But that’s not what’s happening here and we all know it. This is, in fact, an extraordinary and unprecedented abuse of the budget reconciliation process. Reconciliation has never been used – never – to push through a $1-trillion expansion of government, and to seize control of one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
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Never before has the House committee process been so grossly exploited. The thousands of pages of legislation reported by the committees of jurisdiction are irrelevant even before we vote on them. We will report these provisions, as the process requires, and then they will all be stripped out, discarded, tossed on the ash heap – and the real legislation will get written under the cover of the Rules Committee.
In other words, we’re creating here a legislative Trojan Horse, in which a handful of people, hidden from public view, will reshape how all Americans receive and pay for their health care – and then it will be rushed to the floor, and Members will be forced to vote on it to beat another artificial political deadline.
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First, the most fundamental problem is that this legislation is not about health care – it’s about ideology. It moves away from the American Idea and toward a European-style welfare state that will lead millions of Americans into becoming dependent on the government rather than themselves.
Even though it’s not single-payer, and even without the so-called “public option,” this is still a government takeover of health care – and here’s why we keep saying that.
The entire architecture is designed to give the federal government control over what kind of insurance is available for patients, how much health care is enough, and which treatments are worth paying for.
