Levin on the Baucus Health-Care Bill: "A massively ambitious, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs"
Over at the Weekly Standard, Yuval Levin has a useful overview of what's wrong with the Senate Finance Committee's health-care bill:
The latest iteration of Obamacare, emerging this week from the Senate Finance Committee, is said to be a move to the center, avoiding the albatross of a government insurance option and costing "only" $900 billion.
But the bill, shepherded through a series of narrow party-line committee votes by chairman Max Baucus, is far from a compromise measure. It is a massively ambitious, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended over time to replace the American health insurance industry with an enormous new government entitlement. And it fails to address what even President Obama has said is the core of our health care dilemma: rising costs. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the Baucus bill would actually increase the cost of health insurance premiums.
Certainly, we've seen premium spikes in states that have implemented regulations similar to much of what the Finance Committee bill proposes. Levin's whole essay is worth reading.