The midnight sausage factory

Senate Finance Committee member Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, told CNSNews.com that he doesn't expect to read the legislative language of the health care reform bill that the committee just completed.

"Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as 'arcane,' 'confusing,' 'hard stuff to understand,' and 'incomprehensible,'" CNSNews reported.

It's tempting to say that if they don't know what they're doing they shouldn't be doing it, but that might be construed as the type of uncivil discourse which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tearfully warned might lead to violence.

We wouldn't want anybody to get hurt.

So we'll just point out that the "actual text of the bill" is what becomes law, and that's what people will have to obey or face law enforcement action. Maybe Senator Carper can't understand it, but there are plenty of lawyers hired by everyone affected by this law who will understand it and will be happy to explain it to him.

That's why the public should have a reasonable amount of time to read the critical passages of the bill before the Senate votes on it.

The Senate Finance Committee customarily works with what they call "conceptual language," which is something like a plain-language description of what the legislative language will say.

They like to make sure everybody understands what they're doing.

You should see what they're doing.

America Wants To Know caught the last couple of hours of the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill mark-up on C-SPAN late Thursday night. The committee finished work on the bill at 2:15 a.m. on Friday. Exhausted and bleary-eyed, Chairman Max Baucus congratulated the senators and the committee staff on accomplishing what he said was real progress toward "delivery system reform."

Senator Baucus said the results wouldn't be seen for four or five or six years, but the health care bill would begin the process of moving the health care system away from "fee for service," which he said was very wasteful, and toward a more efficient "delivery system."

Right there, you can see the core of the problem with health care reform.

For all that the Democrats have assured the public that "if you like what you have, you can keep it," they are trying to set in motion a process that will cause "what you have" to go away.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year. But soon.

The proposed health care reform bill would require every American to buy health insurance. It would restrict health insurance companies to offering only policies that meet with the federal government's approval. It would tax insurance companies that currently offer expensive policies with good coverage. It would levy fees on medical device manufacturers and drug companies and other businesses in the health care sector.

All these things would have serious consequences and create new problems.

The individual mandate to buy insurance would require a massive enforcement bureaucracy operated by the Internal Revenue Service. Some people would get subsidies. Some people would pay fines. Some people would invent fictional children to qualify for "refundable tax credit" checks and then report on their tax returns that they bought a health insurance policy with the money. What level of government intrusiveness will be necessary to police this monstrosity?

How will the government decide what standards new health insurance policies must meet in order to be legally sold in the U.S.? By interest group lobbying and political contributions? How long will it take the bureaucracy to catch up with advances in medical technology? Will important and valuable innovations be lost because getting them approved for coverage is like trying to sell a new weapons system to the Pentagon?

How long will insurance companies continue to offer high-quality policies if there's a 35 percent tax on the companies for selling those products? How is the government going to replace that revenue after there are no "Cadillac" policies to tax?

How does it reduce health care costs to hit medical device makers and drug companies with $90 billion in fees that they necessarily will pass on to consumers in the form of higher prices?

Will Congress rage against profits made by companies in the health care sector and try to restrict salaries, price increases, company spending and shareholder dividends? Will this cause a long, slow deterioration of quality, availability and innovation?

Where will Congress get the money to pay for Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies when the projections of what they will cost turn out to be wildly wrong? (Cash-for-Clunkers was funded with a billion dollars that was supposed to last for three months. The money was gone in three days.)

Health care reform is a disaster chased by a catastrophe.

If you light candles throughout your home and then go out, forgetting you lit them and forgetting you have a cat, when the house burns to the ground you can use your superior intelligence and excellent verbal skills to explain that the candles were needed to promote a feeling of serenity, and you had to leave because it was the Columbus Day recess, and it's not your fault because the cat is under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Agriculture, but the house is still burned down and any idiot could have told you this would happen.

"If we were starting a system from scratch," President Obama said recently, "then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense."

Good God. It's arson.


Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "The secret health plan," "Bad at math," "Just kill it," "Yes we can and no we won't," and "Gazing into the future."

.