With the House version stacked bigger than Dolly Parton at about 2,000 pages, anybody who says they know for certain is lying. It’s not just the verbiage but how it will be interpreted in the years to come. Still, there’s more than enough to be alarmed enough to want to kill the bills off.
“Rather than overwhelm you with arcane details of each bill,” writes Robert Bidinotti in an engaging and highly annotated essay, “it is more important that you understand in…

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It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.

The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…

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The Wall Street Journal calls the House version of President Obama’s health care plan “the worst bill ever,” noting that it will lead to “epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting,” and other problems.

At the Atlantic, Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama, explains how ObamaCare will cost much more than promised — at least $150 billion more.  That’s true even if promised cuts to Medicare included in ObamaCare actually take place — but as McArdle notes, even…

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Everything you need to know, right here. And the best part is, it’s only 1,990 pages long! Print it out and read it during a coffee break.

Seriously, with a document this long do you think anyone really knows what’s in it? Doesn’t that thought spook you?

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In the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson explains in the “Public Plan Mirage” how the so-called “public option” contained in congressional health-care reform bills is just a gimmick: “It pretends to control costs and improve access to quality care when it doesn’t.” Steve Chapman wrote earlier about the “‘Public Option’ Health Care Scam.”

In other news, a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that the provisions in the Senate health care “reform” bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would add $1,700 a year…

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With Democratic support coalescing around Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mt.) health care reform proposal, passage of a comprehensive overhaul now appears more likely than ever.  Opponents had their summer of protests.  But, Democrats have shown a renewed sense of energy since discrediting Sarah Palin’s “death panels” and Sen. Charles Grassley’s claim that ObamaCare would “pull the plug on grandma.” Still, while those charges may have been a little overwrought, there is plenty to be concerned about with the Democratic health reform…

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Michael Masnick at Techdirt offers up another incidence of government inconsistency in light of the FTC’s blog-watching rules, reminding us that “clinical research on drugs isn’t even remotely trustworthy, as it all-too-often seems to involve doctors who have serious conflicts.”

Doctors with conflicts-of-interest, who push and promote certain drugs while receiving all kinds of goodies from pharmaceutical companies, seems, at the very least, like a more justifiable place for regulators to stick their noses (although there’s definitely an argument to be made…

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Rep. Diana DeGette is, without any apparent cognitive dissonance or trace of irony, proposing:

1) Require, by law, that people buy health insurance.

2) Remove health insurers’ antitrust exemption. But only after legally requiring everyone to buy their product.

You figure it out. Insurers are set to receive one of the largest coroporate welfare grants in history. No wonder so many firms are salivating over this year’s health care legislation. But they may pay an antitrust price for their legally mandated windfall.

Perhaps this…

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Last week, after the industry association America’s Health Insurance Plans released a study showing that premiums would rise 18 percent under the Senate Finance Committee’s reform proposal, top Democrats took to the airwaves to condemn the industry for standing in the way of health care reform.  President Obama used his Saturday radio address to accuse the industry of using “deceptive and dishonest” attacks to derail reform legislation.  And Obama and congressional Democrats threatened to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which exempts insurers from most…

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Some of the consequences of increasing government’s role in health care are easy to predict. One is that cutting costs requires cutting the amount of care. That means rationing. People judged not deserving of care would be denied it.

Another is that if government uses its increased bargaining power to lower drug prices, there will be less money for R&D. That means less innovation. That could well mean the end of increasing life expectancies.

Some people see these consequences and oppose more…

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Health-care “reform” always costs more than predicted, as ObamaCare provisions have at the state level.  So the claim that the new, cheaper version of President Obama’s health care plan will cost only $829 billion, while not increasing the deficit, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted that the actual cost will be more like $2 trillion, and health-care experts have given it a similar price tag of more than $2 trillion.

The reason for the…

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Here is the letter I wrote that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in response to Erwin Chemerinsky’s article on the constitutionality of health care reform.  Chemerinsky teaches at UC Irvine’s law school.

Chemerinsky argues that according to Supreme Court precedent, the proposed health care reform bills will be considered constitutional.

Unfortunately, he is probably right.

The author of our Constitution, however, would disagree. In Federalist 45, Madison writes, “the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.” …

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A Scottish colleague brought this article by Richard Dawkins in the UK’s Guardian to my attention, and the title says it all: “Libel laws silence scientists.”  I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t heard of this before now, but the physicist turned science journalist Simon Singh (author of such books as Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Code Book) has been sued in a UK court and, this past summer, found liable for libel for an April 2008 commentary piece in the Guardian…

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Earlier today, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) announced that she would vote in favor of the health care reform bill authored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.).  And, just about 30 minutes ago, the Finance Committee reported the bill out to the full Senate by a 14 to 9 vote, with all the Democrats and Snowe voting in favor.

As I wrote two weeks ago, however, Snowe may be getting more (or less) than she bargained for.  Once a bill is…

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It is illegal to intern for a pharmacist in Colorado without a license. You can apply for one here.

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Detractors of capitalism decry that it caters to special interests. The opposite is actually true. Just look at what’s happened in the last year.

Most of Wall Street came to government asking for a bailout when the government-created housing bubble popped.

The Big Three automakers also went to Washington for largesse when their customers came to prefer Toyotas and Hondas.

Health insurance companies stand to make a killing if Obamacare passes.

T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore would make millions from environmental legislation.

Ludwig von…

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Democrats are cheering a Congressional Budget Office decision to “score” the Senate Finance Committee’s version of ObamaCare as not increasing the federal budget deficit. But it pays for some of ObamaCare’s massive cost by expanding state Medicaid programs, shifting its cost to the states. That will radically increase state budget deficits. Moreover, this version of ObamaCare, while cheaper than the four other versions, still relies on mythical cost savings and massive cuts to Medicare that are likely to be canceled…

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Those pushing the Senate health care bill were ecstatic when the Congressional Budget Office reported that the bill “would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010-2019 period.” But it’s more budgetary legerdemain, as Cato’s Michael Tanner pointed out today.  Tanner notes that new health care taxes are the revenue-raising tools:

The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for…

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When the Senate Finance Committee votes on President Obama’s health care plan, it won’t even have the text of the bill in existence.  It will just be voting on a summary of what the bill will supposedly contain. Senate Democrats voted down Republican proposals that the bill’s text be made available to Senators and the public 72 hours before the vote.

And the bill itself is likely to be changed by Senate leaders at the last minute, right before the Senate…

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Remember that Will Ferrell, celebrity-packed video on Obamacare last month? The one from MoveOn.org? One of those “we’re from Hollywood, and we’re here to tell the little people how the world works” lecture-scolds. Yeah, it was an effort that induced the usual eye-rolling, oh-them-again sort of response from many viewers. Clearly, rich Hollywood celebrities making their living in performing arts know what’s best for normal, working people. (Has it occurred to them that this is a bit of a stretch?)…

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