ObamaKennedyDeathCare In The Senate

So, it's coming in the Senate. What's the latest?

Majority Leader Harry Reid almost has the 60 votes he needs to open debate on the issue. As I understand it, a motion has to be approved to even bring the legislation forward, so assuming this introduction passes, the fireworks will begin. Of course, if the Right throws up a big enough fight, it's remotely possible the introduction wouldn't even pass, thus killing the whole thing before it got started, but that's unlikely. Never mind the fact that it was created by 1 Senator (Reid) with no input from the other 99, never mind the fact that no one has read the whole thing (since when does that matter to these Dems?), and never mind the fact that he'll likely have to pull some parliamentary tricks to get it done. The Dems really, really want government control of health care.

So, what's up with the Senate version of the bill? For starters, Reid was not to be outdone by Pelosi, and this bill is actually over 2,000 pages - 2,074, to be exact. Cost wise, it's officially coming in under $900 billion (or not...), but take that number with a grain of salt:

The Senate health care bill bill being presented by Harry Reid to Democrats today will cost $849 billion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, several news outlets have reported. According to the reports, the CBO has also estimated that the bill would reduce deficits by $127 billion and cover 31 million uninsured Americans.

I still haven't seen either the bill or the actual CBO report, and the devil is always in the details. In other health care bills, Democrats have used accounting tricks to disguise the true cost of legislation -- such as delaying the major spending provisions. So it's worth waiting to see what the actual CBO analysis says.

Amen to that. A little more deliberation might be good from the 'world's most deliberative legislative body'. Oh, and there's this other little point of order on the cost:

$127 billion over 10 years sounds like a lot until you remember that $176 billion was October’s monthly deficit. A decade of projected ReidCare savings was wiped out in less time than it took to start and finish this year’s baseball postseason. And this is all premised, of course, on those projections being accurate. Which, according to no less than the dean of Harvard Medical School, they surely aren’t

Translation: like the House bill, this one's full of crap, too.

One of the provisions we know about is a tax increase on Medicare:

The latest proposal to pay for a government takeover of the health care system is to increase the Medicare tax for those that earn more than $250,000 a year. This latest proposed tax hike shows Congress is desperate to find more revenue to pay for its excessively expensive health care plan.

The current Medicare tax is 2.9 percent. Workers and employers pay 1.45 percent each. It is unclear at this point whether both workers and employers would pay a higher rate, or just workers. Unlike the Social Security tax, the Medicare tax is not capped, so every dollar of wages earned by workers is subject to the tax.

There will also be a tax on cosmetic surgery.

And, do you remember that Stupak amendment in the House bill that prevented funding from being used for abortions? No such thing in the Senate bill. In fact, the Senate version does one better - it requires at least one plan in every state that does cover abortions.

All of this, and the fact that a very similar system implemented in Massachusetts (which has done everything bad that conservatives have predicted of ObamaKennedyDeathCare), leads even some liberals to express concerns about what's going on.

The result? As much as they'd like to vote yesterday on this, leading Dems are making noises about the final vote not taking place until as late as January of next year. Cool...it's just that much more time to bend the ear of your Senators.

But of course, you'd be a raaaaacist if you opposed it.

There's my two cents.