A full list of those who voted for and against this bill can be found here. Some warnings from Michelle Malkin:
This is very, very bad news, and it leads us into yet another of the poisonous nooks of the Generational Theft Act/Porkapalooza bill currently being debated in the Senate. You see, the Theft/Pork bill also contains the same sort of skeleton that the S-CHIP bill does: nationalized health care. Here's what is contained within the 'stimulus' package:Take heed: President Obama said at the signing that this is just the “first step.”
For once, a moment of pure ideological candor.
Also: Obama’s praise for the provision loosening of eligibility for legal immigrants and their children (a “first step” toward allowing illegal aliens to partake of the bounty) garnered the most applause from the audience and members of Congress.
So, the S-CHIP program -- which was at its inception a viable and common sense program to provide medical care for low-income children -- is now going to include essentially everyone in the country. As always with liberals, it gets worse:If Democrats learned anything from the HillaryCare defeat, it was the danger of admitting to their wish to federalize the health market. Since returning to power, they've pursued a new strategy: to stealthily and incrementally expand government control. "What no one is paying attention to in the [stimulus]," says Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, "is that Democrats are making a big grab at the health-care sector."
It began one week after the swearing-in, when Nancy Pelosi whipped through a big expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The Schip bill was Democrats' first stab at stealth expansion, unveiled in 2007, though vetoed by George W. Bush.
Initially designed for children of working-poor families, this new Super-Schip will be double in size, and even kids whose parents make $65,000 a year will be eligible. The program will also now cover pregnant women and automatically enroll their new arrivals. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 2.4 million individuals will drop their private coverage for the public program.
Under "stimulus," Medicaid is now on offer not to just poor Americans, but Americans who have lost their jobs. And not just Americans who have lost their jobs, but their spouses and their children. And not Americans who recently lost their jobs, but those who lost jobs, say, early last year. And not just Americans who already lost their jobs, but those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is graciously footing the whole bill. The legislation also forbids states to apply income tests in most cases.
And here's the kicker: Whereas employees were previously responsible for paying their health premiums while on Cobra, now the feds will pay 65%. CBO estimates? Seven million Americans will have the feds mostly pay their insurance bills in 2009.The Democrats are shielding this effort to nationalize health care under the guise of nationalizing the economy. That's one of the major, major reasons that this Theft/Pork bill needs to be killed outright in the Senate. There's simply too much at risk if it becomes law.The bill even takes a whack at the private market. Under the guise of money for "health technology," the legislation makes the government the national coordinator for electronic health records, able to certify what platforms are acceptable. This is an attempt to squelch a growing private market that is competing to improve transparency and let consumers compare providers and costs. In liberal-world, only government should be publishing (and setting) health-care prices.
Add it up, and Democrats may move 10 million more Americans under the federal health umbrella -- in just four weeks! Good luck ever cutting off that money.
We've explored the dangers of nationalized health care numerous times on this blog, but for those of you who are newer readers, these excerpts of further analysis will summarize nicely for you:
The consequences of the bill's health provisions will be two-fold: First, it will increase subsidies for health coverage, and, second, it will give government more control over the use of a variety of technologies used by health care professionals.And...
The stimulus legislation would create a council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This is about medicine but not about healing the economy. The CER would identify (this is language from the draft report on the legislation) medical "items, procedures, and interventions" that it deems insufficiently effective or excessively expensive. They "will no longer be prescribed" by federal health programs. The [council's] recommendations "would have teeth": Congress could restrict the tax exclusion for private health insurance to "insurance that complies with the Board's recommendation."And...
And...And how do the Democrats plan to make this work? They want to kill the one part of the program that actually receives payments. Medicare Advantage is exactly the kind of public/private partnership that could rescue Medicare, where recipients buy supplemental coverage to make Medicare work for them better and extend the bargaining power to reduce costs at the same time. Democrats want to kill that program and force all MA patients back to the poor coverage Medicare alone provides.
This demonstrates what a disaster this stimulus bill is, and what a disaster Democratic rule in Washington will be over the next two years. It’s hard to believe one could credibly say this, but I long for the honesty of the Clintons.
Once a panel of government experts decides what is and what is not cost-effective by their definition, the government will stop paying for treatments, medicines, therapies or devices that fall into the latter category. Initially, this will limit access to very expensive treatments for federal employees, veterans, the elderly, members of the military and their dependents and others who rely on the feds to pay for their health care. But since this would place nearly half of health care dollars off limits for such treatments, the demand for and further development of such treatments would likely dry up.That last one is the most important. When the government decides what medical care you -- or your children or other loved ones -- can or can't get, you've just lost the most important decision in your lives. How do you watch your son or daughter waste away from a completely treatable condition simply because some bureaucrat thinks the procedure is 'too expensive'? This is not a scare tactic - it happens every day around the world where nationalized health care has already been implemented. In fact, while Obama and the Democrats are looking to throw America down this hideous path, most other countries are struggling to get off of it and back to a free market system like what we already have!
Mind you, they are not simply looking to exclude treatments that don't work, but to exclude treatments that are effective, but whose cost, in their opinion, does not justify their use. You, the patient, and your physician don't get a vote. This would make the federal government the single most important decision-maker regarding health care for every patient in America.
It's not a stretch to say that this bill, if passed into law, could literally kill you or your loved ones. Just ask anyone from Britain, Canada, France, or any other place that already has government-controlled health care.
Are you dialing your Senators yet?
There's my two cents.
Sources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123327719403931465.html
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/074nsbzs.asp
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/the_responsibilities_of_the_op.html
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/30/the-stealth-health-care-nationalization-in-the-stimulus/
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/02/how_the_stimulus_bill_could_ki.html
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