Tag: health care

Ah, the joys of the Maryland MVA.

A government entity with:

  • Hours of operation designed to suit it, not its erstwhile customers;
  • Limitations on when services will and will not be offered, seemingly picked at random;
  • A remarkably flexible definition of ‘full service’;
  • And an institutionalized disinterest in mentioning any of this to people who call ahead to avoid problems.

Just what I need for my daily life – and, really, I need even more of it!  In fact, I cannot wait until I have to depend on the government to make sure that my next emergency dentist’s visit goes smoothly.

Cannot. Wait.

Moe Lane

Democrats: taxing health insurance back on agenda?

Why not? It’s not like this would affect them any.

WASHINGTON – The Senate’s top tax writer said Tuesday he is considering limits on the tax-free status of job-based health insurance to help pay for President Barack Obama’s plan to cover all Americans.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., described his idea as senators began to grapple with how to pay for the costs of the plan, which independent experts put at about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. There are no easy options.

Baucus is carefully not saying at what income level this would start at, which is of course Senatorese for “a lot lower than you’d expect from earlier rhetoric.” Which should come as an unpleasant surprise or two to folks entering the workplace after it comes into effect; well, the ones who aren’t union employees or government workers, at least. Your standard ‘kids out of school, with first real white-collar job’ types, in other words; if this passes, it’s going to be reduced health benefits for new hires, less take-home pay to cover the taxes, or the joys of negotiating with the central government for elective health procedures. None of which is going to be very fun for them.

No, avoid schadenfreude. We want them voting their class interests, remember?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) breaks with House Democrats on reconciliation.

While in the process of idly mentioning that the deficit’s going to be worse than originally indicated, Senator Conrad (D-Countrywide) says something very, very interesting:

Conrad also said he did not plan to include any instructions in the budget plan he is crafting for health care or the greenhouse gas initiatives. Such instructions written into the budget would give it a privileged status and make it easier to become law, but likely spark a nasty fight with minority Republicans.

This is in reference to “reconciliation,” which is a process by which the Democrats would be able to put specific legislation into bills that could be passed by a simple majority in the Senate, instead of the 60 vote system that we’ve effectively evolved over the years. The House is currently threatening to impose it over health care, if those awful Republicans don’t ‘see reason’ (translation: ‘do what the Democrats say’): we have a deadline until September. Continue reading Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) breaks with House Democrats on reconciliation.

Daschle’s revenge?

They cast him out. They mocked his greatness. They laughed at him. HIM! But he’ll show them!

He’ll show them all.

This is one time where excerpting isn’t going to cut it: let me summarize this article (“Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey*“) (H/T: AoSHQ) and then you can go read both it and the soon-to-be-federal law (here is the original, and here is the Nelson/Collins amendment). Essentially, McCaughey argues that the bill contains stealth provisions within it that will create a bureaucratic commission that will regulate acceptable medical treatments for patients. She then states that these provisions are “virtually identical” with those in Daschle’s book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, which supposedly advocates adopting a system where “approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit.” In other words: the older you get, the cheaper your treatment has to be in order to get the same consideration as someone younger than you. A helpful reminder of the bureaucratic wonders that can breed in the British health care system, and a suggestion that Daschle snuck this in deliberately because of his experiences with Clinton’s health care fiasco, and away we go.

So, is it nonsense? Continue reading Daschle’s revenge?