Most weeks, Congress does not work Fridays. Most holiday seasons, congressmen and Senators are home with their families long before the average worker starts his vacation. So why is the Senate in session on Christmas Eve? As Mark Twain put it, “No Man's Life Liberty or Property is Safe…While the Legislature is in Session.”
The Senate is in session on Christmas Eve for the same reason the House was in session during the wee hours of the morning on a Saturday, because they hope you don't notice what they are doing. The passage of the dueling healthcare bills in Congress will force Americans to do something they have never had to do up until this point, buy a service or risk fees and jail time.
Worse still, no one really knows what's in these bills. The House version has a public option and a ban on public money spent on abortion. The Senate version has no public option but allows federal dollars to be used on abortion. What comes out of the reconciliation process of these bills might very well be the worse of both worlds.
Items like individual mandates requiring every man, woman and child to buy a "state-approved" plan are a given. Community rating, charging the same rate regardless of health condition, destroys the incentive for the young to buy coverage by overcharging them to account for the elderly. Even with these provisions, the CBO says 24 million of the 46.3 million uninsured will remain so.
The money spent just to cajole congressmen and senators to vote for this bill is breaking all records. Mary Landrieu from Lousiana got 300 million dollars in earmarks for her vote. Ben Nelson of Nebraska got a state exemption that his state will never have to contribute to new Medicaid patients. All these bribes are really drops in the bucket when you consider the bill will cost 1 trillion dollars just in the next ten years, if anything they didn't get enough for their vote.
There is still time to stop the bill. Either the House will vote on the Senate version or the bill will go to reconciliation and need to be voted on again by both bodies. We are not done yet! A Rasmussen poll taken Dec 22-23 found that 41 percent favored the health care bill but 55 percent were opposed. If that number rises and we become more vocal about throwing the bums out of office who vote for this monstrosity, many Democrats may decide the political price is too high and change their vote.
Tort reform, buying insurance across state lines and health care savings accounts are all good solutions that would cost the American taxpayers nothing. Health care needs to be reformed but they know this Frankenstein monster of bad ideas and bribes for congressmen is NOT the way to get it done.
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