PrintJuly 26, 2009
5 freedoms that will disappear under Obamacare
Shawn Tully of Fortune Magazine has a list of 5 aspects of health care that we have now that will be lost if Obamacare becomes the law of the land:
A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.
If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.
In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.
The only way the Democrats can sell this bill is by lying. That's all they have left. And the lies are getting bigger and more obvious as we go along. They've lied about how much it will cost, that it won't add to the deficit, that your private insurance plan won't be affected, the small businesses will benefit, that you can still choose your own doctor...the list just keeps growing like some nightmare involving Pinocchio's nose.
The Democrats are banking on nobody paying attention right now as well as the hope that by the time the American people actually realize what kind of health care reform Congress has wrought, it will be too late to stop it. Most people really won't find out how bad it is unless or until they get sick.
By then, they may very well wish they had never heard of health care reform.
