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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).