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H.B. 3200

Posted by Mark | Filed under Politics

A rel­a­tive of mine recently  for­warded the fol­low­ing email to me:

Here are some specifics  on the pro­posed “health care bill.”  If any­one is “okay” with any of this crap, they are insane.  It’s time to call our congressman’s.  offices and tell them we do not want them to sup­port this health bill. No mat­ter what party you belong to, this is bul-#@@ of the high­est order.

Here is a very clear view about the prob­lems our con­gress is hav­ing with the so called “health­care reform” bill!

IF YOU  DON’T READ THEM ALL.… BE SURE TO LOOK AT  58–59.

Sub­ject:    Judge  David Kithil on the health­care reform bill:

The arti­cle is in the Mar­ble Falls, Texas news­pa­per.  It  was writ­ten by a for­mer county judge, David Kithil.  He  voiced his oppo­si­tion to HB 3200, and gave EXACT SPECIFICS, to  include page and para­graph in the bill on why this Health Bill  is BAD.

Here are excerpts from the arti­cle, giv­ing EXACT pages  and para­graphs in the bill and why it is so bad.  You can  for­ward this to all of your addressees.  I think he hits  every­thing  right on the head and the oppo­si­tion you may  encounter can­not argue over these points:

JUDGE  KITHIL:  “I have reviewed selected sec­tions of the bill  and find it unbe­liev­able that our Con­gress, led by Speaker  Nancy  Pelosi, could come up with a bill loaded with so  many wrong-headed ele­ments.  We do need to reform the  health insur­ance sys­tem in Amer­ica in  order  to make cov­er­age afford­able and avail­able to every­one.   But, how many of us believe our fed­eral gov­ern­ment can  man­age a new pro­gram any  bet­ter than the bank­rupt  Medicare pro­gram or the  under­funded Social Secu­rity  pro­gram?
Both Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats are equally  respon­si­ble for the finan­cial mess of those two pro­grams.
I  am opposed to HB 3200 for a num­ber of rea­sons.
To start  with, it is esti­mated that a fed­eral bureau­cracy of  more  than 150,000 new employ­ees will be required to admin­is­ter HB3200.  That  is an unac­cept­able expan­sion of a  gov­ern­ment that is already too intru­sive in our lives.
If we are going to hire 150,000 new employ­ees, let’s put  them to work pro­tect­ing our bor­ders, fight­ing the mas­sive drug prob­lem and putting more law enforcement/firefighters out  there.”

NOW,  here comes the good stuff:  “Other prob­lems I have with  this bill include:

Page  50/section  152:  The bill will pro­vide insur­ance to  all non-U.S. res­i­dents, even if they are here illegally.

Page  58 and 59: The gov­ern­ment will have real-time access to an  individual’s bank account and will have the author­ity to make  elec­tronic fund trans­fers from those accounts.

Page  65/section 164:  The plan will be sub­si­dized (by the  gov­ern­ment) for all union mem­bers, union retirees and for   com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions (such as  the Asso­ci­a­tion  of Com­mu­nity Orga­ni­za­tions for Reform Now — ACORN).

Page  203/line 14–15:  The tax imposed under this sec­tion will  not be treated as a tax.  (How could any­body in their  right mind come up with that?)

Page  241 and  253:  Doc­tors will all be paid the same  regard­less of spe­cialty, and the gov­ern­ment will set all  doc­tors’ fees.

Page  272. sec­tion 1145: Can­cer hos­pi­tal will ration care accord­ing  to the patient’s age.

Page  317 and 321: The gov­ern­ment will impose a pro­hi­bi­tion on  hos­pi­tal expan­sion; how­ever, com­mu­ni­ties may peti­tion for an  exception.

Page  425, line 4–12: The gov­ern­ment man­dates advance-care plan­ning  con­sul­ta­tions.  Those on Social Secu­rity will be required  to attend an “end-of-life plan­ning” sem­i­nar every five years.

Page  429,  line 13–25:  The gov­ern­ment will spec­ify which  doc­tors can write an end-of-life order.”

HAD  ENOUGH????  Judge Kithil then goes on:  ” Finally,  it  is specif­i­cally stated this bill will not apply  to mem­bers of  Con­gress. Mem­bers of Con­gress are  already  exempt from the Social Secu­rity sys­tem and have a well-funded  pri­vate plan that cov­ers their retire­ment needs.  If they  were on our Social Secu­rity plan, I believe they would find a  very quick “fix” to make the plan finan­cially sound for the  future.”

Hon­or­able David Kithil, Mar­ble Falls, Texas.

I decided to seek out an online copy of the bill to get an idea of how accu­rate Mr. Kithil’s claims might be, as his claims sounded like a load of hog­wash to me. A quick google search turned up a copy of the bill over at OpenCongress.org which I’ve used to make my com­par­i­son of the bill to Mr. Kithil’s claims.

