Death Panels.
HR3200 dictates that after the fifth year, the Secretary sets prices and content of all insurance, government and private. Since he will have a strong desire to gather the premiums of the participants in private plans, it is obvious to most the private plans will simply be driven out of the market. The "public option" will become single payer. When that happens the committee that gathers to set policy on what will be paid and what won't could also be known as a death panel. There is no provision in HR3200 for a "death panel" per se, but that policy setting committee (a responsiblity specifically assigned to the Secretary in HR3200 and probably delegated to the committee) will set prices and coverage.

An 88 year old man who has paid in to the single payer system for 60 years and contracts cancer will look to his insurance policy for coverage for chemotherapy. Will he get it? Is it likely the Secretary will think it economic to pay for chemotherapy for an 88 year old man? What if all he needs is a hip replacement? Would he get that? What if he were 98?

Somewhere in all this the Secretary will be saying "We aren't going to pay for your medical needs." The reason this is a Death Panel is because

a. If the 88 year old man doesn't get chemotherapy he dies
b. Government forced him to join government plan. If he didn't join he would suffer an 8% tax penalty.
c. Secretary says he doesn't get chemotherapy and man has no appeal. Secretary is beyond judicial review (HR3200).

It is (b) and (c) that distinguishes the Governement death panels from the private death panels. The man has a choice of what to buy from private insurance companies. Also, with private insurance if he doesn't like the decision he can appeal the the state insurance commissioner.

Compulsory end-of-life counciling isn't a death panel. The Secretary is. Think about it.

There are arguments to avoid this.

If you're poor, you die. you won't have enough money to pay for the chemo. The Secretary is a "Death Panel".

If you're middle class, you will have to do what the liberals and HR3200 purport to avoid -- bankrupt yourself to pay for chemo. Alternatively, like in Canada, you can buy supplemental insurance, thus paying for your insurance twice. This is just a tax though it doesn't look like one.

If you're rich, you'll write a check and pray the chemo is successful.

HR3200 removes for all time, any possibility the poor could get expensive care at end of life.

Finally, since the Secretary is beyond judicial review, he could decide not to give heroic treatement for cancer after a person reaches 75 years of age. There's nothing you could do about it. Then, when Ted Kennedy discovers his cancer, the Secretary can make an arbitrary exception and there's nothing you could do about it. Remember, he is beyond judical review.

HR3200 is such a bad law that if everyone read it and understood it and thought for a while about how it might be implemented and operate over the next 10 years almost everyone would vote no. High costs are one of the motivations for HR3200 but costs are not addressed to any significance. To keep costs down, the Secretary will start with price controls. Price controls always lead to shortages (e.g. Canada has 2.2 doctors/1000 people - almost the bottom of US+Europe). The bill itself will be challenged in the courts and major parts of it could be wiped out [e.g. can the Federal government force me to buy insurance and if I don't tax only me because I didn't buy insurance -- where is that in the Constitution?]

Finally, the CBO estimate of cost over 10 years is $1T. However, most of the $1T is spent in the final 6 years AND the CBO said that its estimate was only for the parts of HR3200 that were complete enought to estimate. The CBO is not famous for accurate predictions of future costs, so the $1T is unlikely to be lower, but has a good chance of being higher. Medicare will be bankrupt in 2017. HR3200 is significanly larger in scope and price than Medicare and so far, there is no plan to keep Medicare from going bankrupt. I fail to see how HR3200 will produce anything better that Bankruptcy of the entire country sooner rather than later.

Promises you can't keep

Quoting from the NY Times, President Obama said:

  "Where we do disagree, let's disagree over things that are
   real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to
   anything that has actually been proposed,"

Dear President Obama.

I have some questions for your consideration:

1.  Are you saying there will never be a government
    council that determines which procedures will be
    paid for and which will not?

2.  Why should the country trust the Democratic
    (Republican) party to run a health care system?

3.  Will Congress submit themselves to the same "public
    option" they want to force on the public?
  
4.  Can a person who leaves a private insurance plan
    go to another?
  
5.  Is a person who leaves a private insurance plan
    forced to use the public plan or penalized?

6.  Can a congressman who is on public plan change to the
    CONGRESSIONAL plan once seated?

7.  Are you promising private insurance will be as
    good or better 10 years from now as it is today?
    If you are, what is the basis of your promise?

