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I bet the vast majority of people believe that the current health care bill will be free. The president says it won’t cost “one thin dime.” “Deficit Neutral” says a recent headline. PC-speak if you ask me.
And we will have to wait for three years before “benefits” immediately kick in. We actually pay for three years through multiple taxes, I mean fees, before anything happens. The young adults who voted for Obama are in for a rude awakening. Many of these adults are healthy and don’t feel they need to pay for insurance. Under this bill they will be required to have insurance or pay a fine, I mean fee, of 2.5 percent. That’s $1,000 if one makes $40,000 per year.
And the real cost? We see a picture of Speaker Pelosi ecstatic that the health care bill will be less than $900 billion. We all know how well Washington manages money, so it would be safe to bet that this will cost us over a trillion bucks. From where? From the future. This is a perverse futures contract. This contract will be paid by our children for decades to come. It’s immoral. Once it’s law, what politician would rescind this bill? It’s political suicide.
What’s a trillion bucks? Take a dollar bill and sew it to another end to end. Do that one trillion times. How far out will that last dollar bill reach? Answer, the sun…plus 1 million miles. That’s a total of 94 million miles! That’s just for this bill.
This year’s budget is a trip to the sun and back to Venus. And our national debt is six round trips. Another example of a trillion bucks is a stack of quarters from here to the moon…240,000 miles. That far too much change!
Detef Hoffmann
Grand Junction
12 Responses to “New health care bill too costly”
Posted November 4th, 2009 at 8:05 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
There are proposed bills in both houses of congress but until there is a bill coming out of congressional conference committee and signed by the President there is no bill. The issue will be “how close to what is needed to correct the glaringly obvious need for reform will a finished product be?” As always, fashioning and passing legislation is a messy business and requires compromises which usually results in legislation which completly satisfies no one. Hoffman’s cries of anguish are premature. The real issue will be in terms of money saved over time as the legislation, if there is any, is implemented. If there is added cost endlessly over time it wil prove that the million dollars a day being spent by the insurance industry for lobbying and advertising will be well spent—for them, not us.
Posted November 4th, 2009 at 8:09 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Without healthcare reform and especially without the choice of a public option healthcare will is forcasted to be even more expensive. We don’t have an option for an inexpensive solution. It is good to keep in mind that in no other capitalistic democracy do citizens declare bankrupcy secondary to a healthcare issue. Maybe the writer does not realize that the middle class at this time is absorbing the cost of the uninsured and that these costs are set to double in the next few years.
Posted November 4th, 2009 at 8:38 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
The health care proposals in the House and the Senate falsely claim that they are deficit neutral. That deceit, layered on top of the trillion dollar deficits projected for as far as the eye can see, will be catastrophic for our economy.
If there was honesty in this government, the bills would properly show the true cost of the proposals and would show how the programs were going to be paid (i.e. what taxes will have to be raised). The dishonesty is necessary because it is the only way this government has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing anything close to the proposed bills.
Hopefully, now that the American people are beginning to show, with their votes, what they think of the liberal agenda, we will begin to see a turn in Washington led by those elected representatives who want to keep their jobs.
Obama has a choice to make. He can learn from Bill Clinton and move to the center, or he can go down in flames by sticking to his liberal agenda. We shall see.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 8:20 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
It seems to me the whole country is in the same dilemna as the President. We are damned if we attempt to reform our health care system and damned if we don’t. I don’t think we have a screaming liberal at the helm of this ship. I think we have an individual who thinks we are all in this together. We are still a very divided country post election. Some Americans are too bitter to get with change, and I think it will take more than 51% to make this ship sail.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 9:08 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
davinci: “It seems to me the whole country is in the same dilemna as the President. We are damned if we attempt to reform our health care system and damned if we don’t.”
Health care reform, aimed at bringing down (or at least containing) costs, and insuring those who cannot afford it, is a goal which both sides want to accomplish.
The disagreement arises when one side has, as its ultimate goal, a single payer government run health care system. And the first step in that direction is the public option. To the extent that Democrats insist on passage of a public option, there will not be agreement. Republicans have offered a different approach to cutting costs, including tort reform, allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, and others. Democrats refuse to include any Republican proposals in theirs. Republicans, on the other hand, have agreed to much of the Democrat plan. For Democrats to try and ram through a totally partisan plan on an issue as important as this one, is going to come back to haunt them.
