I am probably one of 4 people in this country that has read the entire health care bill. It was a painful process, and let me tell you—the critics of the bill on Fox News don’t even have a clue of how bad it really is. Here are the parts of the Health Care Bill I find most troubling:

The federal government gets to decide how much profit a private health insurer can make and how much they pay their stockholders.

States have the option of covering abortions through Medicaid, which means federal funds will be paying for abortion.

The verification procedures for seeing if someone is an illegal immigrant are basically “Are you an undocumented alien?” “Why, no sir, I am not” “All-righty then…”

The public option, as well as new provisions for Medicaid and Medicare, are explicitly described as not subject to any administrative or judicial review. This means individuals cannot contest decisions made by the bureaucrats. There is no transparency to the process, and it is ripe for corruption. And let’s be honest, with our government, regardless of which party is in charge, corruption is a HUGE concern and is probably the “default setting”. Moreover, the Bill explicitly authorizes the govt to slash benefits if funds go low—i.e. care rationing.

Dozens of grant and contract programs in the bill explicitly favor community organizers. The definitions given of the entities providing health services aren’t even limited to health services—if a community organization like ACORN offers nutritional or family planning counseling, they are eligible for federal health care money. All the grant programs explicitly favor programs that funnel money to urban and “ethnically diverse” areas.

The bill creates tens of thousands of new government jobs. And not doctors/nurses—new government bureaucrats. To put in perspective: they are trying to “reduce costs” and “halt skyrocketing costs”, aren’t they? And they’re doing this by…adding to the system tens of thousands of government bureaucrats that don’t provide any medical service, don’t provide any economic growth or productivity. Nancy Pelosi said that this Bill was all about “jobs, jobs, jobs”. And she’s right—it creates tens of thousands of jobs. But there’s something she is too stupid to understand: a government job is not generally a good thing. In order to create a government job, the money has to be taken out of the private sector. The government does not produce anything—it only consumes. It is staggering how many government offices, officers, committees, panels, you name it, that this Bill seeks to create. And I know how government offices operate. For crying out loud, *I* am a government bureaucrat. And the bureaucracy is awful; the most unproductive, unaccountable, unresponsive arrangement imaginable. The heart and soul of this bill is expansion of the bureaucracy. Its blood is billions of dollars in payments to community organizers and social engineers.

The Health Insurance Exchange the Bill sets up is initially fairly small in scope—it’s supposed to be a “stop-gap” for people between insurance coverage, and the exchange can’t deny anyone with the money to pay the premiums. But here’s the rub—you have to have the money to pay the premiums. Unless, of course, you don’t have the money for the premiums, in which case somebody else has the money for your premiums through the auspices of the government.

Another problem with the Health Insurance Exchange—this is where the Public Option resides. Which means it is institutionally defaulted to grow and expand. At first it’s a fairly innocuous assist for people with dropped coverage, but it is designed to be the default provider for the nation. That’s why there are hundreds of pages of guidance for the rules and specifications of health plans offered through the exchange. The Public Option is not “free” health care. The premiums are still there and are still just as high as private insurance. But in the case of the public option, the premiums are paid by a) the very rare individual paying into it of their own choice, b) Monopoly money printed by the government, or c) and far more likely, other people that are already paying for their own health insurance before being mugged to pay for yours.

The measures in this Bill are paid for primarily from increased taxes. We’ve all heard about the “cutting fraud, waste, and abuse” from Medicare in order to pay for this mess. There is, indeed, a specific provision in the bill to throw $100 million every year down the rabbit hole of “fighting fraud, waste, and abuse”. But there are no specific provisions for using that money. It’s a total fraud. There are several provisions to cut down on dual filings, overpayments, and whatnot, but the bureaucratic expansion the Bill creates in order to implement them completely overpower the potential benefit. The lion’s share of this funding, to the tune of $375 billion every year, comes from taxes levied against private insurance companies. The bill establishes a “fair market” factor that adjusts every year as necessary, and the insurance companies multiple this factor by the number of people they insure to find out how much money they get to sacrifice to the Federal Health Care Gods. Hooray! Screw the insurance companies! Right? The only person stupid enough to believe that insurance companies will swallow this additional charge is Nancy Pelosi. This tax means more expensive premiums. Period.

More on the public option. The specifics of the federal mandates on insurance coverage are horrible—you won’t be able to buy minimum coverage. The max deductibles and requirements for zero cost sharing for multiple services ensure that people won’t be able to buy less insurance even if they want to; the bill criminalizes not paying for exactly the quantity of coverage they tell you to. Any employer that either fails to or chooses to not provide coverage as mandated by the govt pays 8% of its payroll to the govt instead. This is much, much cheaper than most companies currently pay for insurance. Hundreds of thousands of workers will be dumped out of their employer-provided coverage because the plans will simply disappear—makes economic sense to the employers. And they will automatically get enrolled in the public option, and the rest of us start paying for it. And they will have to do this, too—because any point where you don’t have the federally mandated quantity of coverage, you get fined 2.5% of your annual salary. Additionally, every penny over $500k of annual salary ($1 million for joint filers) is taxed at an ADDITIONAL 5.4%. There is little in the bill to reduce costs. There is much in the bill to increase costs, federal expenditures, and expand bureaucracy, but rather than reduce costs, they are artificially lowering costs for some by pillaging from others.

There’s a lot more, too. There are also several things that are probably really good ideas. But overall this Bill is an atrocity. I fear for the country that is governed by the clowns and criminals that produced such a document. If this is how bad it has gotten, I honestly don’t know if there’s a way back or way out from the horrific state we have placed ourselves in. Don’t ever trust the government to solve anything. They don’t work for you anymore, and they are not here to help.