Health Care Bill Plunges Forward

"Not a 'Harry and Louise' moment, but a 'Thelma and Louise' moment!"

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” That was the response of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL to a question from Chris Wallace on this morning's Fox News Sunday, regarding a specific provision of the health care bill poised on the precipice to pass.

May I suggest that this is emblematic of much of what is wrong with this rush to take over one sixth of the US economy: No one knows exactly what is in it. Two thousand plus pages politics, pork and patronage, doling out favors and exemptions to certain groups and individuals, denying them to others...this bill, or set of bills is about taxes and government control. Health care and sob stories about orphans and people losing their insurance merely provide the "crisis" for a stalking horse for the expansion of government.

The specific question that caused Ms. Wasserman Schultz to blurt out "I don’t even know what you’re talking about", was a provision in the government take over of the student loan program that has been incorporated into this bill. I mean, it's not as if taking over one sixth of the nation's economy and the entire health care system wasn't complex enough, lets throw in a little more complexity and do it as a package deal!

When the Democrats calculate the "savings" that health care reform will bring, they have to throw in savings from the student loan program to prop up their anemic (and questionable) "reform" savings.

Aside from the question if the government should even be in the student loan business, (Where in the Constitution does it say that the Federal government should make loans to students? Probably the same place that it says the government can mandate all its citizens to purchase health insurance!) , the idea of putting control of student loans into the hands of people who favor central planning may not be beneficial to freedom in the long run. Forget "death panels"! If I went to Bank of America or Wells Fargo for a student loan, all they cared about was would I pay them back. Central planning could allow the folks responsible for the "People's Money" at some point, to deny a loan based on your declared major, if they felt there was a glut in that particular vocation.


To recap, the health care proposal spends trillions of dollars, fails to make good on its promise of universal coverage (millions will still be without coverage), fails on its promise of providing an extra "choice" (soon, there will be far fewer choices as they put private insurance as we know it out of business), will take over the entire nation's student loan program (with the exception of one bank in North Dakota), and doesn't attempt to lower costs of actually providing the services, other than the imaginary and historically contradictory evidence of economies of scale with government run bureaucracies.

Sheesh!

Cross posted at Say Anything