Jul 20 2010
Health Care At Gunpoint
The more we learn about Obamacare, the scarier it becomes for all of us. Before we get into the latest round of disturbing revelations I want to echo something Ezra Klein posted the other day. This is the scariest jobs graph you will ever see:
What it shows is how long it will take to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession given an assumed average monthly rate of job growth. If we assume the 2005 average job growth rate per month it will take us 12.5 years to get back to the good old days of 2007. If we could go back to the golden days of the 1990s (before the dot.com bust) it would require 5 years to pull ourselves back up to ‘normal’.
What this chart shows is how job-killing, government take-overs are going to extend our economic suffering – maybe relegating an entire generation to unnecessary economic struggle. Every job killing act out of  DC (from health care, to oil drilling embargoes, to runaway deficit spending, to energy taxes) is going to make it harder and harder to get back to where we were in 2007. And the elites in DC pocketing our hard earned tax money could care less because they will all be immune to the suffering.
With this bleak challenge ahead of us as context, the emerging story on how health care has now become an unsustainable tax (verses a product we selected through our employers or individually) becomes even more worrisome than at first glance:
When critics of the legislation alleged during the debate that the enforcement of its many provisions would vastly increase the power of the IRS and empower tax collectors to go where they had never gone before, administration spokesmen reacted in outrage. The president’s critics, they charged, were not just wrong, but lying to scare people.
It turns out that the critics were dead right and that if there was any lying going on, they weren’t the guilty ones. In the days since passage, we have learned that the IRS will have to hire literally thousands of new agents, auditors and analysts to make sure everyone required to buy into the program does so and to catch those who violate its many provisions as well as to collect the data that will be required of small businesses to help the government collect new taxes to pay for the scheme.
The result is that small-business owners who were promised they would benefit from the new law are up in arms as they discover that they will in fact be targets of an IRS planning to impose even more regulations on the way they operate. The absolute ludicrousness of the new requirements is that business owners will apparently now be required to file forms reporting on aggregate annual payments of as little as $600 to “vendors†like Staples or the office coffee supplier.
As a small business owner I can tell you this means fewer employees now and in the future. When we have to spend money to fill out and check forms for the government, that means we are not hiring people do other real work – like building the business, designing a new gadget or widget, solving a technical problem for customer, etc. Instead of hiring we now need to pay the  government more in taxes and compliance to rules. Useless, wasteful paperwork chewing up productivity, investment dollars, expanded benefits, raises/bonuses and health care dollars.
The government has just increased the waste in health care many times over with this mess. All that money that could be going to doctors, nurses and the needy is going to IRS agents, auditors, paper pushers and filing cabinets.
This is the madness that liberal fantasies always produce when they take your freedom of choice and hand it to bureaucrats.
This cannot be allowed to stand. This must be stopped. Our children’s futures our now completely at risk. We just cannot stand by anymore. Forget perfection, we are talking survival now.
Update: BTW, here is the man who is now in charge of deciding who will get health care and who won’t.
‘The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” That’s what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, told a National Institutes of Health publication a year ago, when he was just president and CEO of the Institute for Health Care Improvement.
Meet Obama’s Death Czar (a.k.a. Darth Berwick). Queue the ventilator breathing sound track ….
I’m convinced we need to give the Left what they want…in the most educational manner possible.
They want health care rationed? They GET rationed care.
Every liberal will get ONE appointment for assisted suicide.
And no other health care of any sort.
Lesson learned. Problem solved.
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After recess appointing Dr Death Berwick now Pinnochio is putting him up for Senate ratification!
What dastardly plan does this lyin Pinnochio have up his sleeve now?
Has he bought off the Maine twins or new found RINO Senator Brown such that he knows this Liberal Death Panel advocate will sail through for an appointment for life rather than be subjected to scrutiny and given the heave ho when the Repubs take over in Jan. 2011, or is this a distraction to cover up other bad news for the liar in the Peoples House?
Maybe Pinnochio really thinks runnin on the ruination of and vastly increasing the costs of Healthcare is a winner for him and his Demrats?
I’m from Calyfornya but I work in England and I live there too.
Without any hesitation I can tell you that their NHS,
national health service, will not save your life if you are in trouble.
It may work OK for simple visits to your GP, but as soon as you
need a referral to a specialist, their unadmitted rationing kicks in.
The most likely thing is that your GP will tell you that you’re
probably OK, no you don’t have an enlarged heart, no you
don’t have Lyme disease, let’s just see what happens.
My next door neighbor died of a heart attack, she had gone to
the same GP that I have to use the day before complaining of chest pain. The doctor told her it was just due to her
arthritis and to take a paracetamol – she was dead the next day.
Another neighbor went in for hip replacement surgery.
He came out but with MRSA and is now never seen outside his
house.
My Grand daughter in law broke her foot. Six years later it
is still not healed.
My colleague at work had his wife go in to close a small
congenital hole in her heart. They made a life threatening
puncture into the chest cavity and abandoned the original purpose, to try and stop dizzy spells.
I know of no NHS success stories, not with real people that
I know.
After being left to suffer for almost 18 months with the intense pain of kidney stones, I bought private health insurance,
which I still retain and pay for myself. At least you are allowed
to do that here.
Now when my NHS GP, (you still have to see them first,
says you can’t possibly have that !!! and I say let’s go
private, one gets a referral and it is better than nothing.
My wife had hip replacement and she is very well indeed.
You have all this horror to come. Good luck.
It is what happens when you elect a man to the WH whose
only agenda is the stealth destruction of America.
Well now we know what “jourolist” did, and how you cannot count on anything the media says anymore.
Speeking of steal destruction. maybe this is why the Berwick appointment being sent to the Senate.
To keep the focus of the intentional destruction of the southern Red States
http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=29655
“I’m going to vote for her because I believe the last election had consequences,” Graham said in announcing his support for Kagan.
I hope Lindsay is not happy with the consequences of his next election and Arizona do not be fooled by Lidsays mentor! If McCain gets the win again his last years in the Senate will be highlighted joining with grahamnasty to pass Cap and tax, Amnasty and any liberal judge Pinnochio puts up!
This pair need to be GONE!
[…] smear conservatives as racists – hotair.com 07/20/2010 The first in a series. more… Health Care At Gunpoint – strata-sphere.com 07/20/2010 The more we learn about Obamacare, the scarier it becomes for […]
well, there’s a Republican Party finance scandal breaking this morning. Looks like Michael Steele is turning out to be just another affirmative action failure who’s only real talent is the ability to commit fraud.
From what I understand, the GOP central fundraising efforts have been a total failure, probably because Steele has never put any real effort into it, and he’s been covering that up by borrowing millions of dollars and not telling the Treasurer about it – leading to false filings, which is a massive violation of FEC campaign finance rules.
Great – this is the party of fiscal responsibility? Dems will have a field day with this. Doesn’t matter how it looks, Steele needs to be dumped as quickly as possible. By the end of this week would not be too soon.
Who replaces him? Doesn’t matter. Grab any bum off the street and they would still do a better job than Steele has done.
I have been reading about the 400 people who are on the “journolist”, who are not considered hard news people but columnists. 400 writers who are connected to hard news people that are out to get Obama elected. Who do you suppose decided to call Bill Clinton a racist when Hillary looked like she might beat Obama. Who keeps Bush in the news with half lies. These 400 sit around deciding how to ruin a politician and feed the wording to the ABC media. NO ONE IS BELIEVABLE ANYMORE! GEORGE SOROS AND PODESTA HAVE A GOOD GIG. They are out to ruin this country as we know it. Join the tea party and get involved so we have an America to pass on.