Now We Know What's In It

Remember Speaker Pelosi telling us how to find out what is in the 2,000+ page health care bill?:



Well, four months later, we have a clearer understanding.

Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the ranking House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee, had his staff comb through the 2,409 page health care law to find out how many devils are in the details. The process took four months.

There are a lot of devils.

To "organize" their finding they came up with the chart pictured above.

Kevin Hasset, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a revealing piece on the health care law and Brady's findings. Most unsettling are these findings:

"Getting that massive enterprise up and running will be next to impossible. So Democrats streamlined the process by granting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the authority to make judgments that can’t be challenged either administratively or through the courts.

This monarchical protection from challenges is extended as well to the development of new patient-care models under Obama’s controversial recess appointment, Donald Berwick, whom Republicans are calling the rationer-in-chief. Berwick will run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he can experiment with ways to use administrative fiat to move our system toward the socialized medicine of Europe, which he has at times embraced."

Giving the health care market of 300+ million people over to the direction of a maze of bureaucrats will only drive up costs, reduce choice, and, of course, all but destroy your freedom to deal with the private affairs of your health.

Assigning such autocratic authority over the lives of all Americans to the executive branch and one of its cabinet positions is an outrageous abdication of constitutional duty by Congress. It marks a vast centralization of power into the hands of a few over the lives of millions.

(Say what you will about insurance companies. At least in that imperfect third party system you have the freedom to leave one company for another.)

So now we know what's in it, and it ain't more freedom.