Obama Doubles Down on Health Care
It turns out that Scott Brown’s election has not killed Obama’s plans for health care reform. Instead, despite flagging personal and health care poll numbers, Obama plans to use the “reconciliation” process to push his plan through the Senate with only 51 votes.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new or improved about Obama’s plan. As John Goodman points out, Obama has not jettisoned any of the most egregious aspects of the Senate’s plan, but instead has added some additional bad ideas to the mix. These include:
* The White House plans to impose the Medicare payroll tax (2.9%) on capital income! (Interest, dividends, annuities, royalties, and rent which is not otherwise “passive.”)
* The White House wants a national health insurance price-fixing body to approve rate hikes! (Despite evidence that state price-fixing leads to more uninsured, not less.)
As Americans for Tax Reform points out, Obama’s plan represents a $629 billion tax hike. Obama claims that his “new” plan has added Republican ideas to the mix (if that is the case, I haven’t seen them or any hints of free market reforms), but I certainly don’t see any free market ideas in the latest iteration of ObamaCare.
[...] reforms, could have a significant, positive impact on costs and quality, but as we have seen since Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, Obama is pushing harder than ever, regardless of what that “reform” ultimately looks [...]
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[...] reforms, could have a significant, positive impact on costs and quality, but as we have seen since Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, Obama is pushing harder than ever, regardless of what that “reform” ultimately looks [...]
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[...] nature of the health care debate has declined dramatically in recent months. Once Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts, the intellectual debate ended. The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats shifted their [...]
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