1. “EXACT SPECIFICS, to include page and para­graph in the bill on why this Health Bill is BAD”.
   • Page/paragraph num­bers are use­less for com­par­i­son with­out hav­ing an iden­ti­cal print copy. If Mr. Kithil had legit­i­mate com­plaints with spe­cific parts of the bill, why didn’t he ref­er­ence them all by their Sections/Sub-section head­ings or per­haps even by includ­ing quotes from the bill so other peo­ple could see exactly what part of the bill he was talk­ing about?
   • I also find it inter­est­ing that Mr Kithil appar­ently wrote such an amaz­ing arti­cle against H.B. 3200 that peo­ple are feel the need to for­ward it to every­body they know, and yet they don’t for­ward the entire arti­cle that he wrote.
     • I attempted to do some dig­ging into whether any such arti­cle was writ­ten by a David Kithil of Mar­ble Falls, TX but have not been able to find any­thing except ref­er­ences to this email chain-letter.
2. “it is esti­mated that a fed­eral bureau­cracy of  more  than 150,000 new employ­ees will be required to admin­is­ter HB3200“
   • If the Far Right was inter­ested in back­ing this bill; this com­ment would instead be about how the bill will help out our strug­gling econ­omy by cre­at­ing jobs. But since they don’t like the bill, it’s about waste. Also, where is Mr. Kithil get­ting this esti­mate from? By fail­ing to quote a source, it makes one won­der if he didn’t just pull a high out of thin air to try and make peo­ple panic over the bill.
3. “Page  50/section  152:  The bill will pro­vide insur­ance to  all non-U.S. res­i­dents, even if they are here illegally.“
   • Sec­tion 152 is titled PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE and noth­ing in it guar­an­tees cov­er­age to ille­gal aliens. Addi­tion­ally, a later por­tion of the bill, SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS, specif­i­cally for­bids the bill from pay­ing for health-care for ille­gal aliens.
4. “Page  58 and 59: The gov­ern­ment will have real-time access to an  individual’s bank account and will have the author­ity to make  elec­tronic fund trans­fers from those accounts.“
   • As best as I can tell, Mr. Kithil is refer­ring to SEC. 164. ADMINISTRATIVE SIMPLIFICATION. ‘SEC. 1173A. STANDARDIZE ELECTRONIC ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSACTIONS. (4) © which reads “enable elec­tronic funds trans­fers, in order to allow auto­mated rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with the related health care pay­ment and remit­tance advice;” And if we apply a bit of thought to what that says, it’s really no dif­fer­ent from using your debit card to buy milk at the gro­cery store. Thanks for point­ing out the obvi­ous there, Mr. Kithil.
5. “Page  65/section 164:  The plan will be sub­si­dized (by the  gov­ern­ment) for all union mem­bers, union retirees and for  com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions (such as  the Asso­ci­a­tion  of Com­mu­nity Orga­ni­za­tions for Reform Now — ACORN).“
   • I will note that sec­tion 164 is SEC. 164. ADMINISTRATIVE SIMPLIFICATION and every­thing I see under it appears to be talk­ing about how the plan is to be run. But there is noth­ing I can find in the bill which seems to sup­port Mr. Kithil’s claim that the plan will be sub­si­dized for union mem­bers, union retirees and for com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions. If Mr. Kithil or another oppo­nent of this bill can find me the rel­e­vant por­tion of the bill which makes up the basis of this claim, I’ll be happy to revisit it.
6. “Page  203/line 14–15:  The tax imposed under this sec­tion will  not be treated as a tax.  (How could any­body in their  right mind come up with that?)“
   • PART VIII–HEALTH CARE RELATED TAXES, Sub­part A–Tax on Indi­vid­u­als With­out Accept­able Health Care Cov­er­age, SEC. 59B. TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE., (e) Other Def­i­n­i­tions and Spe­cial Rules-, (6) NOT TREATED AS TAX IMPOSED BY THIS CHAPTER FOR CERTAIN PURPOSES — “The tax imposed under this sec­tion shall not be treated as tax imposed by this chap­ter for pur­poses of deter­min­ing the amount of any credit under this chap­ter or for pur­poses of sec­tion 55.” So basi­cally for tax pur­poses, this par­tic­u­lar tax can­not be used in cal­cu­lat­ing tax cred­its. Big whoop, our tax sys­tem is nearly as con­fus­ing and bro­ken as our health-care sys­tem. Is it really any sur­prise that some­thing like this is in the bill?
7. “Page  241 and  253:  Doc­tors will all be paid the same  regard­less of spe­cialty, and the gov­ern­ment will set all  doc­tors’ fees.“
   • Again the lack of proper doc­u­men­ta­tion of Mr. Kithil’s argu­ment, but my best guess is he’s refer­ring to some lan­guage in the bill that the Sec­re­tary must nego­ti­ate rates for health-care items/services such that the gov­ern­ment will not pay less than the rates already set in the Social Secu­rity Act and not more than the aver­age of other QHBP. Again, this is fear-mongering on the part of the Far Right and if they were sup­port­ing the bill; they’d point out this bit as being fis­cally respon­si­ble on their part.
8. “Page  272. sec­tion 1145: Can­cer hos­pi­tal will ration care accord­ing  to the patient’s age.“
   • (18) AUTHORIZATION OF ADJUSTMENT FOR CANCER HOSPITALS-  What this por­tion of the bill really does is give the Sec­re­tary the abil­ity to study the costs of pay­ments to can­cer hos­pi­tals and if it is deter­mined that these spe­cialty hos­pi­tals are charg­ing more for the same ser­vices as gen­eral hos­pi­tals, then the Sec­re­tary has the author­ity to adjust pay­ments to these can­cer hos­pi­tals to reflect those costs.  Which sounds more like this bill would have the gov­ern­ment pick­ing up more of the expense for patients going to a can­cer hos­pi­tal, and that sounds good to me.
9. “Page  317 and 321: The gov­ern­ment will impose a pro­hi­bi­tion on  hos­pi­tal expan­sion; how­ever, com­mu­ni­ties may peti­tion for an  exception.“
   • I’m shocked as for the first time since I started review­ing Mr. Kithil’s claims, this one appears to be entirely accu­rate. It appears he is mak­ing a ref­er­ence to © PROHIBITION ON EXPANSION OF FACILITY CAPACITY. But where he sees a prob­lem, I see a nec­es­sary step towards reform. When you’re try­ing to restruc­ture some­thing as com­pli­cated as the US health-care sys­tem, you’re much bet­ter off min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of vari­ables you have to deal with. Hence, the pro­hi­bi­tion on expand­ing health-care facilites. How­ever since hav­ing those facil­i­ties can mean life or death to patients; the cre­ators of this bill have included pro­vi­sions for health-care providers to ask for an exemp­tion. Why exactly Mr Kithil finds this to be a prob­lem is not made clear in the email, and I would be happy to dis­cuss his com­plaints on this point if he cares to make them.
   • An alter­nate the­ory as to the rea­sonin behind this sec­tion of the bill, was pro­posed by James in a com­ment:

   the pro­hi­bi­tion on expan­sion of facil­i­ties is only on physi­cian owned hos­pi­tals. I think the idea being one thing that dri­ves up costs is some less eth­i­cal doc­tors refer­ring patients for unneeded tests and diag­nos­tics at facil­i­ties they owned to get more insurance money.

10. “Page  425, line 4–12: The gov­ern­ment man­dates advance-care plan­ning  con­sul­ta­tions.  Those on Social Secu­rity will be required  to attend an “end-of-life plan­ning” sem­i­nar every five years.“
    • While there is lan­guage in this bill for advance-care plan­ning which includes men­tion of end-of-life plan­ning; the way it’s writ­ten, it’s clear the inten­tion is to make the patient aware of what pal­lia­tive, hos­pice and other care ser­vices the health-care provider offers which would nat­u­rally be of impor­tance for a per­son reach­ing the end of their life­time. Are those con­sul­ta­tions going to be filled with hap­pi­ness & joy? Prob­a­bly not. Is it a good idea to put infor­ma­tion in the hands of peo­ple who will need? Definitely.
    • It’s also good to point out that under SEC. 138. INFORMATION ON END-OF-LIFE PLANNING, (b) “Noth­ing in this sec­tion shall be construed-“
      • “to require an indi­vid­ual to com­plete an advanced direc­tive or a physician’s order for life sus­tain­ing treat­ment or other end-of-life plan­ning document;”
      • “to require an indi­vid­ual to con­sent to restric­tions on the amount, dura­tion, or scope of med­ical ben­e­fits oth­er­wise cov­ered under a qual­i­fied health ben­e­fits plan; or”
      • “to encour­age the has­ten­ing of death or the pro­mo­tion of assisted suicide.”
11. “Page  429,  line 13–25:  The gov­ern­ment will spec­ify which  doc­tors can write an end-of-life order.“
    • The phrase “end-of-life order” never appears in this bill and after search­ing through the bill, I can­not find any sim­i­lar phrase to indi­cate the gov­ern­ment can have doc­tors write such a thing.
    • On the other hand, there is lan­guage through­out the bill specif­i­cally detail­ing how assisted sui­cide it com­pletely forbidden.

So hope­fully now that you have links to not only the bill itself, but all the rel­e­vant por­tions of the bill, you will take the time to actu­ally read the bill and see if it some­thing you should sup­port or not (rather than blindly for­ward­ing on some­thing with­out research­ing it).

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About Mark McKibben

Mark is a data analyst for [REDACTED], currently residing in the Midwest. CoffeeBear is a place for him to spout off about whatever catches his fancy. In his spare time, Mark does a bit of webdev & design. To stalk him more effectively, try following him on Twitter.

22 November 2009 | 4:24PM | Comments (74)

Health Care, Law, Politics

74 Comments

1. Ken says:
   November 23rd, 2009 at 8:11 am

   email debunked.

   I hope you hit ‘reply to all’?

   Reply to this Comment
   • Mark says:
     November 24th, 2009 at 7:12 am

     Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. Partly because I didn’t want to make waves with the rel­a­tive who is rather impor­tant to me. And partly because I wasn’t sure how the other peo­ple who also got for­warded this bit of garbage would react.

     Besides It’s one thing for me to spout off my opin­ions to an indi­vid­ual to those peo­ple who have some inter­est in what I have to say (e.g. any­body who vis­its this site) but quite another thing to hi-jack some­body else’s email thread.

     Reply to this Comment
     • cg says:
       January 19th, 2010 at 11:07 am

       Your analy­sis par­al­lels my own so I would declare it spot on. I also read the bill in response to receiv­ing this for­warded email. Kithil’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the can­cer hos­pi­tal bit was par­tic­u­larly laugh­able — except that too many gullible peo­ple are swal­low­ing it hook, line and sinker.… BTW, I did hit “reply all” when debunk­ing the points. Peo­ple seem to be drawn to the “judge” title, IMHO. How­ever, they for­get that some judges are elected, which is no true indi­ca­tor of judi­cial abil­ity. Addi­tion­ally, some mag­is­trates call them­selves “judge” and, depend­ing on gov­ern­ing state law, may not be required to have a law degree, which casts doubt on their par­tic­u­lar abil­ity to inter­pret legal documents.

       Bot­tom line, John Q Pub­lic needs to stop read­ing this bunk and learn to read for themselves.

       And finally, has any­one stopped to con­sider that this is sim­ply the House bill and that what’s likely to come out of con­fer­ence is likely to have sig­nif­i­cant modifications.

