminary recommendation that the National Health Service should not offer Sutent for advanced kidney cancer. The institute, generally known as NICE, is a government-financed but independently run organization set up to provide national guidance on promoting good health and treating illness. The decision on Sutent did not, at first glance, appear difficult. NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year. Sutent, when used for advanced kidney cancer, cost more than that, and research suggested it offered only about six months extra life. But the British media leapt on the theme of penny-pinching bureaucrats sentencing sick people to death. The issue was then picked up by the U.S. news media and by those lobbying against health care reform in the United States. An article in The New York Times last December featured Bruce Hardy, a kidney-cancer patient whose wife, Joy, said, “It’s hard to know that there is something out there that could help but they’re saying you can’t have it because of cost.” Then she asked the classic question: “What price is life?”
As the rest of the article points out, our system isn't perfect either and the costs of some medicines make it unavailable for people to get ahold of, therefore denying them that extra time as well.
The solution is to work with the system we have, not to create another one that will give us even more problems, just to say "we made changes." If those changes are bad, and these most certainly are, then the change is not worth it.
Back to the Centrist Democrats, who are sick and tired of having Pelosi shove crap down their throats, from The Hill piece above:
Blue Dogs had aired their complaints last week in a letter to Pelosi that caused her to delay the rollout of the bill until Tuesday. But when the bill was introduced, they felt Pelosi and the committee chairmen who wrote the legislation hadn’t taken their concerns into account.
That led to a tense session between Pelosi and Blue Dogs at the group’s regular Tuesday meeting hours after the rollout.
“The meeting did not go well. She just kept saying it was a good bill,” said one Blue Dog.
“There is a growing perception among many of us that our leadership meets with us but doesn’t listen to us,” said another Blue Dog.
Many centrists say that much of the frustration stems from the vote on the climate change bill just before the Fourth of July break, and the feeling that it was “jammed down the throat” of centrist lawmakers.
Pelosi cut deal after deal with individual lawmakers to squeak the bill out of committee and to the floor. Then lawmakers flew home and had to battle criticism from voters at the same time Republicans were saying Democrats passed an “energy tax.”
“They went home and got beat up about energy,” said a senior aide to a Blue Dog lawmaker. “Now you’re going to jam healthcare down their throat and send them home for a month?”
Do not wait for your representative to pass a bad bill that will take away your choice and then go home to hear your voice complaining, use the number above, call them now and demand they not force this down America's throats.
Tell them to vote against this bad bill.
After you make your calls and send your faxes, go read how this bad bill will also harm our economy.
The president is correct that health care reform is essential to a strong economy. He accurately identifies the underlying problem as extraordinary growth in health spending, leading to slower wage growth, too many uninsured and unsustainable government spending. He is correct that reform needs to “bend the cost curve” downward to stop families, employers and governments from chasing their own tails. Unfortunately, the legislation being developed in Congress moves in the opposite direction.
After the vice president admitted the administration had misread the economy, the president said administration officials, instead, had incomplete information — but yet they would not have done anything different in the too-slow stimulus. We need to prevent a recurrence of the stimulus mistake on health care.
The bottom line here is this "Are you willing to give up your right to choose and let the government have full control over your medical decision and health or do you believe those decisions should be made by you?"
Only you can answer that question.
Only you can "choose."
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