To Save American Health Care …
… they have to destroy it. Take it away, International Business Daily:
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:
“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington’s coverage.
The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, “fizzle out altogether.”
What wasn’t known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
I’d want to say that patient is pretty much DOA, but in an era of hope and change, who knows what medical miracles are possible.
The only sure-fire remedy to this and myriad other things that ail us is a constitutional “Do as I Say” amendment: “Congress Shall Make No Law That Doesn’t Apply To Itself.” Then again, that’s still doesn’t take the rattlesnake heads out of the elixir.
An Instapundit reader with a second opinion begs to differ.
HotAir, Obamacare may not kill private health insurance, but it does pull the plugs, yank the feeding tube and post a DNR on it. More from
Malkin, including the tally of 1400 references to taxes/regulation vs 88 references to choice/options.
Gateway has more news, vid and outrage.
Maggie’s Farm: Suckers!
Commentary roundup at Memeorandum, leading off with the good news that the Obamacare ambulance is coming under friendly fire.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:18 pm Comments (2) on Thursday, July 16, 2009
2 Responses to “To Save American Health Care …”
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July 16th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
[...] Crittenden: Breaking America’s Healthcare to fix it. I wonder if Pelosi is going to be using the same coverage I’ll [...]
July 16th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
[...] forth by Congress contains among its more than 1,000 pages of proposed new laws the provision that no one who does not already have private health insurance on the day the law were to go into effect …. Couple that provision with another that requires all Americans to purchase health insurance or [...]