       Reply to this Comment
       • Bar­bara says:
         February 18th, 2010 at 11:03 am

         Why is this bill not avail­able to view? I googled it, I went to democ­rats congressmen/women’s web sites and they do not have it. I would truly like to read this bill because you all lie to glibly for me to trust what you say. So could I please have a site address to go to to view this Health Reform (I use this term loosely) bill HB3200
         Thank you

         Reply to this Comment
         • Mark says:
           February 18th, 2010 at 11:34 am

           I sug­gest you try read­ing full posts and com­ments before you make start claim­ing peo­ple are lying. For exam­ple, if you’d bother to read through my entire post on HB3200; you would have found I linked to the ver­sion of the bill I used in my analy­sis of the let­ter pur­ported to have been writ­ten by a for­mer county judge from Texas. Since you missed the link, here it is again for your ben­e­fit: http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3200/text
         • Michael says:
           March 13th, 2010 at 9:29 am

           find it here: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h3200ih.txt.pdf
         • Judy says:
           March 19th, 2010 at 10:22 am

           Amen, sis­ter! Wouldn’t you just like to have some­one you could really trust??????? It’s time to clean out all of them and start over.
       • Bar­bara says:
         February 18th, 2010 at 11:09 am

         yes it will be dif­fer­ent how­ever, every time they redo it it becomes worse for the peo­ple. I think if the con­gress is going to reform health care they should join the rest of us. If we are sub­jected to it so should they.

         Reply to this Comment
         • Mark says:
           February 18th, 2010 at 11:36 am

           All that I’ve heard about how they’re chang­ing does actu­ally make it sound like it will be worse. Worse in that the Amer­i­can peo­ple will get less pro­tec­tions and less cov­er­age under the newer ver­sions while the insur­ance com­pa­nies will get to make more & more prof­its (like the 56% increase in prof­its they squeezed out of the Amer­i­can peo­ple last year). Health care should never be about profit/loss but should be about qual­ity of life.
   • Obed says:
     March 16th, 2010 at 8:34 pm

     I just bor­rowed lib­er­ally from your out­stand­ing analy­sis to respond to a rel­a­tive. It is so hard to com­bat fear mongering…my first sug­ges­tion was to go to opencongress.org and read the Bill, as there is no bet­ter way to know what is truly included.

     You know, the first attempt at health­care reform was thwarted by the notion that, if passed, the Rus­sians would take over our coun­try. That it was all a com­mu­nist plot…

     Thanks for stay­ing the course, I am still in dis­be­lief as to why peo­ple think that the same group of peo­ple that drove our coun­try to the brink of col­lapse with some ill advised wars, tax cuts, and mon­e­tary pol­icy can be trusted with health­care. They had 8+ years to do some­thing and what did they accomplish?

     Reply to this Comment
2. John Mor­ris says:
   December 1st, 2009 at 11:01 am

   Good work.I wish you had been a lit­tle quicker. It would have saved me two hours of quick research yes­ter­day which I did in order to respond to a fam­ily mem­ber. My con­clu­sions were the same as yours.The real ques­tion is how any­one could choose to believe that this for­mer county judge would dis­cover such aston­ish­ing pro­vi­sions that respon­si­ble con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks had failed to find.Or,if any of it were true wouldn’t the Wall Street Journal,rather than the local Texas paper,break the news? The sad answer is that Kithil’s sort of mis­in­for­ma­tion is not cre­ated for those in the mar­ket for facts;it caters to those who need a dogma “fix” J Morris,Esq.

   Reply to this Comment
   • Bar­bara says:
     February 18th, 2010 at 11:11 am

     With advi­sors who state “you are not a viable human until you reach the age of 14″ or “rationing med­ical care to the aged is accept­able” in their papers, speeches make one tend to believe they are truly monsters.

     Reply to this Comment
     • Mark says:
       February 18th, 2010 at 11:23 am

       Funny but the only place I’ve seen any­thing even close to what you just men­tioned are in press releases from right-wring pro­pa­ganda machines. If you have a reli­able source for this infor­ma­tion, feel free to post links to it. Oth­er­wise, I’d rather you didn’t try to move these com­ments into an emo­tional fire fight from the rea­son­able con­ver­sa­tion they have been.

       Reply to this Comment
3. furi­ousd says:
   January 10th, 2010 at 10:51 pm

   Thanks for post­ing this. My Mom sent me this and is con­vinced it’s true. I am amazed that peo­ple will con­tinue to believe this tripe from unknown and dubi­ous sources. This is exactly what I need to reply to her as I assured her it was bunk and would let her know what I could find out.

   Reply to this Comment
   • Bar­bara says:
     February 18th, 2010 at 11:05 am

     I would sug­gest you read the bill your­self rather than “believe” either side. Your mom believes one side and you the other nei­ther of you have read the bill but sim­ply believed what is your per­sonal choice to believe.

     Reply to this Comment
     • Mark says:
       February 18th, 2010 at 11:29 am

       I agree that furi­ousd should def­i­nitely read the bill and form his own opin­ion. How­ever it sounds like when furi­ousd fully intended to go out and read the bill, so he could share his opin­ions on it with his mother. Per­haps by this time (over a month after furi­ousd com­mented) he has read the bill and made an informed opinion.

       Reply to this Comment
4. furi­ousd says:
   January 10th, 2010 at 10:52 pm

   I will sim­ply add that I wish every­one would reply this to all, as this is whole “Judge Kilith” let­ter has spread like wild­fire through­out the inter­nets, and most peo­ple who want to believe it, will.

   Reply to this Comment
5. backhome2006 says:
   January 12th, 2010 at 11:53 am

   I did a (very) lit­tle research yes­ter­day and found that David Kithil DOES exist. How­ever, I checked with the news­pa­per (pro­vid­ing a copy of Kithil’s pur­ported let­ter) this morn­ing and had this reply:

   ——————————-

   Sorry, we can find no such let­ter in our files.

   Phil Schoch, Exec­u­tive Editor/General Man­ager
   High­land Lakes News­pa­pers
   830–693-4367, ext. 226
   phil.schoch@highlandernews.com

   Reply to this Comment
6. S. Con­roy says:
   January 18th, 2010 at 1:04 pm

   I checked out the news­pa­per first, and dis­cov­ered that while Kithil does exist, as the man­ag­ing edi­tor states, the only story regard­ing him involves a dis­puted fed­eral land claim many months ago. There is absolutely NO ref­er­ence to this phony letter.

   To make things even more inter­est­ing, the copy of the let­ter that was sent to me stated that the let­ter was printed in, I believe, the August 17th edi­tion (I no longer have that copy of the let­ter, so can’t con­firm the exact date now). When I checked out the news­pa­per, I dis­cov­ered that it only comes out Tues­days through Thurs­days, and that the Aug. 17 date was a Monday.

   As some­one above stated, peo­ple who WANT to believe this, will, seem­ingly regard­less of proof, evi­dence that it’s a lie, and so on. It makes me sad and angry at the same time.

   Reply to this Comment
7. ZZMike says:
   January 23rd, 2010 at 12:56 pm

   I was sus­pi­cious, too, as soon as I read ” Can­cer hos­pi­tal will ration care accord­ing to the patient’s age” — that should have been “hospitals”.

   You’re def­i­nitely right about not using sec­tion num­bers. Page num­bers are use­less. And they come out with a new ver­sion — both House and Sen­ate — every few weeks.

   There is a judge named David Kithil — Bur­net County, TX.

   There’s more than enough wrong with this mon­stros­ity of a bill with­out hav­ing to come up with fake items.

   Reply to this Comment
8. s. con­roy says:
   February 18th, 2010 at 3:43 pm

   Bar­bara, the health reform bill has ALWAYS stated that if you like the plan you have now, you can keep it. It has NEVER involved forc­ing peo­ple to choose a spe­cific plan…not even mem­bers of Congress.

   If they like their plan , they can keep it. If you like yours, you can keep it. If you don’t, you can change plans.

   This bill goes nowhere near far enough, IMO, toward gen­uine reform or cost sav­ings. But it is a start. My idea of real reform involves a single-payer plan–and we could start by expand­ing Medicare. But that would be entirely too sim­ple, I guess.

