What will this health care bill accomplish?

If you just listen to 5 minutes of news coverage these days, you’ll find out that nobody is happy with the health care bill the Senate hopes to vote on before Christmas. But President Obama says we have to do something now or we’ll never get the chance again. They’re even threatening their colleagues to get them on board.

Will this health care bill cover all Americans? No. It will only expand health care for 30 million uninsured. And many more people may become uninsured as a direct result of passing this bill. If we’re not going to insure everybody, why are we doing this in the first place? According to a Gallup poll, most Americans are already satisfied with the health care they receive. So why are we going to screw things up just to cover a few more people?

Will this health care bill force employers to drop coverage for their employees? No, but it doesn’t encourage them to keep covering their employees either.  Should your health care be tied to your job? My opinion is no, but until we get free-market health care reform you probably won’t be able to afford health care apart from your employer or the government.

Will this health care bill raise taxes on average Americans? Yes! Remember when The One promised he wouldn’t raise taxes? Let me refresh your memory. In September 2008 Obama said, “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” The Senate health care bill has a whopping $372 billion in new taxes.

Democrats like Jay Rockefeller promise, “You know we’re going to be back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.” This argument is precisely the one that free market critics of Obamacare have made all along! They’ll pass a bad bill now and then come back later and say, “We have to fix this!”  This health care bill won’t do anything good.

I’ll leave you with one quote from H.L. Mencken, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”