ALG Letter to House Members on Government Takeover of Health Care

March 19th, 2010


United States House of Representatives
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20510

To the Members of House of Representatives:

Sunday's expected vote on the government takeover of our nation's health care system promises to be the most important vote of your political career. As you are already well aware, the American people do not support this takeover. In Congressional District after Congressional District, the American people express strong majority opposition to the plan.

The only thing that remains is for you to do the right thing. ObamaCare must be defeated.

Nothing has changed in this bill. President Barack Obama's plan – despite its numerous incarnations – will still ration care away
from seniors, drive Americans off of their private health options and onto a government-run system, reduce quality, increase premiums, and saddle taxpayers with runaway costs, more spending, confiscatory taxes, and a debt that can never be paid.

That, of course, has not prevented Mr. Obama from intentionally misrepresenting the increased cost of insurance premiums as reported by the Congressional Budget Office at his fraudulent 'bipartisan' health takeover summit.

The relevant Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report stated, "CBO and JCT estimate that the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law… Average premiums per policy in the nongroup market in 2016 would be roughly $5,800 for single policies and $15,200 for family policies under the proposal, compared with roughly $5,500 for single policies and $13,100 for family policies under current law."

The CBO also reported, "About half of those enrollees would receive government subsidies that would reduce their costs well below the premiums that would be charged for such policies under current law," which formed the basis of Mr. Obama's claim, responding to Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) at the "bipartisan" health care summit, stating, "Lamar, when you mentioned earlier that you said premiums go up, that's just not the case, according to the Congressional Budget Office."

Mr. Obama is misleading the American people. This is not a case where Mr. Obama and Senator Alexander were "both right." Mr. Obama was wrong.

Subsidizing premiums does not lower the cost of health care, it shifts the burden of the price of health coverage increasingly to taxpayers. At the same time, ObamaCare increases the minimum requirements
for insurance coverage, which forces premiums up, as noted by the
CBO.

The CBO report also stated, "the average insurance policy in this market would cover a substantially larger share of enrollees' costs for health care (on average) and a slightly wider range of benefits. Those expansions would reflect both the minimum level of coverage (and related requirements) specified in the proposal and people's decisions to purchase more extensive coverage in response to the structure of subsidies."

Because of the subsidy, Mr. Obama wants to claim that individuals would be paying less for premiums, and that therefore the cost of health coverage is somehow being reduced. This is like claiming that subsidized housing and mortgage loans are causing the price of housing to go down, or that subsidized student loans are causing the price of education to go down, which of course is absurd.

In fact, subsidies across the economic spectrum have been directly linked to housing inflation, education inflation, and other asset bubbles, because the subsidies inflate demand artificially, which directly causes prices to increase.

These sorts of blatant lies explain exactly why the American people are completely opposed to this bill. For example, Harry Reid claimed at the summit that "no one" was considering the use of reconciliation when he himself was speaking of it publicly. And now, of course, we know that it is being considered on the floor of the House on Sunday.

But, the lies do not stop there. Mr. Obama claimed in his address to the joint-session of Congress that his bill would reduce the
deficit when the entire entitlement will be operating in the red within less than 15 years, costing over $2.5 trillion from 2014 to 2023.

Now it's been revealed that House Democrat leadership are internally acknowledging that ObamaCare is not deficit-neutral, as reported by Politico. Stop pretending that it is. You know that adding 30 million individuals to government-run health care cannot be done in a deficit-neutral manner. In fact, hardly anybody believes that it can. When polled, only 11 percent say ObamaCare would reduce the deficit, compared to a full 68 percent of likely voters who say that it will.

Moreover, the corrupt process that has been undertaken to take over the nation's health care system has been reprehensible, unconstitutional, and is undermining the public's faith in our Republic. Once modified in the House, a bill, before it can become law, must proceed to the upper chamber under normal rules. The House cannot on one hand, say that it has voted "deem as passed" the Senate bill, and on the other, say it has only voted to modify the Senate bill.

House members cannot have it both ways. Either they can vote on the Senate bill up-or-down, or they can modify it and send it back to the Senate under normal rules. They cannot do both in accords with the Constitution.

The lies just go on and on. The American people have had enough of Barack Obama and this Congress. It's time to scrap this bill once and for all, and to uphold the overwhelming will of the American people.


Sincerely,


William Wilson
President
Americans for Limited Government