   Reply to this Comment
9. George says:
   February 24th, 2010 at 8:53 am

   Mark, thanks for the effort in debunk­ing this. I am the CEO of a very large prac­tice (28-physicians) and garbage like that found in this email is really affect­ing the argu­ments for valid health­care reform. I have spent many hours doing the exact same thing you have done for my rel­a­tives just to explain the points of the bill. It is really sad to think that the Repub­li­cans, the orig­i­nal pro­po­nents of many ele­ments of this bill over the past 15 years, are now totally twist­ing the facts to defeat the progress being under­taken. Keep up the good work!

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10. Judy says:
    February 28th, 2010 at 9:53 am

    Unfor­tu­nately — our “elected” offi­cials (Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­cans) don’t care about OUR best inter­est any­more. Maybe when they are first elected.….but it doesn’t take long for that to change. I feel that the gov­ern­ment is already in our lives TOO much. Yes, we do need health care fixed, but remem­ber these are the peo­ple who fixed it where it is now. We are being taxed to dealth already and they haven’t man­aged to use our taxes for the good of the peo­ple (all of us not a selected few). I am over 65 and shud­der to think what will hap­pen to my great grand­chil­dren and gen­er­a­tions after that.

    Reply to this Comment
11. Judy says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 8:58 am

    Why doesn’t any­one men­tion that the insur­ance com­pa­nies charge more pre­mi­ums because the cost of health care (hos­pi­tals, doc­tors, etc) is higher because of law­suits which insur­ance com­pa­nies have to pay, etc, etc. It’s like a dog chas­ing it’s tail and of course the con­sumers have to pay the cost. If they can’t tax income higher they will just tax other things.……gas, cloth­ing, util­i­ties ( have you ever looked at your taxes on your gas or elec­tric bill) and even­tu­ally they will get around to tax­ing all of our food.

    Reply to this Comment
    • E Mo says:
      March 7th, 2010 at 7:29 pm

      Judy, Your com­ment about the lawyers caus­ing higher insur­ance pre­mi­ums is spot on. What you may not know is that the Democ­rats, from the White­house on down, have con­tin­u­ously refused to include ‘tort reform’ in the new health plan. Tons of arti­cles have been writ­ten about the num­bers of 90% to 97% of all lawyer dona­tions to can­di­dates, goes to Democ­rats. Fol­low the money. The insur­ance com­pa­nies don’t care, they sim­ply add more to the pre­mi­ums so they always win. When the num­ber grows, their % mark-up means more dol­lars in their pocket, from our pocket.

      Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 8th, 2010 at 6:44 pm

      Really, you’re going to bring up tort reform/malpractice insur­ance as an argu­ment against health care reform? Seri­ously? Don’t you real­ize that sort of reform will save at most 2.3%?

      @ E mo: That’s inac­cu­rate. Obama has said on 17 Sept 2009 of last year that he’s will­ing to work on tort reform.

      Reply to this Comment
      • E Mo says:
        March 12th, 2010 at 7:06 pm

        Mark, I appre­ci­ate your enthu­si­asm, but per­haps, in the mag­a­zine arti­cle you hot-linked, you over looked a cou­ple of paragraph’s below where your 2.3% stat was men­tioed that the Dr’s. dis­agreed, say­ing 5% for direct cost of insur­ance and 5% for for their over med­icat­ing, just to be safe. I wasn’t try­ing to flame the Democ­rats, it’s just that their stand on tort reform, in the past, has been abom­inable. I’m sim­ply point­ing out that if the Dem’s want to get a reform bill passed, why not throw in this sacred cow. They’re act­ing the same as the Republican’s did 5–7 years ago. Mean­while, we the com­mon man con­tinue to suf­fer. The heal­ing needs to start with the politician’s, and the vot­ers need to demand it.

        Reply to this Comment
12. Troy says:
    March 9th, 2010 at 1:29 pm

    I see that you “debunked” every­thing except the part where this new health­care reform applies to every­body except Con­gress. Care to elaborate?

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 9th, 2010 at 1:56 pm

      You’re quite right; I for­got to talk about that bit of the orig­i­nal email. Sorry about that.

      I just went back through the bill, and I see noth­ing in it which specif­i­cally states that this bill applies to every­body except Con­gress. The clos­est I can see to any­thing even remotely like that would be Pro­tect­ing the choice to keep cur­rent cov­er­age. And that sec­tion of the bill was put in there to allow any­one who wants to keep their exist­ing cov­er­age to do so; which makes that sec­tion a pro­tec­tion of the bill for peo­ple who like their exist­ing coverage.

      Do I think Con­gress is going to dump their exist­ing health cov­er­age for what­ever watered down ver­sion the Repub­li­cans will let pass? No.
      Do I think the bill would give more rights/power/protection to the aver­age per­son if Con­gress was forced to take the same cov­er­age? Yes!
      Do I think any lan­guage in the bill forc­ing Con­gress to take the same cov­er­age as the rest of us would actu­ally make it through to a final ver­sion of the bill? No.

      Reply to this Comment
13. james says:
    March 12th, 2010 at 8:09 am

    Nice job on the debunk­ing it makes send­ing rebut­tal emails to the rest of my fam­ily much eas­ier. Extra props for all the links to the bill itself. One bit of extra info though , if I am read­ing it cor­rectly the pro­hi­bi­tion on expan­sion of facil­i­ties is only on physi­cian owned hos­pi­tals. I think the idea being one thing that dri­ves up costs is some less eth­i­cal doc­tors refer­ring patients for unneeded tests and diag­nos­tics at facil­i­ties they owned to get more insur­ance money.

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    • Mark says:
      March 12th, 2010 at 8:30 am

      Thanks for the kind words and the infor­ma­tion on the expan­sion of facil­i­ties. I hadn’t caught that pre­vi­ously, but I’ve now updated my post to include your interpretation.

      Reply to this Comment
      • Judy says:
        March 19th, 2010 at 10:19 am

        I think the key here is “inter­pre­ta­tion”. It’s seems to me that is all we are get­ting from ALL par­ties — sure makes our lives unset­tled. Thanks for giv­ing me a place to “vent”.

        Reply to this Comment
    • John j says:
      March 14th, 2010 at 7:13 pm

      James, Mark:

      Many states’ health depart­ment must approve new con­struc­tion or expan­sion of hos­pi­tals and the pur­chase of exotic diag­nos­tic equip­ment. In the new envi­ron­ment (if we ever get there) doc­tors will no longer use the equip­ment they have on site. I talked to my GP a cou­ple of months ago and the only prob­lem he had with the bill was the amount he can charge for an office visit. His belief if that dif­fer­ent doc­tors will be allowed to charge dif­fer­ent prices that will lead to “doc­tor shop­ping,” the basis for the charges against Rush Limbaugh

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    • Audi says:
      March 26th, 2010 at 2:15 pm

      Just a quick com­ment on physi­cian owned hospitals.….these types of hos­pi­tals are designed to pre­form the ser­vices that actu­ally make the most money. Tra­di­tional hos­pi­tals lose money on the dread­fully ill that occupy space for sev­eral days, and require extended treat­ments. The cash cow has been the out­pa­tient surgery which has been moved to physi­cian owned hos­pi­tals. The care is pro­vided in a day and the patient sent home. No overnight stays requir­ing spe­cial­ized staff. No meals requir­ing dietary assis­tance. Any com­pli­ca­tions are trans­ferred to tra­di­tional hos­pi­tals while the bulk of the charges orginate from the physi­cian owned surgery center.

      Reply to this Comment
14. Tim says:
    March 13th, 2010 at 5:04 pm

    I recieved the e-mail from my nephew today and also spent the time to read all the sec­tions.
    I wrote him an at length rebut­tal to all the points they are try­ing to make. It would seem that you and I are exactly on the same page when it comes to inter­pret­ing the bill. The Judge, if he actu­ally wrote that, should be smarter than that. It would seem that he is tak­ing Han­nity, Lim­baugh and Beck as his research guides.
    My nephew and brother seem to enjoy for­ward­ing these things to me know­ing it will push my but­tons. It always works but I refute them with the facts.
    I also agree that the bill seems to be get­ting worse the longer it takes to pass. i am still a staunch believer in sin­gle payer as the most rea­son­able and fair way to lower costs but that is another debate that unfor­tu­nately is not on the table at this time.
    Keep up the good work. This is my first time here but I shall return.

