Health care reform key to debt crisis
Rep. Paul Ryan
Politico
7/31/2011
The debate over raising the statutory debt ceiling has accomplished little but revealed much about the unwillingness of many in Washington to face up to our generation’s most pressing challenges.
At the heart of the gridlock is a deep disagreement over the role that out-of-control government spending plays in our current predicament — and nowhere is this disagreement more strongly expressed than in the debate over the government’s role in health care.
One approach has been enshrined into law by President Barack Obama’s new health care overhaul, a 2,700-page mistake that has compounded the worst problems in American health care, weakened our economy and accelerated out-of-control government spending. The law’s many restrictions and mandates have jeopardized access to affordable, quality health care for millions of Americans.
Already, more than 1,400 businesses and organizations have asked for waivers from these new mandates on the grounds that the new top-down, one-size-fits-all rules would profoundly disrupt the health care arrangements of the millions of Americans they cover. Most of these waivers were granted, but some were not. And while it’s unclear whether political considerations played a role in which waivers were denied, it’s crystal clear that with power increasingly centralized in Washington bureaucracies, businesses will seek to employ good lobbyists at the expense of good workers.
Combined with more than $800 billion in new taxes, the uncertainty created by the new law is having a chilling effect on hiring. The small-business owners I speak to in southern Wisconsin are concerned that they have no way to plan for hundreds of new rules that have yet to be written. Will more waivers be granted next year? How will bureaucratic decisions change from year to year? It’s anyone’s guess. No wonder a team of analysts at McKinsey & Co. recently found that as many as a third of employers are planning on terminating the coverage their employees currently enjoy.
Unless it’s fully repealed, this law will also harm seniors. It raids $500 billion from Medicare and sets up a board of 15 unelected bureaucrats to make decisions that will result in denied care to seniors, without taking any credible steps to control the underlying health care costs that are speeding Medicare toward bankruptcy…
The article continues at Politico.
Related: HHS: Catholics Should Only Care for Their Own?
This is one of the disturbing ramifications of her majesty the HHS Sibelius’ ObamaCare ruling on birth control coverage–profoundly anti-religious:
In a statement in response to the move, Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who is chairman of the pro-life office of the bishops’ conference in Washington,explained that “under the new rule our institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics.”
He asked: “Could the federal government possibly intend to pressure Catholic institutions to cease providing health care, education and charitable services to the general public? Health care reform should expand access to basic health care for all, not undermine that goal.”
Update: Conyers: Obama Proposed Social Security Cuts In Debt Talks, Not Republicans
