Obamacare should be repealed.

Obamacare should be repealed because:1. Entitlements should only be passed by consensusWhen the Democratic leadership was pushing health care legislation through Congress they effectively prohibited Republican participation in hearings, with one exception. Despite leadership objections, Sen. Baucus allowed hearings in his committee with Republican participation. Not many of the Republican modifications were adopted, but over the many weeks of debate some changes were accepted by the Democrats. All of the work of the committee was discarded in favor of a new bill introduced by Sen. Reid and adopted by the slimmest of partisan majorities under the gimmick of reconciliation. It was 2700 pages that no one had an opportunity to read, let alone study. Nancy Pelosi make here famous remark that Congress "[has] to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it, away from the fog of controversy." [3. http://www.usnews.com...] After 18 months, no one is sure what it is in it. The language of the bill is beyond parsing. Sen. Thomas Carper, a Democrat who voted for the legislation and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told CNN, “I don't expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I've ever read in my life. … ” He characterized it as “incomprehensible” and “gibberish.” [4. http://tinyurl.com...]. The legislation ultimate was adopted without a single Republican supporter, and with 34 Democrats joining House Republicans to vote against it. Previous entitlement legislation, including President Bush's expansion of Medicare, were done with full hearings and bipartisan support. “For decades, a rule of thumb in Washington has said that there should be popular support and a bipartisan majority before approving an initiative that significantly affects tens of millions of Americans. Health-care reform—ObamaCare—has neither, yet Democrats want to impose it anyway.” [5. http://online.wsj.com...] Obamacare should be repealed because legislation that affects 20% of the U.S. economy and most of the population should be fully vetted in hearings, achieve bipartisan agreement, and be readily comprehensible. 2. Obamacare is not affordable The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the cost of legislation according to mandated narrow assumptions. Obamacare is now scored as costing $1.76 trillion over the next decade. [6. http://news.yahoo.com...] The scoring rules allow vastly underestimating the cost. Obamacare contains 21 new tax provisions to help pay the costs. [7. http://www.atr.org...] For example, a 40% tax is levied on health insurance plans costing over $10,000. The assumption is that no one will exit such plans as a result of the outrageous tax. If Congress put a $1000 tax on carrots, the CBO computed revenue would be the present number of carrots consumed times a thousand dollars. What happens in reality is that the taxes never materialize. Other tax increases are on medical devices (like MRI machines), charitable hospitals, non-profit medical insurance companies, health savings accounts, and flexible spending accounts. All the taxes on health care obtain revenue by driving up health care costs. There are new taxes on business and investment, and new payroll taxes. Those taxes will slow economic growth, lowering income tax revenues. Before Obamacare, the tax code had 4 million words. It cost taxpayers about $500 billion each year to hire accountants, buy software, and keep records to comply with the tax code. The Administration recently announced the additions to the tax code for Obamacare, an additional 2 million words .. so far. [8. http://current.com...] The additions include extremely complex rules for businesses. We can expect compliance costs to soar. If adding 50% to the amount of rules increases costs by only 20%, the total would be $1 trillion over ten years. Obamacare is phased in so that the cost for the first decade, the period the CBO scores explicitly, are reduced. Taxes under Obamacare start four years before the benefits. The CBO analysis assumes that very few companies will choose to pay the penalty of $2000 per employee to end their health-care benefits. But with health care costs over $11,000 for a family plan, the assumption is surely wrong. “And if NCPA's upper-range estimate is right and 117 million people were dumped into the exchange, ObamaCare would cost nearly $2 trillion more than expected in the first decade alone.” [9. http://rove.com...] Obamacare takes about $500 billion away from Medicare to help pay for the new programs. It's unlikely in the extreme that cutting Medicare will be politically viable. Medicare is already underfunded to the point where half of doctors will not accept new Medicare patients. When the cuts start to show, Congress will restore the funds. Obamacare does not increase the supply of health care. It only increases the demand. The costs will therefore skyrocket. We now have the examples of European countries drowning in entitlement spending. Everyone would like to have free health care, but it isn't free and the economy cannot withstand the burden of additional deficits. Simple reforms like making the loser pay for lawsuits and by permitting interstate competition in health care would lower costs without subsidies. We should start with those measures. 3. Obamacare is an unacceptable loss of freedom Suppose you are young and in good health and would like to just buy catastrophic health insurance. Too bad, it's illegal. Suppose you don't want health insurance at all, a perfectly reasonable proposition for a wealthy individual who hates bureaucratic paperwork. That's not allowed. Maybe you are just an ornery risk-taker who doesn't want insurance. That's not allowed. You don't expect the Government to just pay any health care bill presented, do you? Obamacare sets up about 150 new agencies, panels, and boards to direct the details of health care. President Obama explained in a Town Hall meeting, The question for the President was: Under Obamacare, will an elderly person’s general state of health, and her “spirit,” be taken into account when making medical decisions – or will these decisions be made according to age only? President Obama’s answer was clear. It is really not feasible, he indicated, to take “spirit” into account. We are going to make medical decisions based on objective evidence, and not subjective impressions. If the evidence shows that some form of treatment “is not necessarily going to improve care, then at least we can let the doctors know that – you know what? – maybe this isn’t going to help; maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the pain pill.” [10. http://covertrationingblog.com...] The freedom lost is the consumer's ability to choose a health care provider whose judgment they trust above that of the bureaucracy. Not only do patients object, but physicians do not accept the loss of their ability to treat a patient as they believe best. "An astonishing 46 percent of responding primary care physicians claim they would leave or try to leave medicine as a result of ObamaCare, gravely exacerbating the existing shortage of primary care doctors (according to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the number of U.S. medical school students choosing primary care has already dropped 52 percent since 1997)." [11. http://www.nationalcenter.org...] Obamacare should be repealed because it usurps the rights of patients and physicians to make their own critical decisions.