Holy Snark!
You will watch this 3 minute video about the Democrats’ plan for single-payer health care right now! (H/T Heritage Foundation)
This video is courtesy Verum Serum, the same guys who brought us that Jan Schakowsky video where she admits that Obama’s plan will destroy private medical insurance. They seem to be a Christian blog, so I blogrolled them, along with Bush White House economist Keith Hennessey, who I linked to twice.
Quick quote from Heritage Foundation’s post:
As Yale professor Jacob Hacker says in the video: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single payer and I said well its not a Trojan Horse, right? Its just right there.”
And then later: “One of the virtues of it though is that you can at least make the claim that there is a competitve system between the public and private sectors.”
Don’t forget some other videos I posted on health care, (that post has a link to Laura’s amazing post on health care that was on Hot Air, which had more helpful videos!).
Michelle Malkin has some ideas about what the grassroots can do! We can fight this.
A comprehensive, point-by-point refutation of government-run health care is here, at the Heritage Foundation.
They cover:
- the hidden costs of government-run health care, that are paid by the private sector
- the low efficiency and low quality of existing government plans like Medicare and Medicaid
- how government-run health care would lead to controls on your private life to reduce health costs
- the real solution to the health care mess: competition, de-regulation and consumer choice
Some good news on health care
OK, Heritage Foundation had this story on a bill introduced by Republican senators Tom Coburn and Richard Burr. It’s called the “Patient’s Choice Act”.
Excerpt: (I bolded the stuff I liked)
As Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos with American Enterprise Institute note in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation “provides a path to universal coverage by redirecting current subsidies for health insurance to individuals. It also provides a new safety net that guarantees access to insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.”
By restructuring the tax treatment for health insurance, the plan would give every taxpayer direct assistance to buy private health insurance, and end the inequities that plague the current system. The bill would shift the $300 billion annual tax exclusion for employer-based health benefits toward refundable tax credits for families and individuals. Families would get $5,700 a year and individual consumers would get $2,300 a year to purchase private plans and invest in health savings accounts (HSAs).
Low-income families would receive a supplemental debit card worth up to $5,000 that would help them pay for health coverage and out-of-pocket medical bills. They’d also be incentivized to make the most of their health care dollars since the remaining balance on their card would roll over to the next year. The expected expansion of private health plans would reduce the dependence of many uninsured Americans on the hospital emergency rooms for routine care, saving American taxpayers billions of dollars.
“The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance,” Turner and Antos add.
This is what Republicans would do if we could elect enough of them.
WINTERY KNIGHT 