    Reply to this Comment
15. Ellen Chasse says:
    March 16th, 2010 at 11:20 am

    Thank you! I have for­warded your link & thought­ful com­par­i­son of the bill to my friend who sent that same let­ter to me.. Thank you also for the link to the actual bill.

    kind regards
    EllenM

    Reply to this Comment
16. Michael says:
    March 16th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    I am a con­ser­v­a­tive and totally against the health­care bill. I did the same research and did notice some of Kithil’s (or whomever’s) asser­tions were def­i­nitely “a stretch”. So, per­haps, the intents of the dif­fer­ent sec­tions of the bill aren’t exactly what Kithil and other oppo­nents say it is. HOWEVER, what advo­cates of “We don’t know what to do — let big gov­ern­ment take care of it” don’t seem to under­stand is that when such leg­is­la­tion is enacted, it becomes its own life­form. It opens the door for an end­less suc­ces­sion of amend­ments, addi­tions and rul­ings and it soon becomes out of con­trol. The polit­i­cal dan­ger of such law is that it gives the gov­ern­ment even more con­trol over the pri­vate aspects of Amer­i­cans’ lives. It takes con­trol, deci­sion and pref­er­ence away from peo­ple and hands it to a con­stantly mor­ph­ing body of law, the very lifeblood of a gov­ern­ment, which few would deny con­trol more and more of our lives. HB3200 is a “super­bill” which gives gov­ern­ment, both the polit­i­cal left and the right, “super con­trol” over us all. We have count­less lessons on what hap­pens with sim­i­lar gov­ern­ment pro­grams. Social Secu­rity is the best exam­ple, a pro­gram ini­tially designed to pro­vide the absolute min­i­mum sub­sis­tence to Amer­i­cans made des­ti­tute by the deper­es­sion. Look what it’s become and real­ize what it’s done to the atti­tudes of Amer­i­cans toward gov­ern­ment, to our work ethic and to our economy.

    I am a con­ser­v­a­tive and I am totally in favor of real health­care reform. I just believe we should attack the issue in a totally dif­fer­ent way. Here’s my ver­sion of House Bill 3200:

    House Bill 3200 “B”

    1. Inde­pen­dent Val­i­da­tion of All Health­care Bills
    Require inde­pen­dent review of all health­care bills to val­i­date line-item and total charges. We all know there are many “incor­rect” charges being claimed by hos­pi­tals or charges that are mas­sively inflated. If gov­ern­ment has a place in health­care, let’s use that power for what it was designed: to pro­tect against fraud and abuse by cre­at­ing an agency for this pur­pose. Be care­ful, this val­i­da­tion process is NOT pass­ing judge­ment on what ser­vices should or should not be pro­vided, only that billed ser­vices were actu­ally pro­vided, noth­ing more.

    2. Patient Account­abil­ity
    Require patients to actu­ally sign all health­care bills they receive, swear­ing the treat­ment they requested was nec­es­sary and the charges they incurred were accu­rate. When is the last time any­one you know actu­ally saw or at least reviewed their detailed hos­pi­tal bill? This is no dif­fer­ent than sign­ing one’s fed­eral or state income tax forms. Peo­ple need health­care, of course, but they also need to be account­able for their treat­ment and bills. For what pos­si­ble rea­son has our sys­tem almost com­pletely elim­i­nated any patient account­abil­ity? Could it be there are so many “mid­dle men” or silent enti­ties hid­ing between the patient and their health­care and that are skim­ming off more and more of the money chang­ing hands, that they have cre­ated a sys­tem no one under­stands and which gives them free­dom to take what­ever they want?

    3. Patient Par­tic­i­pa­tion & Respon­si­bil­ity
    Require 5% to 20% patient co-payment on all health­care bills (per­haps up to a max­i­mum for cat­a­strophic ill­nesses). This will return account­abil­ity to the health­care sys­tem, heaven for­bid, and result in bet­ter health­care deci­sions (i.e., allow doc­tors and patients to do every­thing that needs to be done but noth­ing that doesn’t need to be done) and will reduce or elim­i­nate the mas­sive fraud and abuse now caus­ing costs to spi­ral. Such added costs to the indi­vdi­ual can be off­set through uti­liza­tion of the exist­ing income tax deduc­tion for out-of-pocket health­care costs. Note: One must under­stand that the basic human nature and busi­ness nature trait we know as GREED will and does, with­out any doubt, allow fraud and abuse unless checks and bal­ances are in place to stop it. No one is above this temp­ta­tion so mech­a­nisms must exist to con­trol it. Cre­at­ing a gov­ern­ment insur­ance sys­tem that insu­lates patients and providers from the ser­vices they require is the per­fect ground for fraud and abuse. Lord John Acton’s 1887 quote, “Power cor­rupts; absolute power cor­rupts absolutely.” has been proven time and time again and is the ulti­mate result of mas­sive gov­ern­ment leg­is­la­tion such as HB3200.

    4. Remove Ille­gal Aliens
    Require every indi­vid­ual that requests free health­care ser­vices to first prove their legal cit­i­zen­ship. If they can­not pro­vide such proof, first pro­vide them with the requested ser­vice then pro­vide their name and address to the Immi­gra­tion & Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Ser­vice which will imme­di­ately deport that indi­vid­ual and their imme­di­ate fam­ily. Their are 15 mil­lion ille­gal aliens that drain our health­care resources and greatly increas­ing costs for the rest of us, mas­sively stress­ing our sys­tem. This pol­icy might also be described as enforc­ing the most basic and cru­cial laws of any nation — con­trol­ling its bor­ders and ensur­ing only legal cit­i­zens obtain the ben­e­fits of the money and laws sup­plied by those cit­i­zens. If this pol­icy pro­vides a dis­in­cen­tive for ille­gal aliens to seek health­care, then it is widely known that Mex­ico (from where the vast major­ity of ille­gal aliens orig­i­nate) pro­vides free health­care to all cit­i­zens — cit­i­zens who are actu­ally in their home coun­try to receive it. Our Con­gress uses leg­is­la­tion in many forms to pro­vide incen­tive or dis­in­cen­tive to Amer­i­cans, from rebates to help the car indus­try to taxes on lux­ury items. What’s wrong with pro­vid­ing ille­gal aliens incen­tives to obey our laws and go home to the nation in which they belong?

    Over­all, it’s not really about whether the pro­po­nents of the bill are just try­ing to take over our lives or whether they gen­uinely want to help peo­ple or for some other rea­son. It’s about whether we really believe the gov­ern­ment can actu­ally achieve a bet­ter health­care sys­tem which:
    * pro­vides as good or bet­ter ser­vices than we receive now
    * pro­vides ser­vices at the same or less cost
    * greatly increase the num­ber of peo­ple that can par­tic­i­pate in the sys­tem
    * can main­tain or improve the cur­rent level of sci­en­tific research and devel­op­ment which has, so far, achieved the world’s great­est health­care sys­tem and tech­nol­ogy and to which all nations come to learn and acquire

    I can­not imag­ine any­one truly believes national health­care can sup­ply the above attrib­utes. Our cur­rent health­care sys­tem is out of con­trol but only the costs. It’s the cost that keeps so many of the unin­sured from becom­ing insured. Any­thing out of con­trol will lose effi­ciency and fair­ness and cause costs to soar. Our cur­rent health­care sys­tem may be out of con­trol, but, let’s not give up and turn over our lives to Wash­ing­ton D.C. There ARE other answers. I have iden­ti­fied the issues I think are the real rea­sons our cur­rent sys­tem is bro­ken. Let’s work on those issues instead of turn­ing our lives over to become slaves of the government.

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    • Mark says:
      March 16th, 2010 at 10:41 pm

      Michael, thanks for the thought­ful com­ment. How­ever I have some questions/concerns with your ver­sion of health­care reform.
      1. Inde­pen­dent Val­i­da­tion of All Health­care Bills: How’s that going to work and who’s going to pay to have all this val­i­da­tion done? This sounds more likely to raise the cost of health­care.
      2. Patient Account­abil­ity: Require patients to actu­ally sign all health­care bills they receive, swear­ing the treat­ment they requested was nec­es­sary and the charges they incurred were accu­rate. Are you going to start giv­ing every US cit­i­zen advanced med­ical train­ing so they will have the abil­ity to deter­mine if a given treat­ment was nec­es­sary then? If not, how exactly are peo­ple sup­posed to know if a treat­ment was nec­es­sary or not?
      3. Patient Par­tic­i­pa­tion & Respon­si­bil­ity: Require 5% to 20% patient co-payment on all health­care bills.… will return account­abil­ity to the health­care sys­tem How does this return account­abil­ity to the sys­tem? All I see this doing is forc­ing peo­ple already in a bad sit­u­a­tion to find the money to pay for treatment.

