How to pass a bill: Misrepresent, rush, conceal

We don't know what a finished healthcare bill will contain, and it's likely that those who vote on it won't know, either, since they'll have no time to read it, understand its provisions, or analyze them for unintended consequences. To state the obvious, transparency is anathema to this Congress because too many Americans would be appalled by the contents of their bloated bills if they were exposed to the light of day. Successful passage requires Congress to pretend their legislation, or its shape-shifting cousin, 'conceptual language,' is something that it isn't, and ram it through as quickly as possible.

But inquiring minds will work with what they've got. Some gleanings via Critical Condition on what we're likely to get from a Democrat healthcare reform bill:

John Hinderaker:

It actually would be very easy to make health insurance cheaper. All we have to do is allow insurance companies to compete nationally instead of state-by-state and eliminate all mandates that limit consumer choice. It has been estimated that these simple reforms--which are not part of any of the Democrats' "reform" bills, for obvious reasons--would reduce health care costs by one-quarter to one-third. Instead of such common-sense reforms, the Dems are proposing Rube Goldberg measures that will make health care more expensive. Instead of eliminating mandates, their measures, including the Baucus bill, increase them--in effect making cheaper health insurance illegal.

Read the whole thing.

Also read Carol Lochhead's analysis of Democrat healthcare reform:

Cost: None of the bills is likely to reduce the government's costs. Democrats rejoiced when the Congressional Budget Office gave a green light to the Finance Committee bill, judging that it would reduce deficits by $81 billion over the next 10 years, with continued reductions after that, meeting Obama's test that reform will "not add one dime to the deficit."

[. . .]

Prevention: Expanding preventive care has been billed as a way to reduce costs, but it is more likely to increase them.

But almost nobody believes that will happen because much of the savings would come from a familiar budget gimmick - a promise to reduce payments to doctors and hospitals. Congress, under Democrats and Republicans, has promised such cuts in the past and almost always reversed them.

The idea that preventing chronic disease would not save money seems counterintuitive. But Jay Bhattacharya, director of Stanford University's Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, poses an example of a patient saved from a heart attack who later dies from a more costly cancer.

"People have to die of something," he said. "If you save them from one thing, they're going to die of something else, and that something else can be more expensive."

Prevention adds costs in another way: To prevent one person from getting a disease often requires spending money on many more people who would never have gotten sick. Most people who get the measles vaccine never would have gotten measles, but it is impossible to know who those people are beforehand.

Employer mandates: The Senate Finance bill intends to reduce the burden of forcing employers to provide insurance, but it could wind up leaving low-income people jobless.

That's because the bill requires firms that do not offer insurance to repay the government for subsidies their employees receive, giving firms a reason not to hire them, said the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Plus, figuring out how much subsidy each worker gets would pose a bureaucratic nightmare for businesses, especially those with frequent employee turnover.

Individual mandates: Bipartisan alarm about forcing young people to buy costly insurance that they think they don't need led the Finance Committee to gut fines on those who refuse to buy insurance. There would be no penalties at all in the first year and they would not exceed $750 even by 2017, less than the cost of just about any insurance policy.

Read the rest.

Kevin Hassett on who will be paying for all of this:

So here goes: Under the health-care plan advanced by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, lower- and middle-class people who have insurance today are going to be taxed and squeezed in order to cover people who don’t.

The money to finance the new entitlement comes from two main sources, tax increases and Medicare cuts. Medicare cuts are mostly borne by elderly folks with modest means. That undoubtedly explains why seniors are so concerned.

The tax increases, by contrast, have received little attention. There has been almost no discussion of the simple question: who would pay the tab?

Think about how unusual that is. It is a radical departure from past tax debates. When President George W. Bush was in office, every tax proposal, no matter how minor, seemed to be buried by a blizzard of detailed distributional analyses that went from think-tank Web sites to the front pages of your favorite newspaper instantaneously.

In this debate, the distributional-industrial complex has remained silent.

Such remarkable silence in the noisiest town on earth can only be caused by an uncomfortable truth. And the mother of all uncomfortable truths is lurking below the surface in the health debate. If you are a card-carrying member of the left-wing establishment, you can’t analyze the distributional consequences of the health bill, because if you do, you will catch President Barack Obama in a lie.

[. . .]

The remarkable thing is that this revenue comes from low- and middle-income people who already have insurance. Many members of organized labor have these “gold-plated” plans. And they would be worse off, not better, because of Obamacare.

Democrats always seem to promise that they will finance their dreams by taxing the rich. And they always seem to increase taxes on everyone.

There they go again.

Read the rest of this, too.

Douglas Adams would have understood what Team Obama and this Congress mean by transparency:

"But Mr Dent, the plans [to destroy the Earth] have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

In our case, we'd get down there and find the filing cabinet empty. Hold on to your towels.

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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