8.  Should Government run insurance be passed into law,
    what checks and balances are in place to prevent the
    government plan from lowering its prices to drive
    private insurance out of business?
  
9.  What checks and balances are in place to keep the
    Democratic congress and President from simply changing
    the plan 2 years from now to a single payer plan?
  
10. What checks and balances are in place to prevent
    the Secretary from making arbitrary decisions about
    for whom and where health care is best?

11. Would we see red states having worse health care
    than blue states?

12. Why should politics be injected into health
    care? ("the Secretary" is a political appointee).

13. HR3200 starts out today, before it is even passed
    micromanaging health care by specifying in detail
    medical processes (home visitation details, doctor
    consultations with patients on end-of-life issues).

    What prevents you from passing a new law, two years
    from now to have that doctor simply tell the patient
    when medical financial support ends?

14. What prevents the federal government from withholding
    funds from a state, county or city that doesn't strictly
    follow the "Secretary's" rules?

15. What limits the Secretary's power over health care?

16. Why should any American think the government can run
    an insurance plan better than a private company? Are there
    examples where government has proven more efficient
    than private enterprise?

Finally, I don't believe HR3200 can be successfully
funded. Social Security is in poor shape and will
require either increased payroll taxes, lower
benefits or raising the retirement age. Watershed year
is 2040, but with the recent recession, that date is probably
closer.  Medicare is scheduled to be insolvent in 2017. HR3200
is funded the same way as Social Security and Medicare, and
that's the pay-as-you-go scheme. Pay-as-you-go requires a
larger and larger base of people to support the increased size
of the beneficiary population.

17. Why won't HR3200 bankrupt the nation or create a tax
    burden significantly larger than today? [Hint: Identify
    CONVINCINGLY where the 2x cost comes from and how you will
    eliminate it. Hand-waving cost reductions don't answer the question.]

HR3200 is a overly complex solution to much simpler problems.
Your government has not faced that fact. They have not simply identified
the problem and gone about solving them in collaboration with
conservatives, liberals and most important of all, the public.
Your government (and mine) has kept us all in the dark and now has
on the table a bill that all have demonstrated conclusively they
do not understand.

Because none of these questions has ever been answered, you should
speak out against HR3200 as written, now. Tell Congress to go back to the
drawing boards.  BUT WAIT, here's a better idea and you can
take the credit for it.

Create a Health Care convention. Populate it with an equal number of
liberals and conservatives and charge it with producing the definitive
list of exactly what problems a Health care bill must solve. Tell them
to reject from the list any proposed solutions, just list the
problems. Give them 4 months (same as the Constitutional Convention).

Once the list is produced and published, call a second Health Care
Convention. Populate it with an equal number of liberals and
conservatives and tell them to solve the problems in the list and
DO NOT USE a government run pay-as-you-go-scheme.
Give them 4 months.

It would be difficult to have worse results than HR3200.

You can be the President of all the people or the president of
the Democratic party. The choice is yours.

Ed Bradford

On Aug 10, 2009, President Obama said:

  "But ultimately, I think the American people want fairness. And we

  can create a system in which you have strong border security, and an

  orderly process for people to come in. But we're also giving an

  opportunity for those who are already in the United States to be able

  to achieve a pathway to citizenship so they don't have to live in

  the shadows."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/world/americas/11prexy.html?_r=1&nl=pol&emc=pola1]

President Obama is right, Americans want fairness. What they don't

understand is how breaking the law to get into the country, and then

being granted citizenship before those standing in line legally in foreign

nations is fair. Neither do I. That is why the previous immigration

bill caused so much furor.

It is up to all people who believe in the rule of law to make

this clear to the lawyer in the White House. It's one thing to know

the law and teach it. It's another thing entirely to understand the law.

Blog early and often against granting citizenship to any illegal

aliens who wish amnesty and citizenship for themselves ahead of

their fellow countryman who stand in line legally.