      And actu­ally many peo­ple believe a national health­care sys­tem could sup­ply the above attrib­utes you describe. Every hospital/doctor’s office I go to seems to have a billing depart­ment almost as big as their treat­ment facil­i­ties. If we had a single-payer health care for all cit­i­zens (like we have Medicare for our senior citizens).

      Reply to this Comment
    • Son­sie Conroy says:
      March 16th, 2010 at 11:47 pm

      Michael, I’m with Mark regard­ing many of your remarks. I can’t imag­ine how I could actu­ally (and hon­estly) jus­tify every med­ical treat­ment I have received…other than stat­ing that the doc­tor made a good case for doing it. I have no med­ical train­ing and don’t plan on get­ting any.

      I already pay a copay for every doc­tor visit, pre­scrip­tion, and hos­pi­tal visit. Most insured per­sons pay at least some­thing. Oh, and by the way, I don’t think GREED enters into it when you’re get­ting a colonoscopy or hav­ing your bro­ken leg set. How many folks would actu­ally WANT to have either of these pro­ce­dures more than the min­i­mum num­ber required by good med­ical care? I can cer­tainly see how greedy folks could overuse cos­metic surgery, for exam­ple, but that’s not cov­ered by any insur­ance plan I know of.

      As for ille­gal immi­grants, they mostly uti­lize the emer­gency rooms, which are not allowed to demand proof of cov­er­age or of cit­i­zen­ship before treat­ment. and even if they did this, would you hon­estly expect a doc­tor to call the police to deport a child with acute appen­dici­tis, or a man suf­fer­ing from a pos­si­bly fatal gun­shot? Some­how I don’t think this would work out too well. Yes, we have a prob­lem with ille­gal immi­grants, but it would much cheaper to treat them as part of one huge pool (aka single-payer) than, say, to pro­vide blood pres­sure med­ica­tion from a emer­gency room for $200 instead of from a local phar­macy for $20.

      Finally, I do believe that a single-payer pro­gram would accom­plish all of your attrib­utes. Medicare is doing a pretty good job of it. And other coun­tries seem to be man­ag­ing pretty well…with bet­ter out­comes than the U.S. on many tests for good health and good care.

      Reply to this Comment
17. Fred­die B says:
    March 17th, 2010 at 3:08 pm

    pages 50–51, sec­tion SEC. 152. PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE. reads as fol­lows:
    “with­out regard to per­sonal char­ac­ter­is­tics extra­ne­ous to the pro­vi­sion of high qual­ity health care or related ser­vices.“
    This is left open for COMPLETE AND TOTAL INTERPRETATION and there­fore one can assume that “per­sonal char­ac­ter­is­tics” does apply to any and every per­son, includ­ing ille­gal aliens. There is no scope defined here (what’s included & what is not).

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    • Mark says:
      March 17th, 2010 at 8:04 pm

      Even if I agreed with your inter­pre­ta­tion of that por­tion of the bill, there’s still SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS which specif­i­cally for­bids pay­ment on health-care for ille­gal aliens.

      Reply to this Comment
18. Cal says:
    March 18th, 2010 at 1:40 am

    I didn’t see all of the posts here, but just in case you missed it, the orig­i­nal email is con­sid­ered an inter­net hoax and is listed on Snopes.com.

    I think this is just more tea party ter­ror­ism: it starts with shout­ing down dis­cus­sions at town hall meet­ings and ends with planes in build­ings. The hate HAS to stop.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am

      I don’t think Snopes had this one listed when I orig­i­nally wrote this post, but I see they have it now under Let­ter to Sen­a­tor Bayh.

      Reply to this Comment
19. health­care says:
    March 18th, 2010 at 8:54 pm

    It’s about the money, honey. It doesn’t mat­ter what this bill says, once passed, they have the infra­struc­ture to do what­ever they want and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. They’ve been try­ing to screw up health care since 1974 so they could do what they’re doing now. It started with HMO’s and will not end until they have full con­trol of 1/6 of the US econ­omy. DON’T buy into it. THIS is free­dom and lib­erty on the line. Look at the big­ger picture.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 18th, 2010 at 9:36 pm

      It’s always about the money; how­ever some­times what we get for our money is worth it. If you have an argu­ment to make against the bill, I’d be happy to hear it. Just claim­ing it started with HMO’s and will not end until they have full con­trol of 1/6 of the US econ­omy is not mak­ing an argu­ment; it’s spout­ing rhetoric. Give us the facts on which you’re bas­ing your rhetoric and let us draw our own conclusions.

      Reply to this Comment
20. health­care says:
    March 18th, 2010 at 8:59 pm

    okay, you oba­macare fans seem to be work­ing over­time killing dis­sent­ing opin­ions. Here is a link to the real bill:

    http://budget.house.gov/doc-library/FY2010/03.15.2010_reconciliation2010.PDF

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 18th, 2010 at 9:24 pm

      Yup, we’re all oba­macare fans here and def­i­nitely work­ing over­time to kill dis­sent­ing opin­ions by leav­ing the com­ments on this post open since Novem­ber 2009. *rolls eyes*

      On a less sar­cas­tic note, thanks for link­ing to a more cur­rent ver­sion of the bill.

      Reply to this Comment
      • Gary says:
        March 19th, 2010 at 10:27 am

        Judge Kithil sounds like a front man for the Texas Tea­Party and he is doing the Texas Two-Step and the buf­falo shuf­fle with the facts on the Health­care bill.

        Reply to this Comment
21. Mark says:
    March 19th, 2010 at 1:23 am

    Just a quick update on this. Donny Shaw (over at Open­Congress) has posted what looks to be a good sum­mary of where we’re at with this his­toric leg­is­la­tion. Below I’ve quoted the sec­tion of that post which links to the lat­est ver­sion of the bill for your read­ing pleasure.

    Here’s every­thing you need to keep up with health care reform as it approaches the fin­ish line:

    • The Sen­ate Health Care Bill (the foun­da­tion of health care reform) — H.R.3590, Patient Pro­tec­tion and Afford­able Care Act
    • Bud­get Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Bill (pack­age of fixes to Sen­ate bill) — H.R.4872, Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Act of 2010
    • Full Text of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Bill — read the full bill text, uniquely avail­able here on Open­Congress as a page on the open Web (we had to man­u­ally rip the text from a .pdf doc­u­ment, and it’s still a bit messy, but readable).
    • Sum­mary of Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Bill — How the bill would amend the Sen­ate health care bill and how it would affect cur­rent law, in plain English.
    • The CBO Score — How the bud­get num­bers of the final bill stack up against pre­vi­ous iterations.

    NOTE: It’s late and I’m tired. I have not analysed Shaw’s post. And I have not looked over these final ver­sions of the bill to see how they com­pare to the orig­i­nal, bogus email I was refut­ing. Depend­ing on how tomor­row goes for me, I may (or may not) have time to do so. In any event, I would encour­age those who care about this leg­is­la­tion to read the final ver­sion com­ing up for a vote on their own, to best for their opinion.

    Reply to this Comment
22. Cather­ine says:
    March 19th, 2010 at 8:07 am

    If I had known that you weren’t going to pub­lish my vit­ri­olic hate mail, I wouldn’t have spent so much time writ­ing it. Mark, you dis­ap­point me once again.

    On a more seri­ous note, any Com­po­si­tion 2 teacher would be proud of the logic that you’re using in this thread in response to the responses.

    Cath

    Reply to this Comment
23. Tris­tan says:
    March 19th, 2010 at 9:32 am

    Finally got the time to look it up. This is what I found. Unfor­tu­nately, this text is a box so I can­not insert my comments.

    Ille­gals (p.50):
    Quite vague in the bill, could be inter­preted as non-discriminatory on health issues, but I under­stand he could inter­pret it this way. Should def­i­nitely be more precise.

    Elec­tronic funds con­trol (p.58,59):
    Also too vague and I would agree with him that it sounds like pay­ment control.

