Rushing through legislation is a bad thing, except when it's not

Senator Obama thought rushing through legislation without having the opportunity to read the legislation before voting. President Obama continues to push Congress to vote on the healthcare legislation.

Senator Obama thinks the President intimidating Congress is a bad thing.
President Obama seems to be doing that on a daily basis.

Shiny New ObamaCare

National Review says don't believe what the President is selling:

President Obama’s press conference Wednesday night offered an ideal encapsulation of the Democrats’ case for their health-care-reform proposals: outlandish promises about benefits and patently dishonest denials of the costs. He said essentially all of the uninsured would be covered, the insured could keep their existing coverage and would be guaranteed to keep it if they lost or changed jobs, the quality of care would rise, waste and fraud would be slashed, the deficit would decline, and no one would have to pay a price for all this except a few millionaires. Oh, and by the way, the plan would also “keep government out of health-care decisions.”

Here are a collection of tweets from someone as they read the bill. Sample:

Pg 30 Sec 123 of HC bill - THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benes u get

Pg 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill - YOUR HEALTHCARE IS RATIONED!!!

Pg 59 HC Bill lines 21-24 Govt will have direct access 2 ur banks accts 4 elect. funds transfer

pg 124 lines 24-25 HC No company can sue GOVT on price fixing. No "judicial review" against Govt Monop

Pg 145 Line 15-17 An Employer MUST auto enroll employees into pub opt plan. NO CHOICE

Pg 241 Line 6-8 HC Bill - Doctors, doesnt matter what specialty u have, you'll all be paid the same

PG 253 Line 10-18 Govt sets value of Dr's time, prof judg, etc. Literally value of humans.

Here's a copy of the actual bill in the House.

You asked for it, You got it. Obamacare

Mickey Kaus points out the obvious:

Health care reformers are clearly spooked by the notion that they could be accused of denying, for example, hip surgery to an 80-year-old. If so, they largely have themselves to blame. They brought it up! It wasn't the Republicans who billed health care reform as a cost saving, budget-balancing measure that would start to deny payments for treatments deemed "ineffective," or (as one acolyte put it) when "a person's life, or health, is not worth the price." And to think when they heard that people started to worry about rationing! Fancy that.

I don't understand how the Obama administration plans to implement a health care system just like Canada and UK's, but somehow will run it better. It's like instead of a Health Care Czar, they have a Health Care Fairy.

The battle of the Health Care

In this corner, weighing in at 123 lbs, we have an article on the need for a public health care system - because without government competition, the private sector has little incentive to improve.

and in this corner, weighing in at 135 lbs, we have an article on why government run health care is bad.

ding, ding

Update: Obama's position on forcing people into government healthcare program has evolved. Somehow that doesn't fill me with warmth and comfort.

Obama gets boo'd

His speech at the AMA yesterday didn't go over with the crowd when he said he wasn't going to do anything to help curb malpractice lawsuits. Really? Obama is sticking with the trial lawyers? I'm shocked.

The CBO has estimated the Kennedy-Dodd bill will cost upwards of $1T to cover 1/3 of the uninsured. What a nightmare.

In vitro Gone Wild

This story brings a whole new dimension to the abortion debate.

A couple had their embryo's frozen and when they went in to have the LAST one implanted, the clinic accidentally implanted it in the wrong woman. When that woman found out she had the wrong embryo in her, she had the fetus aborted.

So the couple is left with no more embryo's with which to have a child. They sued the clinic and received $50,000 for their loss. That is outrageous!!! $50,000? That's it? Really? The clinic was clearly negligent and should have to dole out more than $50,000. Apparently since the embryo wasn't born yet and not considered a human, the couple didn't get much. Interesting....

Also interesting...and timely (since Obama is speaking to the AMA today about healthcare reform), the author of the linked article doesn't think the government should be paying for in vitro to begin with.

I don't know...if you have socialized medicine, should in vitro be incuded?