"One of the things he did was suppress the costs...if the true cost of Medicare had been known, if Johnson hadn't basically hidden them, the program would never have passed."I tied this propensity for lying to the various lies and misrepresentations coming from Congress and the White House in the ongoing health care reform debate. This of course was dismissed as "full of logical absurdities".
In light of that discussion I was interested to read this editorial reprimanding the White House for using legislative tricks, in other words lying, to suppress the true cost of the latest health care reform bill being bandied about. It seems that in order to get under their self-imposed cost threshold, Congress has simply moved $247 billion in costs to a different bill which wouldn't go into effect for a year. It's the very definition of a shell game. This one designed to trick deficit conscious people into supporting this reform bill.
4 comments:
There's no doubt that providing universal health care for Americans will cost a lot of money. There are two problems with the focus on that:
1. We are already spending far more than another other industrialized nation on health insurance. Employers are paying a health insurance tax of 25-30% on the salary of every worker. Workers are losing thousands of dollars of income per year to health insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles. A single-payer universal health insurance system would cost far less providing a boon to business and more spending money in the pockets of American taxpayers.
2. What is actually going to come out of Congress is a fraud. We will see Americans already financially strapped being forced to buy worthless insurance. We will see billions of our tax dollars go into the pockets of the health insurance companies with no real benefit or reform of their practices. Then we will see politicians cut spending that is vital to our economic recovery to pay for their gift to the insurers. They could raise taxes on those making over $250,000 but they won't. They could remove the salary cap for Social Security but they won't. They could make drastic cuts in our bloated military and intelligence budgets, but they won't.
Charles, did you read the post? It's about how Congress and the president are flat out lying to the public.
Of course they are lying. What else is new? I didn't consider that relevant.
Charles, I agree whole-heartedly with your second point. You won't see any bill come out of congress that was meant for the good of Americans--only special interest groups who have bought them off.
I am participating in a training/motivation workshop in Sandy on Dec. 5 to teach conservatives how to get the bums out of office and get people in who will actually consider the good of the people.
See details here: http://economicspolitics.blogspot.com/
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