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