The Retort

An Opposition to Health Care Reform

April 19th, 2010 by Everett Martin For The Retort

I have had a chance to read Senator Tester’s opinion article on health care and he is right about insurance costs going up and our health care system needing improvement. A few positive things this bill does for the people are:

• It gives young people the chance to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26
• It will prevent people from being denied insurance for pre-existing medical conditions
• There will be insurance exchange that will allow people to carry their insurance with them from on job to another job

Unfortunately, those are all of the good aspects of the health care bill. It will be four years before this bill goes into effect and between now and then we will experience many things because of this bill. We will have to pay the new tax that will pay for the bill and we will also experience increasing insurance costs over those four years. The largest issue is our loss of freedom that will result from this bill.

With the vote for this bill by our senators and the stroke of a pen by our president, the law forces insurance on all Americans and takes away our freedom of choice. And as I see our freedom of choice being taken from us, I fear what our government might take from us next.

I agree that we do need to change health insurance costs, but this bill gives us no guarantees. It also adds 6000 IRS workers and countless other government oversight jobs to make this plan work. The IRS agents alone make this look more like a form of taxation more than anything else.

Since the government has done a poor job keeping Medicare and Social Security solvent, what makes anybody think they can guide this program without continuous tax increases to keep it solvent? This bill is too expensive to be a sound financial move during a recession and the bill alone might prolong the recession.

I believe, as do many Montanans, that our freedom to choose has been taken from us by this bill and that the cost of this will not be only financial. The polls were overwhelmingly against this bill, but our senators’ vote followed their party and not their state.

All-in-all, this is a “feel good” bill that will hurt everybody in the end.