The New York Times Blog On The Healthcare Debate

The New York Times politics and government blog (yes, there is such a creature–it’s called The Caucus) posted an article Friday about the Obama healthcare plan.  They made some interesting points.

President Obama is meeting with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to discuss how to pass the healthcare bill without Republican support.  The President is claiming that the Republicans are blocking the bill for the sake of harming the Democrats.  This is simply not true.  There is a bi-partisan healthcare bill in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  In the House it is called the Healthy Americans Act.  The Democrats so far have refused to acknowledge that it even exists.

The objections from the Republicans are reality based, but the reason the Obama bill has not been passed is that he does not have full Democrat support.  The problems with passing this bill are in the President’s own party–please don’t blame the Republicans–they don’t have the numbers to stop it.

If the bill is passed without any Republicans it will probably include a tax increase on what will be termed ‘wealthiest Americans.’  It will not mention that because of the way the tax code is written, that will include many small business owners who are not wealthy.  It will put a damper on hiring in the small business sector of the economy for years to come.

In an article published Thursday by the New York Times, Robert Pear reports that some of the fears on the elderly regarding the President’s healthcare reform may be justified.  The article states:

“Knowing that Medicare itself faces a financial crisis, many older Americans object to Congress’s tapping the program to help pay for coverage of the uninsured. They say they do not believe that all the Medicare savings will come from eliminating waste and inefficiency, as Mr. Obama says.”

Part of the problem here is defining the uninsured.  I don’t see any way the current plan proposed will avoid insuring illegal aliens.  That shouldn’t have to be a consideration in a healthcare bill, but it is.  We need to sort out exactly who the uninsured are before we plan on spending a trillion dollars insuring them.  We also need to understand that people in this country do have access to emergency medical treatment regardless of whether or not they are insured.