In case you’re living under a rock over spring break and haven’t heard, Congress passed the sweeping bill on health care last night–with the oh so small margin of three votes.
Hurrah!! We have health care! Woohoo!! All of our dreams have come true! Everyone in this country will now be covered and everyone else will benefit from it! We should expect the deficit to go down. We should expect that everyone will magically be able to have health care and no one will be worse off for it. The government is in charge now. Woo! Well, newsflash: Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP were already in place. They were government-run, and they denied more claims than you want to know.
Sure, we’ll be covered. But watch, you may not get the care you want. You may have healthcare, but now that it’s a political issue, politicians can use it as leverage in political campaigns. Worse, people who know nothing about politics can and will vote in elections that decide these issues. You think you have a choice in your healthcare? Just wait and watch. When was the last time the federal government actually carried out a program without going over the predicted budget for said program? If you believe that this bill will actually reduce our deficit, you have another thing coming. If you have a moment, check out these graphs — but I warn you: they aren’t for the faint of heart. Here are a few of them
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I want to believe that the president and Congress just don’t know what they’re doing. Because if I allow myself to believe otherwise, I must believe that they knew what that they were passing that bill against the will of the people and that they were purposefully fundamentally changing the way this country works. There are about 300 million Americans. According to some estimates, 47 million are uninsured. But once you take out illegal aliens, people who can afford insurance and don’t want it, there are really only about 10 million people here who wanted health care and couldn’t get it without the help of this bill. Why couldn’t we have used some of the stimulus money to cover them? I’d like to think that they were just too stupid to see the other options and that it was just an accident that this plan involves a government takeover of things which the government has no business regulating. But that’s a little hard to believe.
Just some food for thought: Now that Democrats have shoved through health care, they will need to find votes somewhere because Americans are angry and resentful. Now where is he going to get votes? Think about it and it won’t be too much of a stretch. The next big issue will probably be amnesty for illegals. Obama needs their votes – if he promises them health care and finds a way to allow them to vote.. well, think about it. He needs this done by November – stay alert because this could be a very scary few months; these people just showed us that they are not going to ease up and listen to the American people just because elections are in November. No, they are going to get more bold and we cannot just sit back and watch as the government gets bigger and we lose our freedoms, our choices and our hard-earned cash.
Why don’t you let the data speak for itself instead of providing “useful” descriptions such as “gimmicks.” This partisan game is part of the problem, not the solution. Also, the fact that you link to a self-proclaimed conspiracy blog is nothing short of embarrassing. The writers at the Review should know better than that.
JPMITB,
Understand that Review writers are not partisan Bush-bots. Most are quite independent of GOP idiocy. Opposing a corporate welfare bill is not a ‘partisan game,’ nor is refuting force fed lies by Obama’s press secretaries in the media.
More importantly, not providing word descriptions for graphs and charts doesn’t make sense. That’s all part of making an argument; you would do the same if defending something you believed.
The fact that Above Top Secret is a ‘conspiracy’ blog is irrelevant. The 10 million figure has been cited by several mainstream conservative sources and is true.
Ferenc, on your last point, check out http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269387827&sr=1-1
basically a long analytical expansion of your last point
Prb56,
If that number is, in fact, correct (which I’m not doubting), then why not link to a legitimate source instead of a conspiracy forum? All that does is damage the credibility of the Insider and, by extension, the Cornell Review.
Also, I think it’s obvious that graphs need to be supplemented with words. However, using loaded words such as “gimmicks,” is not descriptive and especially not objective. If you’re trying to make an argument without looking like “Bush-bots,” why not show graphs with objective and,get this, informative labels and follow up with an explanation of what that could mean to the taxpayer? When you see a graph with entirely subjective labels all over the axes, what do you think? Is the person who made the graph subjective, or is there something subjective about the “data” itself? That is absolutely a valid question that a reader could ask.
I don’t think in the least that the staff of the Insider or the Review are “Bush-bots”. However, this is stuff you shouldn’t feel like you have to be defensive about. If you want to look like a Hannity or a Coulter, continue to be defensive and ignore people’s objective opinions about the piece (notice that I did not say at all in my first post whether I agreed or disagreed with the point at hand). However, if you want people (even those who disagree with you) to see the legitimacy of your writing and open themselves to your opinions, you shouldn’t give them articles like this.
My mistake. Fixed the “10 Million” link. Hope everyone is happy.
And by the way, if you actually looked at the graphs, they have captions at the bottom. The first, third and fourth use information from the CBO. The second uses info from the Heritage foundation.
Lastly, I wasn’t aiming to write a quiet article that would add to the white noise in the discussion on health care. It would be nice if people would wake up and understand some of the very dramatic issues happening here.
Ferenc, while it may be true that the CBO’s current estimates declare the federal budget deficit will decrease by $138 billion (regardless of its likely detrimental effect on the national debt), you are forgetting one key flaw of CBO estimates: they only hold true, or even close, if the program does not expand past its current bounds. When was the last time a government program didn’t grow at all across 10-20 years? The answer is basically never since at least the Civil War.
JPMITB,
Fair enough about my overly defensive tone. However, the point of my post was to demonstrate that we are not engaging in a ‘partisan game.’
If Republicans were in charge and were responsible for the law, it would have evoked the same reaction from us.
The United States Government is killin’ me. Can’t everyone see that this monster of a bill is going to raise taxes for everyone and even invent brand new ones for everybody?