The other major issue, and it is a huge one, is the Democrat deceit regarding funding for their plan. It is wholly dishonest to say that their plan is deficit neutral. They get there by assuming some $400-500 billion of “SAVINGS” in Medicare. That is nonsense. Medicare is bankrupt. If those sort of savings were available, great. Use them to help bring the Medicare program back towards solvency. Don’t apply them to a brand new program. But whether those savings are available or not is highly questionable and to use that as the primary source of funding for the new bill is the height of irresponsibility.
And even if one was to buy this savings story, the health care proposals are only shown to be deficit neutral over a 10 year period because the revenue raising steps start right away and health care benefits don’t even start flowing until the third year and do not become fully implemented until well into the 10 year period. In other words, once fully implemented, the plan will not be deficit neutral. Even under their fairy tale assumptions.
“I don’t think we have a screaming liberal at the helm of this ship.”
I believe we absolutely do. The fact that he cannot do the most extreme things that most liberals in this country want is because the president has to deal with the political reality that his approval rating would drop to the level of Nixon’s after Watergate.
“We are still a very divided country post election.”
We certainly are. And that happens when you are governed by the most leftist leaning government in our history which is out of touch with the beliefs of the bulk of the American people.
“Some Americans are too bitter to get with change, and I think it will take more than 51% to make this ship sail.”
And the bitterness is growing.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 11:23 am Login to Send PM Report this comment
Too costly, deficits, etc. ad nauseium blah blah blah. Someone didn’t get their brainwashing. Get with the program.
Bush, {single handed’ly without Congress’s help} achieved a deficit. THAT is “proper debt” because Bush spent money on all the wrong things. Obama is spending money on “all the right things” so you cant characterize it as debt, or deficit spending. Its for the common good, so it doesn’t count. Much like if a Woman eats all your french fries… the calories don’t count because they werent on her plate.
I am trying to understand this, and get with the program myself.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 3:50 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
If more concentrated on solving the current problem(s) with health care instead of why every proposed solution is not acceptable, it would have been addressed long ago. The fact that it was not indicates more of a lack of will than anything else. So what if things are hard and the choices that have to be made? That is what life is really about, at least for the mature individual who looks for satisfaction in accomplishement of having done something worthwhile rather than in self-gratification and self-indulgence. That is where the read debate is really taking place, between those who search out and meet their obligations and those whose exsitence is mired in self-centeredness.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 3:52 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Someone needs to take some economics…Bush debt bad, Obama debt good. So spending money we don’t have on the “common good” is morally justified. I suggest you go read some “Founding” literature. All too funny if it weren’t so sad. Both of the above mentioned debts are immoral. There will come a time soon when It won’t matter what social programs we get because this country will be bankrupt. Every empire’s fiat currency fails without exception. Ours will take longer to fail because the dollar is the world’s reserve.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 4:05 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
renman, I believe that when you reread Rojellios post you will see that it is all sarcasm,
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 4:06 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
renman95: “Someone needs to take some economics…Bush debt bad, Obama debt good.”
Perhaps the individual should stop studying economics but as theory, and look at the results of applying one theory or another.
renman95: “There will come a time soon when It won’t matter what social programs we get because this country will be bankrupt. Every empire’s fiat currency fails without exception. Ours will take longer to fail because the dollar is the world’s reserve.”
This country has been headed for bankruptcy for a very long time. And not every empires currency HAS to fail. That is the fatalistic view of “Well, that’s just how it has always been” It does repeat itself, but because those in charge and the people themselves don’t bother to look at why those others failed and take the proper measures so as to prevent theirs from suffering the same fate. And ours, is not that far off from failing as there is already a great deal of talk about some parties wanting to change the world’s reserve from the dollar to some other currency. That can happen very quickly. For those who like movies, they might get a copy of the film “Rollover” and see how quickly and easily that can happen.
Posted November 5th, 2009 at 5:51 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
Bullishfrog hit the nail on the head. Pure, unrefined sarcasm. Be that as it may, there are those who say exactly the same thing… and they are being serious.
Posted November 6th, 2009 at 2:24 pm Login to Send PM Report this comment
RLaitres,
As the oh so wise scholar you are wrong. The country is not headed to towards bankruptcy it already has been since the 1930’s. Social security was inacted back then and was used as collateral on the dept. The chairman of the federal reserve banks is managing the bankruptcy and our government has been operatiing on emergency powers every year since when it comes to the federal budget. Bush and Obama et al seem to think printing up more money and bankrupting future generations is still the way to go even when it has been a total failure. The only way to get this under control is to put the federal reserve out of business and nationalize the banking system again. God forbid if we get a true leader who tries to do this. The last ones were JFK and Andrew Jackson. No less than about twenty attmpts on Jackson’s life while he was in office and well, we all know what happened to JFK.
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