And Yet Another Blog About Health Care

Have you read H.R. 3200 yet? No? I can't say I blame you.

Coming in at the length of a Stephen King novel (slightly more than 1,000 pages) and filled with such incoherent passages such as: " The feasibility of modifying the existing Medicare resource-based value scale (RBRVS) by using adjustments (such as multipliers or add-ons) when a patient is LEP.*" this thing is as light a read as Finnegan's Wake.

*(That passage was just one picked at random. I'm sure I could have pulled quotes from the bill that would cause the onset of severe tourettes. On the other hand, there are probably some passages that actually make a lick of sense but those are few and far between.)

I'm no genius but I'm a pretty smart guy. When I try to read this bill my eyes go crossed after a couple of pages. You need a lawyer looking over each of your shoulders translating for you as you attempt to read this indecipherable monstrosity.

I guess that's the point though. These bills are purposefully written in much a manner that, to the layman, it might as well be in Sanskrit or Klingon. If you don't understand the proposal it's hard to find any specifics that are objectionable or possible harmful to you. You're forced to trust that your representatives in Washington are acting with your best interests in mind.

I thought, foolishly some would say, that after the much ballyhooed Health Care Summit this past Thursday that the plan would be laid out in simple, easy to digest terms but, no such luck. I think I'm more confused now.

The main thing I hope the general public should have taken away from the Summit was that the idea of the GOP as the "party of no" was simply a creation of left-wing spin doctors to undermine the opposition. The Republicans threw out idea after idea only to have most of them simply dismissed out of hand as being "too small" or "tinkering around the edges" by the Democrats.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of my home state of Wisconsin verbally trashed this bill and it's budgetary "smoke and mirrors" in such a way as to leave Barack Obama with no rebuttal what-so-ever. He had a rebuttal to every Republican statement except for Ryan's. He simply moved on to the next person because there was no was of refuting Congressman Ryan's claims. For a video of this exchange, click the link at the bottom of the post.

The Democrats say that controlling costs is one of the main concerns of their health care vision but this bill does little or nothing to accomplish that goal. Anybody paying attention the the health care debate over the last year should have realized by now that this isn't really about controlling costs or providing for the uninsured so much as it's about expanding the size and power of the federal government.

If that's not the ultimate goal, then why else does this bill have to be massive in scope and passed as soon as possible?

Paul Ryan owns ObamaCare's "numbers"