According to today's The Hill, the first draft of the Democrat plan to reform healthcare will be unveiled next week. According to the article:
"The legislation will certainly include a federally run public plan that would provide health benefits in competition with private insurance,
"The proposal is anathema to Republicans but Kennedy favors the public plan and Obama's letter emphasized his insistence on it. Dodd said the panel was considering four of five models for the public plan."
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Republicans will get their first look at the bill later this week. The idea here is to rush the legislation through before July 31st (before anyone has a chance to see what is actually in the bill). There is nothing wrong with the idea of cutting costs of healthcare for Americans, but this is not the way to do it. A public healthcare plan opens the door for all kinds of abuses--mismanagement, lobbying abuses, unmanageable cost overrunns, etc.--all of which we have seen in the current Medicare program. This bill needs to be stopped in its tracks until it can be studied, analyzed, reviewed, and revised. This bill does not need to be passed without the necessary scrutiny.
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