OPT OUT IS A SENATE CON
boblonsberry.com ^ | 10/27/09 | Bob Lonsberry
Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 8:16:53 AM by shortstop
What a con.
The opt-out clause they’re putting on the public option in the Senate, what a bald-faced con. This is a fraud with a capital F.
I’ll explain, but first let me define the terms.
The “public option” is Democratspeak for the government getting into the insurance business. It taxes you, it collects a premium, and then it gives you crappy health care -- after a long wait. “Opt out” is something new they thought of over the weekend. It says that the public option would be, well, an option, and that individual states could opt out of it. They could decide, by a vote of their legislature, that they don’t want their residents to be clients of the federal public option.
The opt-out provision lets Democrat senators from moderate or conservative states go home and tell their constituents that they didn’t vote for the public option for their particular state. These senators can pretend to oppose it while simultaneously supporting it.
But like I said, it’s all a con. Nothing more than a shell game intended to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people. If the opt-out option goes forward, it is the same as imposing the public option on the entire country.
There are three reasons why I say that.
The first is that while a state may choose not to benefit by the public option, it may not choose not to pay for the public option. The operating deficits of the public option -- and there will be operating deficits -- will be made up out of the public treasury. Residents of all the states pay income taxes which go into the public treasury. The same is true of all other federal taxes, on individuals, businesses and transactions. It all goes into one pot.
So everybody pays for the public option, even if they or their state choose not to benefit by it.
The second reason is like the first.
The public option is essentially a false insurance plan offered by the federal government. False in that, unlike real insurance, it won’t be a shared-risk pool, it will be an indemnification. It won’t have to balance its books, it won’t have to operate in the black. It will be playing by a different set of rules -- most significantly the rule that it can suck money out of the treasury any time it wants. It will quack like a duck, but bite like a tiger -- especially if you’re a real insurance company.
The public option won’t compete with real insurance companies, it will undercut them. It will “sell” health-care coverage at a loss and destabilize the real insurance companies that try to match its premiums.
And that’s no good. First, because most of us rightly trust our insurance company more than we trust our government. Second, because the insurance-company money lost in the opt-in states will have to be made up in the opt-out states.
So in an opt-out state, not only will you have to pay taxes to support a program you don’t use, you’ll have to pay higher insurance premiums to bolster a company being gutted by the public option.
Thus far, opt-out is a lose-lose -- and we haven’t even gotten to the Constitution yet.
Specifically the Fourteenth Amendment which, among other things, guarantees equal protection under law. The Fourteenth Amendment has been held to guarantee equal access to government benefit.
Which means that the first day a state actually opts out, some liberal activist is going to file a lawsuit in federal court claiming that his/her/its rights are being denied. The argument will be that in some other state there is access to this federal benefit, but not in this state, and that is the unequal application of federal largesse. For good measure they will throw in the fact that their federal taxes -- as if liberal activists paid any taxes -- are paying for something they are not getting.
I predict it would take an activist federal judge about a nanosecond to impose an injunction and the opt out would be opted out. It would be found to be an unfair and arguably unconstitutional denial of access to a federal program.
And that’s all she wrote.
At that point, the public option would be nationwide, not by congressional vote, but by judicial decree.
And the Democrat senators will laugh themselves silly -- in private -- while pretending to be astounded and dumbfounded in public. They would say a few words about activist judges and about how this isn’t what they intended, and then back in the cloakroom they’d be high-fiving one another and preparing to receive the Iron Cross from Caesar Obama.
This is all a con.
Obama and the liberals want the public option. It is the stepping stone to what they really want -- a single payer. And “single payer” is Democrat code for “socialized medicine.”
And the opt-out fraud allows them to lie themselves one step closer to socialized medicine.
I don’t know whether to be more offended by the underhandedness of this, or by the presumption that we were so stupid we wouldn’t catch on to it.
