Masterfleece Theatre

By way of DownsizeDC.org, my attention was drawn to Reason magazine's reprint of a Denver Post column by David Harsanyi, which mentions a few issues he has with the 1900-page "health care" bill being lugged around the U.S. Capitol these days. Here is some of what he says:

Curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey, and just dive in. But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles (1984 is only 268 pages!), such as the "Health Choices Commissioner" and "Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration."

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi's fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes, and bureaucracy would have the transformative power to "provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending."

It's going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word "regulation" appears 181 times. "Tax" is there 214 times. "Fees," 103 times. As we all know, nothing says "affordability" like higher taxes and fees.

The word "shall"—as in "must" or "required to"—appears more than 3,000 times.

Democrats say we could save billions by funding a plan that used billions of wasted tax dollars from another public plan that we already supplement with billions. Make sense?

Read the whole column here.