It's Not Pretty

Many of you know, I am a member of the Joint Economic Committee, a bicameral committee in Congress. Recently, the Republican staff released a chart detailing the organization of America’s new health care system based only on the law. And it isn’t pretty.

Click here to take a look at the enormous and confusing monstrosity of bureaucracy, new taxes, and government roadblocks that will soon stand between you and the quality of timely care you and your family need. This is the result of a federal government takeover of health care and the reality of what the president’s “health care reform” actually means.

If you study the chart, you will get a snapshot of what will amount to more than 159 new federal programs, commissions, and boards, somehow all reporting to CMS, relieving you of the burden of making those pesky personal choices about your own health and medical care. By the way, when you look at this chart, you are only seeing a third of the entire new government health care nightmare to come.

Here are a couple of highlights from the committee’s report:

- $569 billion in higher  taxes
- $529 billion in cuts to Medicare
- 16 million added to the ranks of Medicaid
- 17 major insurance mandates
- the creation of two new bureaucracies with powers to impose future rationing: the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and the Independent Payments Advisory Board

Senator Sam Brownback summed it up best: “This updated chart illustrates the overwhelming expansion of government control over health choices and the bewildering complexity facing everyone affected by this law. It doesn’t take long to see how the recently signed health care bill causes a hugely expensive and explosive expansion of federal control over health care. Personal choices that should be between a doctor and a patient will quickly be strangled in a never ending web of bureaucracy.”