September 21, 2009 - Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
Some members of the United States Senate were up late last night earning their state-funded paychecks attempting to spend even more American taxpayer dollars on their healthcare bill. The Senate Finance Committee – the group working on the “Baucus Plan” – completed “mark-up” of the legislation early this morning and will now move forward to a vote next week. Mark-up is the process where amendments are made to the legislation before the committee votes on it – effectively recommending it to the full House.
The Finance Committee has said that it WILL NOT make the final draft public before the vote next week – in part because it isn’t even written yet and will not likely be completed before the vote.
Sound crazy to you? It should, but unfortunately this is the usual manner in which things get done on the Hill – they just usually aren’t matters as important as $900 billion healthcare plans.
So what is expected to be in this secret/un-written/completed bill? For starters, it will cost at least $900 billion – a number they are PROUD OF. It will be paid for through a variety of creative sources. The most repulsive of which will be the penalties placed on the uninsured through an individual mandate. There will also be a public co-op rather than a public option, so this made some of the Republicans on the Committee come on board dimwittingly. The reality of this bill is the truly scary part. When Democrats calculate the number of uninsured in this country – they count those who CHOOSE to be uninsured. But when drafting this bill they are the group that is punished most severely. In essence it is a plan to force those who don’t want to be insured by fining them money that if they had, they would more than likely not spend on healthcare.
Senator Mike Crapo Idaho (member of Senate Finance and Banking Committees) echoed this point in an interview with Fox News earlier today. He said that of those Americans who will be forced to pay penalties – 60-80% will be individuals making less than 20k. The plan will also decrease the tax deductibility of employer-provided plans which will mean that 99.6% of Americans will be paying more taxes on the new plan. This is essentially raising taxes without raising taxes – just by cutting deductions. Its a nice little trick because most people don’t understand the tax code and Democrats prey on ignorant Americans.
Most believe that the Baucus Plan will exit the Senate Finance Committee and be merged with another bill coming out of the Health, Education, and Labor Pensions Committee which drafted a bill proposed by Senator Ted Kennedy before he passed. This plan has a public option and could lead to quite a debate among Democrats as it moves to the full Senate. If this or any bill can clear the Senate, it must then merge with the House version in a Joint Committee once separate bills are concurrently passed in each house. The House presently has three bills in which the public option is still a key factor as well. Don’t count the public option out just yet – even if nobody wants it…
This is the sort of thing that makes me so angry. How can they vote on something that they cant even read? Why wont they let us see it if they are so proud of their bill? Shameful