Gay Conservative

Everyone’s talking about healthcare right now, largely because Obama has been pushing a national healthcare system since his campaign. Now we have HR 3200, the 1,018-page whopper of a bill that will enforce sweeping healthcare reform. We don’t realize just how dangerous this game is even though we have the evidence staring us in the collective face.

Take a good, long look at Massachusetts. They rolled out government healthcare a few years ago and the program is already in serious trouble. Right now, lawmakers are about to approve a law cutting somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 legal immigrants–people who came here through the front door and have been entirely honest about their time here in the US–from the state government’s plan. One man told the AP that his bills for his prostate cancer treatment will be far too expensive for him to even begin to pay. A spokeswoman from Health Care for All is lambasting the government for making that decision, saying that it will only lead to overburdened emergency rooms and hospitals having to foot the bill.

The problem is simple: the money isn’t there. The state cannot pay for it anymore.

You can yell and scream at your state all you want, but the fact remains that nobody stopped to think about what the cost might be and now you can’t afford it. When the money runs out, guess what? You have to find ways to adapt. This is the only way to do that–cut a certain group from the benefits. They won’t be the first. Those 30,000 people will save the state $130 million a year.

And Boston Medical Center just sued the state for shortchanging them at a rate of around $181 million a year. The state is responsible for medicaid, Commonwealth Care and a certain number of uninsured, but BMC is barely getting more than half of what the state owes.

America may be the greatest nation in the world, and indeed one of the wealthiest, but what people do not grasp is that money is never in unlimited supply. It can run out, no matter how much you have, because when you’re spending more than you’re taking in, eventually you can find the bottom of that well. Massachusetts is already learning how painful that can be.

The plan that is about to bankrupt Massachusetts is what is being held up as the model for national healthcare. But the national bill goes far and beyond being an “option.” Here’s the exact wording, quoted verbatim, that proves Obama and the Democrats are not offering anything that resembles an option:

(a) Grandfathered Health Insurance Coverage Defined- Subject to the succeeding provisions of this section, for purposes of establishing acceptable coverage under this division, the term `grandfathered health insurance coverage’ means individual health insurance coverage that is offered and in force and effect before the first day of Y1 if the following conditions are met:

(1) LIMITATION ON NEW ENROLLMENT-

(A) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day of Y1.

So, as you can see, once this behemoth takes over, the private choices we now have will quickly go the way of the dinosaur.

And how are we going to pay for it all? It’s already estimated to put us more than one trillion smackers in the hole (that’s on top of the debt Barkey has incurred via the Generational Theft Act and the Porkulus). Where is the money going to come from to support this thing when we can’t even pay all the other bills?

If we allow a national healthcare system to be established now, the way it’s written, with no provision for new private insurance to be bought, we will never be able to un-do it. We will be stuck with it and whatever problems it comes with. We have plenty of examples to learn from and we’re ignoring them completely. We cannot, under any circumstances, give up our right to decide how we go about finding healthcare. That is exactly what the bottom of the well will teach us, and it’s a lesson that will kill us.