Devildawg15's blog: "Deformed Healthcare Reform"

Many conservatives, including Heritage Foundation experts, have been
arguing that the President's supposedly "fresh" 11-page health care
proposal is virtually no different from the Senate bill. It's true.
The President's draft includes most of the same bad proposals that the
Senate bill does. But there is one key difference between the two: The
Senate bill actually exists.

Until the President's proposal is drafted as official legislation, the
only proposal the House can and will consider is the bill the Senate
passed. But the differences between the Senate bill and the one that
cleared the House are stark. To get their bill through the House, Senate                                                                                                   and White House officials are offering some flaky fixes.

The "fixes" that the White House is promising wavering House Democrats
they will make all sound easy at first glance: 1) scaling back the tax
on high-end health insurance policies; 2) closing the Medicare D
loophole; 3) boosting insurance subsidies; 4) increasing Medicaid
payments; and 5) fixing the Cornhusker Kickback. But when you take a
second look, you see that all of these "fixes" will cost more money.
Just look at the Cornhusker Kickback which the President chose to
address, not by taking away Nebraska's special Medicaid payments, but
by extending those extra Medicaid payments to every state! Every
single item in the President's proposal either increases spending or
reduces new revenues. And he didn't put forward any way to pay for
them. If passing health reform were as easy as giving away free candy,
Obamacare would be law already. Finding a way to pay for all these
fixes is going to be just as difficult as every earlier effort to pay
for this bill. So don't expect any solutions anytime soon.

This doesn't even begin to address abortion, a major roadblock the
Senate bill faces in the House. Fox News reports that a coalition of
seven House Democrats, led by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), has threatened
to kill Obamacare altogether if federal funding for abortion is not
explicitly prohibited in the final legislation, as it is in the House
bill.

So, to appease their colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) are offering a "pie-crust
promise" -- easily made and easily broken -- to remove abortion
language after the House vote during the Senate's reconciliation
process. Is this realistic, though? "Never before in the history of
the 34-year abortion funding debate have pro-life members of Congress
approved a bill containing abortion funding on the promise that a
subsequent vote will fix the problem," Heritage expert Chuck Donovan
argues. In short, the left is resorting to bad procedure to
advance an even worse health care policy.

Instead of rushing the process with oddly-structured concessions, and
instead of passing the bill to "find out what's in it," as Speaker
Pelosi argued, lawmakers should focus on starting over. The American
people support health care reform, just not this one.

A better idea would be a reform that upholds core American principles.
For example, our experts advocate a state-based approach to reform.
"Home-grown reforms tailored to the prevailing conditions in the
states make the most sense," writes health care expert Bob
Moffit. So let's start over by allowing states to "compete in the
arena of health policy and see which ones best achieve the nation's
universal health care goals.