Health Care Hocus Pocus

John Stossel nails the lies and deceptions used by politicians to sell the health care debacle:

The key to magic is misdirection, fooling the audience into looking in the wrong direction.

I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he'll saw a woman in half. That's entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he'll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it's not entertaining. It's incredible.

The politicians have a hat full of tricks to make their schemes look cheaper than they are. The new revenues will pour in during Year One, but health care spending won't begin until Year Three or Four. To this the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner asks, "Wouldn't it be great if you could count a whole month's income, but only two weeks' expenditures in your household budget?" (H/T: Instapundit )

Charles Krauthammer thinks "the bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool."  Pat Austin wonders if there is a Senate swimming pool.  Of course there must be nothing is too good for those we pay to shred the US health care system then lie about what a wonder it will be.  Presto Changeo, the "result is an overregulated, overbureaucratized system of surpassing arbitrariness and inefficiency," according to Krauthammer, who suggests we can throw a dart at the 2000 page tome and find a problem:

You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.
 
You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.

You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences. 

Of course we can throw darts all day but the only solution to this bill is to throw a knife and end the misery.  Howard Dean admits the "Republicans are right about the rhetoric of this bill," though Dean seems to be hitching himself to the liberal wing of the party.  Dean's devotion to the public option aside, it is hard to ignore his point the health care bill is a giant bailout that will have negative consequences if enacted.  Hot Air has a transcript for the video below:


Ed Morrissey wonders:

Dean — who was a successful chair of the DNC and supposedly represented the mainstream of the Democratic Party — has now hitched himself to Socialist Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the party. Is Dean thinking about a 2012 run predicated on a politically wounded Obama who failed to pass health-care reform?

Now that would be entertaining, imagine sawing the Democratic party in two with a primary.