Senate Health Overhaul Bill Lays the Trillion-Dollar Groundwork for a Government Takeover of Health Care
The Orwellianly-titled American Health Choices Act, a health care overhaul bill the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed Tuesday with a 13-10 party line vote, contains a two-pronged mechanism for increasing government's already enormous footprint within the health care market, and for driving private insurance into the ground.
When the first public draft of the American Health Choices Act (AHCA) was released at the beginning of June, it contained language mandating that employers with 25 or more workers offer health insurance to their employees or face a federal fine. The level of that fine, as with almost every other penalty and tax increase provided for in the bill, was to be left to the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This new ability to impose taxes and levy fines of an amount entirely at her discretion would be a breathtaking expansion of the appointed HHS Secretary's power.
When an evaluation by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the AHCA's net cost - that which would have to be spent above built-in revenue increases and offsets - to be around $1.6 trillion (a number that many experts and outside evaluators find to be reminiscent of the Medicare forecasts at its inception, which put the cost of the now-$37 trillion program at less than $10 million), while only extending health coverage to approximately a third of the 45 million American uninsured, public backlash was significant enough that the HELP committee members writing the bill took steps to bring that projected cost down from a trillion and a half dollars into the hundreds-of-billions range.
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