'Tricks' and 'gimmicks' in Senate healthcare bill
Jim Brown and Chad Groening - OneNewsNow - 11/20/2009 6:00:00 AM
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has unveiled his more than 2,000-page healthcare bill with an estimated price tag of $849 billion. However, as Grace Marie Turner of the Galen Institute points out, one of the reasons the bill was scored under President Obama's $900 billion cost goal is because no one gets any benefit from the program until 2014.
"So they start collecting taxes and fees now, and...the first ten years of full implementation of this bill is $2.5 trillion, and that's only the beginning," Turner explains. "So this does not in any way...meet President Obama's budget specification. And there are all sorts of tricks that they have pulled in this bill to try to pretend that it's deficit-neutral."
Turner says although the bill is a "carefully crafted" document designed to garner as close to 60 votes as Senator Reid can, it contains lots of new taxes and $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.
"They're assuming that Congress is going to have the will to make those cuts, which they have no track record in doing -- which means they're going to have to come back to taxpayers for more and more taxes to pay for these alleged promises of accessible healthcare for more Americans," Turner suggests.
She further says that many promises President Obama made to the American people are broken in the Senate healthcare bill, including the notion that "if you like your current health insurance you'll be able to keep it." The Congressional Budget Office predicts that under the Senate's proposal, millions of Americans will lose the employer-based coverage they currently have.
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Healthcare dubbed too pricy
A Mississippi senator says with a $12 trillion debt and record job-loss rate, the U.S. cannot afford the Democrats' healthcare plan.
At a Capitol Hill rally, Senate Majority Leader Reid claimed Thursday that the $849-billion, 10-year bill he unveiled hours earlier will save lives, save money, and save Medicare. The Nevada Democrat claims the bill is not just a milestone in a journey of a few months or a few years, but rather, it culminates an effort that began over a half century ago.
But Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) does not agree with Reid's assessment.
"It's a terribly expensive bill," states Wicker. "I don't know how they can tout it as something that actually saves money; except that they're using a few accounting gimmicks to maybe make it look better at first. It raises taxes to a tune of half-a-trillion dollars." (Listen to audio report)
The GOP lawmaker says there is another huge problem with the Senate bill as "it eliminates the so-called 'Stupak language' which was negotiated in the House and was designed to ensure that no taxpayer dollars go to fund abortion through these insurance plans." The Mississippi senator points out that "that language is taken out."
Wicker is hopeful he can find at least one principled pro-life Democrat who will help Republicans prevent the bill from going forward in its present form. That one vote would be enough in the Democrat-led Senate.
