Mojo2
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- Oct 28, 2013
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President Barack Obama: His signature health care plan, the Affordable Care Act, is, in effect, a government takeover of the American health care system, says a writer for the Heritage Foundation.
Obamacare: Say hello to government control
By Robert E. Moffit Oct. 10, 2013
On health care, the president's pile of broken promises keeps rising. Consider this gem from Aug. 20, 2009: "Let's be clear about the fact that nobody has proposed anything close to a government takeover of health care."
Well, yes, somebody did. President Barack Obama is now well on his way to orchestrating the federal government's "takeover" of Americans' health care.
Commandeering the resources of major federal departments, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service, the administration and its allies in Congress have created numerous federal bureaus, commissions and programs, issued thousands of pages of rules, regulations, guidelines and directives, reinforced by unprecedented mandates and new taxes, fees, fines and penalties. Central planning and coercion holds this sprawling thing together.
The president's supporters insist this isn't a "government takeover" — that's a "myth," they say, because private insurance plans and providers will still exist.
Sure, they will. As long as they do as they are told. Virtually all key health care decisions will be made by government officials. Not you. Not your employer. Not your insurance company.
Beginning on Jan. 1, government officials will require you to buy a federally approved health plan or pay federal fines or tax penalties. They will define and redefine, at their pleasure, the content of your health benefits package, meaning the medical treatments and procedures you must have; the kind and level of preventive health care services you must have; the level of coverage that you must have; the level of cost sharing, deductibles and co-payments that are acceptable — to them, not you.
Writing in the October 2010 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, Sara Rosenbaum, professor of law at George Washington University and supporter of the law, perhaps best described the Obamacare's transformative effect on private insurance: "It will take on certain characteristics of a public utility." In other words, private insurance will be "private" in name only.
As a "public utility," you get what government officials say you will get, and you will learn to like it. As the president and his allies keep telling us, it's the law of the land. We are not going to "re-litigate" it. So get over it, get used to it and shut up.
Another View | Health Care - Obamacare: Say hello to government control
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