October 11, 2011 - Peter Ferrara
“Newt’s New Contract”
[snip]
[Newt] Gingrich features first in his Contract the priority to “Repeal Obamacare and pass a replacement that saves lives and money by empowering patients and doctors, not bureaucrats and politicians.” Gingrich explains, “The Obamacare law is unconstitutional, unaffordable, unworkable, and stunningly unfair. It’s so-called ‘individual mandate’ is blatantly unconstitutional and an unprecedented expansion of federal power.”
Gingrich displays profound insight into why the individual and employer mandates are so unworkable, writing in the Contract:
Their intractable problem is this: once you have a mandate, the government has to specify exactly what coverage must be included in insurance for it to qualify. This introduces political considerations into determining these minimum standards, guaranteeing that nothing desired by the special interests will be left out. And once the government mandates such expensive insurance, the government becomes responsible for its costs. It has to adopt expensive subsidies to help people pay for the expensive plans that it is requiring. The resulting cost to the taxpayer and strain on the budget leads the government to try and control healthcare costs by limiting healthcare services. The inevitable result is rationing by a nameless, faceless, unaccountable board of government bureaucrats.
These intractable problems arise whether the mandates are imposed by the federal government or a state government. In fact, exactly these disastrous results are playing out under Romneycare in Massachusetts.
Repeal of Obamacare cuts future spending and taxes by trillions. It also would result in further dramatic reductions in regulatory burdens and costs. As Gingrich’s Contract notes, “The Obamacare law also creates one thousand, nine hundred and sixty eight separate grants of power to bureaucrats, most of them to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and her bureaucracy. It creates 159 new boards, agencies and other government entities to administer health decisions that should be up to the individual in consultation with their doctor.”
Gingrich also displays original insight into the policies that should replace Obamacare:
I will advocate for specific replacement health policies that will create a free market framework for health care, provide affordable, portable, and reliable healthcare coverage, and establish a health care safety net focused on those in need. This system will assure health care for all with no individual mandate or employer mandate of any kind. This alternative to Obamacare begins with patient power and localism and the many common sense ideas developed over the past eight years at the Center for Health Transformation.
These policies adopt the Patient Power framework advocated by conservative health policy guru John Goodman at NCPA in Dallas. That is why Gingrich’s reforms include extending
Health Savings Accounts throughout the entire health care system. Everyone on Medicare should be free to choose an HSA as part of their coverage if they want it. Everyone on Medicaid should be free to choose an HSA for part of his or her coverage. All workers should be free to use their health insurance tax credit or deduction to choose an HSA in place of their employer-provided health insurance if they desire.
The very first paper on Health Savings Accounts, in fact, was co-authored by John Goodman and myself in 1981. Gingrich was a leader in Congress providing for the initial adoption of HSAs in federal law. [snip]
http://townhall.com/columnists/peterferrara/2011/10/11/newt%E2%80%99s_new_contract/page/full/
Impeach Ann Coulter.
1, 2, 6...BUMP, BUMP, BUMP!
Hillarycare-Romneycare-Obamacare-TOTALITARIANCARE.
Doesn’t it make sense that the Obamacare rule that Catholic hospitals must provide contraceptive services is a logical, direct extension of the philosophy of the Individual Mandate?
Is they can make you purchase health insurance there’s no limit to what they can make you do. This is just the beginning....