Thought this might serve as a useful summary of the Washington Shuffle off to Tyranny. Sorry to spoil your weekend, but it is what it is.
And you should really read Ann Coulter’s One Page Health Plan: I don’t care if you hate her. Read it. Not only is it funny (and we need that this weekend), it also nails a too simple solution to at least 80% of the problem: health “insurance” isn’t insurance at all as it’s currently available – thanks to state by state required terms and conditions. And our inability to shop for options across state lines. Insurance companies pretty much have a lock (thanks to a federal anti-trust exemption).
Here are a few of Ann’s ideas:
It's a one-page bill creating a free market in health insurance. Let's all pause here for a moment so liberals can Google the term "free market."
…We can't have a free market in health insurance until Congress eliminates the antitrust exemption protecting health insurance companies from competition. If Democrats really wanted to punish insurance companies, which they manifestly do not, they'd make insurers compete.
…That's the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week.
President Obama says we need national health care because Natoma Canfield of Ohio had to drop her insurance when she couldn't afford the $6,700 premiums, and now she's got cancer.
Much as I admire Obama's use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio's state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited ob/gyn visits, among other things.
It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics – you know, things like cancer.
As Ann points out, her plan has the moral edge over the current plan on the Hill, as hers is more environmentally friendly: weighing in at some 2100 fewer pages of carbon consuming paper. And as an added plus, it still adheres to the Founders original concepts of liberty, democracy and self-determination. Not bad for a one-pager.
