A Message to my Senator

Senator,

You must vote AGAINST Harry Reid’s attempt to bring his 2,000+ page health reform bill to the Senate floor (and why did the Senate bill grow from 1,500 pages to over 2,000 – did Harry just want to make sure his was bigger than Nancy’s?).

Exactly one month ago I sent you a message thanking you for voting against Harry Reid’s attempt to scam the American people by passing the “doctor fix” separately from the health reform bill. Now he’s trying the opposite trick – passing the health reform bill without the “doctor” fix. And he’s trying to do it in such a way that only 51 votes will be needed for final passage of the bill, rather than the usual 60.

Harry Reid’s health care bill is an outright scam and a shell game, and an economic disaster in the making. It’s easy to make a bill appear to reduce the deficit when you include 10 years of “revenue” and only 6 years of cost in the first decade. But of course after that the program will be upside down and a permanent drag on the economy.

If the real goal was improving health care (as opposed to the increased government control and social engineering that are clearly driving the Reid -Pelosi agenda), the legislation would be concise and targeted to the major issues needing improvement:

• portability of health insurance among employers and locations
• encouraging increased competition and reduced cost through the sale of health insurance policies across state lines
• equality of tax treatment of health insurance premiums regardless of where or from whom policies are purchased
• allowing the sale of policies customized to buyers' needs rather than mandating one-size fits all policies that make people pay for coverage they'll never need.

These are simple concepts and each could be documented clearly in just a few pages. Even if each took 20 pages to outline you'd have only an 80 page bill. But the House version is 2,000 and the Senate version is now even larger.

Congress has proven it doesn't read bills before passing them, and we know they didn't write this themselves. Bills this long simply create the impression that Obama and Congress have told their favorite special interest groups to load up the legislation with whatever they want. And they're hoping to rush it through before we catch on.

Senator, Reid’s bill is a bad bill. It will not achieve the goals that are supposedly the reasons behind this effort; it will increase taxes and reduce service. All it will accomplish is increased government intrusion into our lives – and we’ll get to pay for that privilege.

You must vote to defeat this bill NOW, not try to amend or defeat it later. Stop Harry Reid and then do health reform the right way.

Crawling to Conclusions

After the Fort Hood "man-made disaster", we were treated to the absurd irony of Obama telling the American people not to "jump to conclusions" about why this tragedy occurred. This from a man for whom jumping to conclusions is one of his primary skills and means of exercise. Obama had no trouble jumping to the conclusion that police officers in Boston "acted stupidly" in the arrest of Louis Gates, before he had any facts whatsoever about what actually happened. Yet in the case of the Fort Hood tragedy the murderer might as well have worn a Team Al Qaeda t-shirt, but Obama still can't even crawl to the conclusion that the shooter is a terrorist.