The Bad News Just Keeps Rolling In For Obamacare

The more you know about the healthcare plan rammed through Congress, the more there is to hate. It raises taxes, raises premiums, increases the cost of care, adds to the deficit and will lead to taxpayer funded abortion, longer waits, rationing, death panels, and a decreased quality of care — and that’s probably underselling it.

Still, the ultra-left-wing extremists who run the Democratic Party managed to get the bill, which no one read beforehand, passed through Congress on Christmas Eve because they were terrified that the more the American people found out about the bill, the more they would despise it.

At the moment, the Democrats are breaking Barack Obama’s oft-made promise to put health care talks on C-SPAN. Instead, liberal powerbrokers and special interests are cutting backroom deals to try to craft a bill that can once again run the gauntlet in the House and Senate, despite the fact that the American people have loudly, clearly rejected it.

In the interim, here’s some of the news that’s come in.

From the Washington Times:

Congress is creeping closer to passing a government health care bill without telling taxpayers how they are going to pay for the crippling bureaucratic expansion. The reason Democrats are so secretive is that they are ramping up the power of the Internal Revenue Service to make Americans’ health care decisions for them.

A new report on the poor quality of service Americans receive from the IRS doesn’t augur well for the agency’s central role in government health care. With the April 15 tax day just three months away, the IRS already is warning tax filers that about three of every 10 taxpayers who phone the tax office “will likely be ignored this year.”

…The House and Senate health care bills are more than 2,000 pages each, and both are chock-full of new regulations that further empower the IRS. So many new tax rules mean the tax system is about to get a lot more complicated, and the IRS is going to have to handle even more confused customers. In particular, the IRS will be involved in monitoring whether people have the “right level” of health insurance, which the bureaucracy will determine. Not even Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, can get an answer from the IRS about this mess. “Are they capable of doing it? How much more is it going to cost to do it? Do they know what the law requires?” the senator asked. “And we never got a concrete answer from the IRS.”

People wanted change and having to deal with the IRS every time you go to the hospital certainly qualifies. Here’s another change: this bill will drive America even deeper into debt:

Among the astonishing things about the ObamaCare debate–or lack thereof–is that Washington is inundated with warnings about the destructiveness of this plan, and it doesn’t matter. The agency that runs Medicare rung the latest alarm bell on Friday, and good luck finding any media mention.

Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, reports that under his analysis national health spending will rise under the bills by $222 billion over the next 10 years. In other words, ObamaCare really does “bend the cost curve”–up.

Even that estimate exists only on paper, as Mr. Foster has the honesty to admit. Because “most of the coverage provisions would be in effect for only six of the 10 years of the budget period, the cost estimates shown in this memorandum do not represent a full 10-year cost for the proposed legislation,” he writes. The report is punctuated by phrases like “unrealistic” and “doubtful,” and Mr. Foster adds that “the scope and magnitude of these changes are such that few precedents exist for use in estimation.”

…The report also calls out the new entitlement program for long-term care, which is included only because it will start collecting premiums five years before it starts paying benefits. In return for this accounting gimmick, the fisc will be saddled with a program that Mr. Foster estimates will be bankrupt by 2025. It may be sooner than that, however, as the program will tend to attract sicker people, presenting the possibility of “a significant risk of failure as a result of adverse selection by participants.”

Adding “$222 billion over the next 10 years?” It’ll be “bankrupt by 2025?” What does Obama care, right? He won’t be in office then, will he? Of course, given the unpopularity of this plan, he may be out of office sooner (one term), rather than later (two terms):

President Obama’s approval rating on handling health care is at an all-time low, according to a new CBS News poll, something that is helping to drag down his overall approval rating.

Just 36 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of health care, according to the poll, conducted from Jan. 6 — 10. Fifty-four percent disapprove. In December of last year, 42 percent of Americans approved of the president’s handling of health care, and 47 percent approved in October.

Odds are this travesty of a bill is still going to pass, but it isn’t done yet. Maybe there are a few Democrats who love their country more than they fear the extreme left-wing in their party. If so, they’ll change their votes and help kill this disaster.

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