I know what I think, but sometimes I have a hard time articulating my point.
So, in the tradition of the Internet, I’ll let others do it for me.

First up is a must read by my longtime blog read, Denise Hunnell.

She’s a doctor, by the way, and has great thoughts on healthcare.

I don’t have all the answers, and neither does the President or Congress.

An excerpt:

Now consider infant mortality. We already have extensive programs to provide prenatal care to anyone who needs it. Do we have too many teenage pregnancies? How will health insurance change that? There are already free clinics and Planned Parenthood clinics ready to hand out contraceptives to any teenager that asks for them. Do we have too many mothers who smoke, use drugs or alcohol, or have poor nutrition so that we have more low birth weight infants? Will health insurance make expectant mothers stop smoking, stop using drugs or alcohol, and eat better? Do we have an excess of twins, triplets, or more due to the rampant use of in vitro fertilization thus again creating more low birth weight infants which increases infant mortality? What exactly is driving our infant mortality rate and how will health insurance make a difference? I don’t know and neither does the President or the Congress.

Do we even know what this plan is supposed to accomplish, aside from providing insurance?  Anyone who’s been denied an MRI or blood test will tell you insurance is not health care.

Have you seen the commercial being run, featuring Canadian Shona Holmes who was denied care for her brain tumor and so came to America?  A Canadian blog debunks her “lies”, but in doing so, bolsters the point that universal health care paid by the taxpayers is not a medical utopia.

Shona had appointments booked! Because the cyst (not tumor) can indeed cause tremendous discomfort and serious (temporary) side effects, she was booked to see the specialists she needed to see. She refused, and chose to not wait the few months to see them.

Underlined emphasis mine.

And, for the record, Canadian healthcare is not free The Canadians may not pay a premium each month, but they are still paying for the health care – and it looks like they aren’t getting their money’s worth.  Can you imagine waiting months for a specialist while you suffer blindness (that can be reversed) and other horrible side effects?  The blogger’s point seems to be that Shona Holmes isn’t dying, so what’s the big hairy deal about her having to wait her turn in line.

Is that our new standard of care – you must be literally dying in order to receive timely treatment?

If you want to read through HR 3200, you can find all 1000+ pages here.  It’s difficult to understand, because there are a lot of references to all kinds of laws and legislation.  I’ve barely browsed it, but I was quite disturbed by page 503, line 10-18

‘‘(3) POWERS.—

11 ‘‘(A) OBTAINING OFFICIAL DATA.—The Center [for Comparative Effectiveness Research] may secure directly from any department or agency of the United States information necessary to enable it to carry out this section. Upon request of the Center, the head of that department or agency shall furnish that information to the Center on an agreed upon schedule

ANY agency of the government will feed information into the database?  If you get WIC, and your child is a little anemic, if you tell the school nurse about something, if you get arrested and need any kind of treatment in the prison, that will all go into the database.  What I didn’t see is how someone can appeal or get faulty information or misdiagnoses removed.  EVERYTHING’S on your permanent health record, now.  (And we’ll have more bureacracy as all of those agencies hire a team of people to comply with this request.)

Glenn Beck raises a good question, too.  Who wrote the bill?  Someone put all of these thousands of pages and permutations together.  WHO?

CNN weighs in with 5 freedoms you’ll lose under Obamacare.

Law professor William Jacobson adds some thoughts to the recent Congressional Budget Office report about how much reform is going to cost us.

Tagged as: healthcare, HR 3200, Obamacare, rationed health care