    Sub­si­dized for union retirees: p.65
    Con­flict of inter­est for me here. Sounds good to me.

    Tax: p.203
    Not sure why this is a big deal or if I even under­stand it but it looks like it is a way to cal­cu­late eligibility.

    Physi­cian fees: p.241/253
    He seems wrong here. It pretty clearly states that a “con­ver­sion fac­tor” will be used to deter­mine each spe­cialty rate.

    Can­cer hos­pi­tal: p.272
    That’s a big, clear lie. It (for once) very clearly states that the cost of treat­ment of a can­cer patient will be will be com­pared to the same cost at other hos­pi­tals to pre­vent cer­tain hos­pi­tals from overcharging.

    Hos­pi­tal Expan­sion: p.425
    He is not say­ing every­thing. This restric­tion is in ONLY for hos­pi­tals owned by a physi­cian. They do not want a sin­gle physician/businessman to build a hege­monic care cen­ter based purely on profit.

    End of Life plan­ning: p.p.429
    Here again a com­plete re-interpretation of the bill. The bill states that would a patient not have seen a doc­tor in the last 5 years, the doc­tor needs to clearly state to the patient all their rights and options. Very dif­fer­ent than the nerve-poking terms “end-of-life seminar”.

    Gov­ern­ment choose end-of life doctor:p.429
    I absolutely do not see this in this paragraph.

    …It took me an hour to go through this, and it is all in very dry legal lingo. Noth­ing most of us will go through the pain of doing reg­u­larly. This judge knows that and that’s why he very loosely bases his facts on the bill and rephrases sen­tences to strike an emo­tional cord. Very dan­ger­ous. There is a huge amount of pro­pa­ganda and facts twist­ing on both sides. I think it is good to be informed but these days I absolutely do not trust politi­cians and even less Repub­li­cans. But since we can’t go through all the bills, we do indeed have to lis­ten to both sides and at the end choose a voice we can agree with. I quickly get the big pic­ture of someone’s agenda these days. When this judge opens her let­ter with some bone­head rec­om­men­da­tions, he clearly shows that he has an agenda and that he does not pri­or­i­tizes enlight­en­ing us with facts.

    His input?
    Put money to fight drugs instead:
    The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has spent bil­lions already for 8 years. Results? Jails over­crowded with small time offend­ers (cor­po­rate hand­out), and Mex­ico almost under mar­tial law because the drugs lords are so pow­er­ful. Want to fight drugs? Make pot legal and tax it like tobacco, that’ll be enough to fund a health care reform. Kids can already find pot any­where any­way so that’s really not the issue.
    Hire more fire­men and cops:
    ??? How will that help pro­vide health care? Sounds like an argu­ment from a 4 year old.
    Pro­tect­ing bor­ders:
    Sure you can waist a mas­sive amount of money to do that, it might work. You can call Israel too, they’ll have good tips on walling in a coun­try… or you could sim­ply have a sus­tain­able income wage enforced by rais­ing min­i­mum wage or tax­ing the hell out of com­pa­nies who go take jobs abroad. How about par­ity? Charge com­pa­nies the dif­fer­ence in wages when they go to China and put it in a fund to pay for unem­ploy­ment? The only rea­son why there are ille­gal immi­grants here is because peo­ple are will­ing to hire them for pen­nies. And yes, peo­ple do need to feed their fam­ily, noth­ing wrong with that. Just because we have the good for­tune to have been born here does not give us the right to lec­ture others.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 19th, 2010 at 11:01 am

      Sub­si­dized for union retirees: p.65: The folks over at FactCheck.org talk about this and their analy­sis states Page 65 is the start of a sec­tion (SEC. 164. REINSURANCE PROGRAM FOR RETIREES) that would set up a new fed­eral rein­sur­ance plan to ben­e­fit retirees and spouses cov­ered by any employer plan, not just those run by labor unions or non­profit groups

      Reply to this Comment
24. Laura says:
    March 23rd, 2010 at 4:20 pm

    Thank you, Mark, for this thor­ough debunk­ing. I’ve already pub­lished a link on my face­book in answer to all the pan­ick­ing Tea Partiers who won’t shut up about the whole thing. Great job!! I don’t know where the heck you found the time, but great job!

    Reply to this Comment
25. Jim D says:
    March 24th, 2010 at 2:12 pm

    If you look at snopes.com they have researched this let­ter which has appar­ently been cir­cu­lat­ing since mid 2009. There is research to indi­cate it was writ­ten by a doc­tor in Indi­ana almost a year ago. The ref­er­ence num­bers while not really laid out well seem to refer to one of the many bills that were being con­sid­ered last sum­mer. It appears that maybe this Judge Kithil got this let­ter on his email put his name on it and began for­ward­ing.
    Jim

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 24th, 2010 at 2:17 pm

      Yup, I found the Snopes arti­cle a few days ago. It’s listed under “Let­ter to Sen­a­tor Bayh”, http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/frazer.asp

      Reply to this Comment
26. Jim D says:
    March 24th, 2010 at 2:18 pm

    The exact web­site for snopes which inves­ti­gates items placed on the inter­net for their accu­racy and validity.

    http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/frazer.asp?print=y

    Jim

    Reply to this Comment
27. AEK says:
    March 27th, 2010 at 6:49 pm

    It’s March 27th, the bill is now Pub­lic Law No: 111–148 and yet I was for­warded this old can of spam just this morning.

    I believe it was sent to me because I replied to a post where some­one said they hadn’t read the bill and didn’t think any­one who voted for it did. My response was to pro­vide a link to the Library of Con­gress’ web­site that has a sum­mary ver­sion of the bill (Reader’s Digest ver­sion if you will). And two days later I get to read the “Judge’s” com­plaints that were even more bit­ter than the black cup of cof­fee I was drink­ing. I replied that I couldn’t date or track down the actual let­ter and pro­vided a link to your well researched com­ments. Thank you for sav­ing me the trou­ble! Oh, by the way, I gave her a link to the Library of Con­gress one more time for good mea­sure. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.3590:

    I wish there was a way to use legal black­line to com­pare all the old ver­sion of the Health­care Bill H.R. 3590 with the bill as passed. Sure would save us a lot of trou­ble point­ing out the mis­con­strued, mis­quoted and out of date references.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 27th, 2010 at 9:37 pm

      Glad I could help and you’re right, a tool that com­pares pro­pose bills with the final ver­sions that passed would be inter­est­ing to see.

      Reply to this Comment
28. Derek says:
    March 30th, 2010 at 9:55 am

    What makes you an author­ity on con­gres­sion bill deci­pher­ing??? As you said… every­one has their opin­ion, and I for one think yours is wrong. This bill has been crammed down our throat with­out any­one lis­ten­ing to the gen­eral pub­lic. If the peo­ple could vote on this bill, it would’ve failed. The polls dont lie! It only goes to show how much con­trol the gov­ern­ment has on us and how lit­tle of a voice we have in Washington.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 30th, 2010 at 10:08 am

      I do not claim to be “an author­ity on con­gres­sion bill deci­pher­ing”. And you’re quite free to believe that my opin­ion is wrong. How­ever I do ask that if you wish to com­ment here say­ing so, that you take the time to explain (and pro­vide evi­dence) for how and where my opin­ion is wrong.

      Reply to this Comment
      • Derek says:
        March 31st, 2010 at 9:25 am

        An opin­ion is what it is… a per­sonal belief that can nei­ther be proved or dis­proved. How­ever, I think you are incor­rect sim­ply because you aren’t inter­rupt­ing the ver­biage of the bill cor­rectly. Take the ‘elec­tronic funds trans­fer’… and I will quote it directly from the bill on page 59:

        ‘‘© enable elec­tronic funds trans­fers, in order to allow auto­mated rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with the related health care pay­ment and remit­tance advice;

        The word­ing is quite clear… the gov­ern­ment will be able to get access into a per­sons bank­ing account. In other words, if you owe the gov­ern­ment money for health­care or for a fine for not pay­ing, the IRS has the author­ity to trans­fer those funds directly out of your bank account.

        Reply to this Comment
        • Mark says:
          March 31st, 2010 at 10:49 am

          True, an opin­ion is a per­sonal belief that can nei­ther be proved or dis­proved; how­ever in this post, I wasn’t merely stat­ing my opin­ions. I was com­par­ing the claims of the orig­i­nal (and mul­ti­ple dis­proved) email to the most cur­rent copy of the bill avail­able at the time.

