Read the full column in today’s Inquirer
Early Monday morning, President Obama hailed the passage of his health-care bill, saying, “This is what change looks like.”
But is this the change Obama campaigned on?
Did he promise rising health-insurance premiums, new taxes on employers and investment, higher Medicare taxes, a government mandate that everyone buy insurance, more people on government-run health plans, trillions of dollars more in federal spending, backroom deals to buy votes, and (according to my analysis of the legislation) federal abortion subsidies that would increase the number of innocent deaths every year?
Obama has fulfilled his dream of making history, but he certainly has not delivered the change he promised the American people in 2008.
As a candidate, Obama promised to be bipartisan. But, for the first time in history, Congress has enacted an expansion of the government’s role in our lives on the scale of the Social Security and Medicare programs with only Democratic votes. Both Social Security and Medicare passed with broad bipartisan support.
Obama promised to unite a divided America. But he has been completely dismissive of well-informed Americans’ overwhelming opposition to this measure, forcing it down their throats.
Obama promised fiscal responsibility. But he has increased government spending over the next 10 years by more than $2 trillion, and his budget will add almost $10 trillion to the national debt over that period.
If record spending, an explosion of government, and the imposition of debt on the next generation don’t faze you, maybe this will: Obama and the Democrats aren’t done yet.
In the next few weeks, Congress will try to pass a reconciliation bill that will add almost $100 billion more in spending while delaying one of the health bill’s major sources of tax revenue – the tax on “Cadillac” health plans – to a point so far down the road that it’s unlikely a future Congress will implement it.
Once that’s done, there will be a bill to increase Medicare reimbursements by $208 billion.
Huh? Didn’t Obamacare just cut $375 billion from Medicare reimbursements?
In 1997, Congress passed a bill to cut Medicare doctor fees that the Congressional Budget Office expected to save hundreds of billions of dollars over the life of the program. But the measure never saved any money, because doctors threatened to drop their Medicare patients if the fees were cut.
Tags: health care, Rick Santorum
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