The average family plan will cost $15,200.
(CNSNews.com)
– The U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 on Sunday night to
socialize health care in the United States, making the government
the paymaster of, and giving it sweeping regulatory authority
over, the U.S. health care industry which represents one-sixth of the
U.S. economy.
The legislation also enacts a dramatic and
unprecedented diminution in the individual liberty of citizens. It
does so by mandating that all Americans buy a government-approved
health care plan while redistributing wealth on a massive scale
by promising annual federal insurance subsidies to all
Americans who earn less than 400 percent of the poverty level, which
is currently $88,200 for a family of four.
The new
health-care system the legislation will put in place over the next
four years amounts to a massive and mandatory new welfare program
that will ensnare middle-class and middle-aged Americans in
dependency on the federal government for a vital element of their
lives.
The health care legislation approved by Congress Sunday
gives the administration sweeping power to regulate health insurance
companies. These regulations will include instructing insurance
companies on what benefits they must provide and what rates they can
charge.
The mandate that all Americans buy health
insurance represents a fundamental change in the relationship between
individuals and the federal government in the United States.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this is the first time
in the history of the country that the federal government has ever
ordered American citizens to buy any good or service.
Many
members of Congress, including former Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin
Hatch (R.-Utah), have argued that this unprecedented mandate is
unconstitutional. Hatch told CNSNews.com last fall that if the
federal government could constitutionally force individuals to buy
health insurance there wasn’t anything the federal government could
not force individuals to do.
Many congressional advocates of
the individual mandate interviewed by CNSNews.com over the past year
could not say where the Constitution authorized the federal
government to force people to buy health insurance.
The final
votes that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama needed to
push the legislation through the House came on Sunday when
Rep. Bart Stupak (D.-Mich.) and a small group of other Democrats
abandoned their insistence that congressional health care legislation
include language that would prevent any federal dollars from going to
any health care plan that covers abortion.
Instead,
Stupak and his allies accepted President Obama’s promise that he
would sign a draft Executive Order that simply instructs federal
agencies to set accounting rules for how the health care plans that
people purchase with federal funds will theoretically “segregate”
the federal money they receive from other dollars that would
theoretically pay for abortions.
President Obama’s
draft Executive Order speaks of this “segregation” mechanism as
if it were the effective equivalent of the Hyde Amendment. However,
the Hyde Amendment prohibits any federal funds funneled through
various annual appropriations bills from going to any health plan
that covers abortion. The health care bill that Congress passed
Sunday and the Executive Order that Obama is promising to sign will
allow federal funds to go to health care plans that cover abortion.
It will only theoretically “segregate” these fungible funds from
other dollars going to the same insurance plans that pay for
abortion.
Five self-professedly “pro-life”
Democratic congressmen joined Stupak at a Sunday press conference to
say that they would vote for the health care plan after President
Obama promised he would sign this Executive Order dealing with the
accounting mechanisms that will be used by abortion-providing,
federally subsidized health insurance plans. These congressmen were
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (Pa.), Rep. Steve
Driehaus (Ohio), Rep. Alan Mollohan (W.V.), Rep. Nick Rahal (W.V.)
According to the CBO, by 2016, the cheapest family
health care plan that Americans will be required to buy under
the law will cost $12,000 per year. The average family plan
will cost $15,200. A family of four making $88,201 per year—or
more than 400 percent of the poverty level—will not receive any
federal subsidy to purchase such a plan. They will pay taxes,
however, to subsidize the health care purchases of people earning
less than 400 percent of poverty.
According to the
Treasury Department the Medicare system faced about $37 trillion in
unfunded liabilities before Sunday’s bill was passed.