Me
I get the feeling that I’m the idiot today. And yesterday. And probably for many more days to come.
You may have heard about the Senate plan to ram through healthcare on Christmas Eve. Perhaps it is the conspiracy theorist in me, but I feel like the current plan for those supporting this bill is to take our current system, which admittedly needs work, and screw it up to the point of complete dysfunction.
They want to super-tax (40%) “gold-plated” plans, which are really more like brass-plated plans for big companies, and tin-plated plans for small companies or individuals. This will drive companies to cut benefits well before any magical cost savings appear.
They want to kill tax benefits that allow big companies to pay for their retirees prescriptions, rather than having them participate in the Medicare drug plan.
They want to regulate the private health insurance industry to death.
I could go on and on, but I’ll keep this short. The crazy person in me says that the reason they want to do this is to drive everyone into the arms of a government health care option (be it Medicare or some nascent public option). When everything else really is crap, the government alternatives begin to look pretty good.
As much as I don’t like being that crazy paranoid guy, I find myself hoping that this really is their conspiracy. Because if it is not, it looks to me like they are simply trying to make an even bigger wreck out of our current mess of a system without having any ideas for how to actually fix it.