From Phil Klein. (H/T Health Care BS via ECM)
Health Care BS writes:
Obviously, the bill attempts to keep the costs down until most Dem incumbents, including Obama, have won their next re-election campaigns.
Michelle Malkin notes that the bill was passed in committee a week ago, but it was only released to the public today.
Story from the UK Times. (H/T The American Thinker via ECM)
Excerpt:
The National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists.More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.Figures released under the Freedom of Information act show that NHS administrative staff, paramedics and ambulance drivers have also been given free private healthcare. This has covered physiotherapy, osteopathy, psychiatric care and counselling – all widely available on the NHS.
[…]The health department defended the practice and said sending doctors, nurses and other key staff for private treatment helped to get them back to work.
This is actually standard for socialized medicine. In Canada, leftists fly to the United States for health care. They know they’ve wrecked the Canadian system. It’s like Barack Obama and public school teachers sending their own children to private schools. It’s just hypocrisy.
Watch this video by libertarian Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. (H/T Power Line via ECM)
I normally don’t like these Dan Mitchell videos, but this one is better than the others I’ve seen at giving you a great introduction to so many useful topics.
The national sales tax would be a GREAT idea, if we went on to remove an equivalent amount of revenue from the income tax. It’s much better to tax consumption than productive work. But that’s not what the Democrats want to do with this value-added tax. They want both income and consumption taxes, so they get a new revenue stream and more money to buy votes from their favorite special interest groups.
Here is a Wall Street Journal article about the Democrats’ proposed VAT.
Excerpt:
The allure of a VAT for politicians is that it applies to every level of production or service, rakes in piles of money, and is largely hidden from those who ultimately pay it—namely, consumers. With a $9 trillion 10-year budget deficit, $4 trillion in spending in fiscal 2010 alone, and a $1 trillion (at a minimum) health-care entitlement in the wings, Mrs. Pelosi knows that not even the revenue from the expiration of the lower Bush tax rates in 2011 will cover the bills. Nearly every European country that has passed national health care has also eventually imposed a VAT, and it’s foolish to think the U.S. will be different.
Tax and spend.
WINTERY KNIGHT 