Posted by
Billy on Friday, November 20, 2009 11:54:11 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. ('Tricks' and 'gimmicks' in Senate
healthcare bill )
"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.
(This bill should be defeated! All of us need to contact our Senators and tell them in a respectful way that they should vote no and we will be watching to see how they vote.)