          Whereas you showed up and attempted to “dis­prove” my counter-claims by try­ing to use ad hominem and ad pop­u­lum attacks.

          Then after I asked you to explain why you think I’m wrong and pro­vide some evi­dence to back up your claims, you come back to sim­ply reit­er­ate one of the talk­ing points of the orig­i­nal email? Oh and about that, there is no men­tion of any new gov­ern­ment author­ity over your bank account and noth­ing that says elec­tronic pay­ments from con­sumers is required. All that sec­tion of the bill does is allow the sec­re­tary of Health and Human Ser­vices to set stan­dards on elec­tronic pay­ments, so the con­sumer can pay for their health care elec­tron­i­cally (like pay­ing for your util­ity bill online or like using your debit card to buy anything/anywhere).

          Lastly your claim that this bill was crammed down our throat with­out any­one lis­ten­ing to the gen­eral pub­lic. If the peo­ple could vote on this bill, it would’ve failed. The polls dont lie! Well, accord­ing to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 49% of those polled said the final ver­sion of this bill was a “good thing” while only 40% did not. So it seems to me the bill would not have failed, espe­cially as you say The polls dont lie!.

          Reply to this Comment
29. Derek says:
    March 31st, 2010 at 3:31 pm

    Firstly, I didn’t attempt to ‘dis­prove’ your opin­ion. I asked what made you an expert in such mat­ters, and I also sim­ply stated that I didn’t agree with your opin­ion. I believe I was telling you that you aren’t tak­ing the ver­baige of the bill for what it is. If you call that dis­prov­ing, then so be it.

    You believe what a media source is telling you??? You’ve been sucked in then!!! No won­der you cre­ated this blog. You need to talk to every­day peo­ple around you such as one you work with, or neigh­bors. Where I live, I can only find one sin­gle per­son that agrees with the bill, and I’ve spo­ken to a LOT of people.

    You said there is “no men­tion of any new gov­ern­ment author­ity” in the bill. Then PLEASE tell me what in the world you think the gov­ern­ment needs with 16,000 extra employ­ees?!? Wake up man!

    Reply to this Comment
    • AEK says:
      March 31st, 2010 at 4:31 pm

      Derek– I agree with this bill so that makes at least two of us.

      I also have taken the time to read the sum­mary of the bill as well as the full text of cer­tain parts as it was writ­ten and amended. Go to Library of Con­gress’ web­site http://thomas.loc.gov/ it is avail­able (“spin” free) to every­one. You can even use the Control+F key func­tion to search for a spe­cific word or phrase that con­cerns you.

      I am not say­ing that your opin­ion isn’t valid and you are com­pletely enti­tled to it but, I find the fol­low­ing quote very appro­pri­ate to a lot of the inter­changes going on today (take from it what you will).

      “Who­ever under­takes to set him­self up as judge in the field of truth and knowl­edge is ship­wrecked by the laugh­ter of the Gods.” Albert Einstein

      Reply to this Comment
      • Mark says:
        March 31st, 2010 at 7:40 pm

        Ha! That’s an excel­lent quote and one I wasn’t famil­iar with. Thank you.

        Reply to this Comment
    • Mark says:
      March 31st, 2010 at 7:39 pm

      You believe what a media source is telling you??? Are you actu­ally try­ing to say that you don’t believe the media? After you went to all the trou­ble to point out to me The polls dont lie!? Are you chang­ing your mind about that or are you sim­ply upset that I did exactly what I asked you to do (backed up my state­ments with evi­dence¹)?

      As for your talk­ing to your friends and neigh­bours and only find­ing one per­son who agrees with the bill, I’d imag­ine you live in a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive area. Or you live in an area where peo­ple are sim­ply dis­ap­pointed that this bill did not go far enough in its efforts at health­care reform. In my area, those peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to about the bill have been in favor of it.

      Lastly, if you are going to quote my own sen­tences back at me; at least have the cour­tesy to keep the quote in con­text. When I said there is no men­tion of any new gov­ern­ment author­ity; I was specif­i­cally refer­ring to no new gov­ern­ment author­ity over your bank account (in response to your claims regard­ing the por­tion of the bill deal­ing with elec­tronic funds transfers.

      Reply to this Comment
      • Derek says:
        April 1st, 2010 at 8:52 am

        Why dont you choose a poll that doesn’t lean one way or the other if thats the way you’re going to play the game. EVERYONE knows that USA Today leans heav­ily to the left!

        You can believe or trans­late what you want con­cern­ing “no new gov­ern­ment con­trol”. That part of the bill is very open ended and vauge on pur­pose. Don’t tell me you believe that politi­cians always means EXACTLY what they say?!?

        Reply to this Comment
        • Mark says:
          April 1st, 2010 at 10:17 am

          If you think the USA Today/Gallup poll is so flawed, why don’t you find one that doesn’t lean one way or the other?

          And again, you’re attempt­ing to take my state­ments out of con­text. There’s noth­ing the bill that says “no new gov­ern­ment con­trol”. That’s some­thing I said based on my read­ing of that por­tion of the bill which you and I have been argu­ing over.

          Reply to this Comment
30. Son­sie Conroy says:
    March 31st, 2010 at 10:13 pm

    My expe­ri­ence is that approval or dis­ap­proval falls almost per­fectly along party lines…just as it did dur­ing the Sen­ate vote. My Demo­c­ra­tic or progressive/liberal friends approved (or at the least thought it was an imper­fect but accept­able start). My con­ser­v­a­tive friends absolutely hate it with an inten­sity that I haven’t seen since they went bal­lis­tic over Clinton’s sex­ual pecadillos.

    Reply to this Comment
    • Derek says:
      April 1st, 2010 at 9:46 am

      You are very cor­rect. This coun­try was founded with cer­tain prin­ci­pals which have all been thrown out the win­dow by our gov­ern­ment in our lifetime.

      I wish more peo­ple would read speachs that Thomas Jef­fer­son wrote. He was so in tune as to what the peo­ple of this coun­try should never allow the gov­ern­ment to do or control.

      Here is just one of many quotes that reflects what he said…

      “A wise and fru­gal gov­ern­ment, which shall leave men free to reg­u­late their own pur­suits of indus­try and improve­ment, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government. ’

      If what he says is a ‘good’ gov­ern­ment, then our cur­rent gov­ern­ment is VERY BAD!

      Reply to this Comment
      • Mark says:
        April 1st, 2010 at 10:03 am

        Bring­ing up Thomas Jef­fer­son to sup­port your argu­ment (or opin­ion or belief or what­ever you want to call it) in this man­ner; it a clas­sic case of using the appeal to author­ity log­i­cal fal­lacy. But since you seem to like quot­ing him, here’s a dif­fer­ent state­ment he made that you might be inter­ested in, “I do not find in ortho­dox Chris­tian­ity one redeem­ing feature.”

        Reply to this Comment
        • Derek says:
          April 5th, 2010 at 8:21 am

          Just because Thomas Jef­fer­son was not a Chris­t­ian, doesn’t mean he was very knowl­edge­able on how a gov­ern­ment should be prop­erly con­ducted… after all, he was the key author of the Dec­la­ra­tion! Whats your point?!?

          I have ZERO respect for any­one run­ning our coun­try today, so YES I will appeal to a greater author­ity such as our found­ing fathers even though they have passed on. The admin­is­tra­tions in our life­time have done noth­ing but twist and mis­con­strue the Dec­la­ra­tion to their ben­e­fit and in turn caus­ing the Peo­ple to suf­fer for it.

          Reply to this Comment
          • Mark says:
            April 5th, 2010 at 2:02 pm

            My point by bring­ing up a ran­dom quote was that it didn’t prove any­thing. Much like your quote didn’t prove anything.

            The admin­is­tra­tions in our life­time have done noth­ing but twist and mis­con­strue the Dec­la­ra­tion to their ben­e­fit and in turn caus­ing the Peo­ple to suf­fer for it. Actu­ally, I would say some of the admin­is­tra­tions in my life­time have twisted and mis­con­strued the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States (as the legal doc­u­ment on which our gov­ern­ment is based vs the doc­u­ment where we told the British empire to piss off).

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